Here’s a cool new musical project that feels both out-there and extremely mundane. In 2022, the great Colorado experimentalist M. Sage teamed up with Lieven Martens under the name Sage Martens. Their album, Riding Fences, was an ambient classical exercise designed to explore the idea of “Western” music. They’re back this year with another conceptual offering that speaks to the deepest parts of my dad-soul — though, based on their artist’s statement, maybe I shouldn’t feel great about that.
Out just in time for Memorial Day weekend, Chamber Music For Lawn Mowers is a meditation on the American desire for a well-manicured yard. The album combines newly composed music with field recordings of actual lawnmowers, which lend a tremendous ambient effect to Sage and Martens’ gorgeously flickering collaborations. As someone who experiences a great deal of peace from the process of mowing my lawn, I am connecting with this music on an innate level, but it’s also a critique of the way our culture’s compulsion for neatly chopped grass contributes to the destruction of the environment. So… that’s not great.
The music, though, is indeed great. Here’s how they explain the record on Bandcamp:
Did you know, a clean-cut lawn is a desire we inherited from the British?
Yes, the British dumped this pleasure into our collective consciousness. Those humorless Victorians who enjoyed having their black pudding on the lawn. They came to this uninspired impression while mis-looking at Italian paintings. Yes indeed, while gazing at these paintings they mistook green lanes for green lawns. Thus it became hip. Every stuffed truffle commanded his gardener to cut the grass.
As a result, this Victorian lust for sterile gardens with pretty green lawns nudged our world into water spillage and pesticide clouds. This new priority produced exhaust clouds and prudish monocultural landscapes.
Just by looking at Italian paintings.
As with most of Western history, the practice was exported to America and then turbocharged. By shearing clear the prolific brush of pastures, prairies, forests and glens, biodiversity becomes an aesthetic casualty with long suffering ecological ripples.
An inherited practice narrows the bandwidth of experience.
And so, the childhood habit of humming along in key to the drone of a gas-powered mower while trimming a suburban lawn extrapolates into something expanded; an unanswered question about the harmonics of landscape practices.
Two songs from Chamber Music For Lawn Mowers are out now, the opening title track and the closer, “Song Between The Blades.” Listen below.
Chamber Music For Lawn Mowers is out 5/27. Buy it here.
