SAGES

SAGES (Orangville) was a wonderful opening act, the pulsing rhythmic calm before the frantic octane to come. Quite distinctive in instrumental style with respect to her fellow performers, Racquel Hardy’s solo electronic display was intimate as she sang kneeling above with her synth and looping apparatus on the ground. Entrancing melodic emo vocals pierced our waking souls as dream textures accented by electronic beats and patterns gracefully and perpetually seeped outward. A performance by SAGES is more like a direct personal expressive conversation. - Nicholas Cooper

Sages from Orangeville, Ontario describes her music as “emo dream pop.” She just put out this video for “Heartache Is,” directed by Sara May, which features a bunch of trippy slow-motion rituals taking place deep in the mystic forest.
Sages has been busy… in the time it took me to receive her interview answers and create this blog post, she shared a whole other brand new video. This comes via Sidewalk Hustle. It features guest voice by Fresh Flesh and some sweet trippy 3D animated orbiting blobs and textures courtesy of Bile Sister from Toronto. This track is a slice of technology-induced paranoia featuring an 808 beat overlaid with spooky synths and digital distortions.
How would you describe your sound to someone who’s never heard you before?
I would say my sound is innocent, introspective and whimsical. Its soft and gritty all at the same time. I like to over reverb my vocals and some of the synths to create a drone-like effect, I find chaotic noise and muddled sounds comforting.

What gear/software/techniques did you use in making this recording?
This song is one of nine from my upcoming album called ‘How To Fill It’. I was inspired by an event where a friend and myself locked ourselves in an apartment for 3 days and just wrote and recorded off the cuff without much editing and I loved the results. It was very raw and real and that what I wanted to make for this album. I only used the intro version of Ableton, a MiniKorg Xl and my voice. I didn’t want to use VSTs and MIDI, I really wanted less control of the outcome. One technique I used a lot was an airpusher effect on the background vocals making them rhythmic and glitchy.

What mood or mental state do you hope to evoke in the listener with this music?
I would say that my intention is to create an ethereal dimension, where the listener can empathize or relate to my introspective thoughts, maybe a sense of curiosity and amusement as well. - Phillip

You may have heard of the herb sage, from flavouring your food or cleansing your aura. Similar to smudging sage, the music of SAGES is flavoured and cleansing but in a more synthetic and sonic sense.

SAGES is the reflective electronic solo project of singer/songwriter Racquel Hardy, who hails from the forests of small town Mono ON. Fans of Grimes will easily be swayed by Hardy’s knack for capturing sounds in the natural world and then sampling them. Twisting them into our digital sphere and glitch-ing them out with beats that’d make Purity Ring jealous. With two self-released albums already under her belt (2014’s Creatures of the Sea and Saturated from 2015), the most recent release from SAGES was her 5-track EP, titled Strawberry Crystal, November 2016.

And now? We here at Sidewalk Hustle are thrilled to premiere “A-VOID” the first single off Racquel’s upcoming album How To Fill It, due out Feb 3rd, 2018. Written and produced by Hardy, the bombastic track also features cheeky, existential lyrics from Toronto/Nova Scotia/Olympia incubated lo-fi rap artist Fresh Flesh (Zoe Solomon) and is accompanied with a music video, animated and created by Julie Reich of Toronto’s Bile Sister.

Here’s what Fresh Flesh told us about the track…

“The song is about my pattern of avoiding everything till the last minute and then getting fired. Its about avoiding life by subscribing to the status quo.”

The video’s creator Reich also had this to say…

“The song has a starkness and I wanted to represent the musical and conceptual Void visually. Zoe’s lyrics really resonated with me, “Get a job you’ve got to stay employed, get destroyed you’re just a humanoid, don’t avoid the void …overblown, better charge up you’re phone sell everything that you own cuz nothing beats being alone don’t avoid the void”. It’s easy to feel pretty isolated as a poor artist in a big city. The outcome is a strange 3-D perception of planets in space. As for my style, I’m self-taught in the world of 3-D animation and as a result, my approach is not bound by rules that may restrict creative process. For this video, you are witnessing my experimentation with skins and capture methods.”

Watch the trippy video Reich made for “A-VOID” by SAGES featuring Fresh Flesh below. - Kate Killet

The word sage has lot of meanings: someone wise, a calming plant and, it turns out, an interesting musical project. Sages comes to our ears from Orangeville, Ontario, and there’s a lot to like about this song from her Strawberry Crystal EP: confidently sweet vocals, playful layers of interlocking synthetic sounds and a subtle but important crow’s caw sample.

“Kveldulf” and the rest of its EP are available on Bandcamp. - Elena