Woke up this morning with these lines in my head:

If you don’t like where you’re at, wait five minutes, like Michigan weather, it will change.

Odd. More odd that I feel inclined to share, in any event… moving on…

As some of you no doubt noticed by my tweets I spent the last week in Chicago, and came back Friday. As I rode the train I had a lot of time to think, and contemplate music. I listened to Steve Roach’s Dreamtime Return, Daniel Lanois’ Belladonna, a little Pat Metheny, and a little of Arvo Part’s Tabula Rasa, as I did so, I couldn’t help but think about music, my musical trajectory, and what’s next for me, musically.

As I’ve been casting off my fear of being branded a poet over the last couple months it’s really unleashed my creativity. I’ve been writing a lot, and been very inspired to do a podcast, or something regular that blends the spoken word, poetry piece with the musical piece. This is something that I’ve never done in any of my recorded work, but I’ve done a little bit in some of the bands I’ve been in.

It was with those concepts, Pat Metheny and Daniel Lanois fresh in my mind that I went into recording Saturday. The recording has been good so far, and I don’t know what will come out of the other end, but like with Olagra, both the band, and the recording, I continue trying to bridge the gap betwen my lyrical/poetry piece and my musical piece.

While I’ve loved the textural and sonic exploration of the ambient work, I’ve felt that it lacks an emotional link at times; a connection that I find very much in the work of Daniel Lanois, and Harold Budd, and that I’d like to be able to weave into my own work. This is something that I’ve been working on since 2003, and I’ve been able to achieve it in bands, but not my solo recorded work. So there’s also a bit of frustration that this emotive quality has remained so allusive in my solo work.

I’m off to a good start, and I hope to share some rough mixes here on the site before too long. I’ll keep you updated.

In other news, Huronic Minor live has been downloaded hundreds of times since Thursday night, so please keep downloading and sharing.

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Originally posted in January 2007

I caught wind of this NPR story yesterday when I was shaving before work. It was a story that talked about songs and memory, and how certain songs can trigger memories. Not unlike smells, or tastes, or other kinds of sensory responses, really, but for some reason things regarding sound and experience have always intrigued me.

I made a note to check out this story. I was curious to hear more about this perspective. It kind reminded me of when I used to listen to the NPR show Lost and Found Sound.

In some ways I think that Lost and Found Sound really planted a seed
with me. Of course, going back as far as I could remember, I correlated
song and memory, or sound and memory, but this was always on personal
level. With Lost and Found Sound, I had out-of-self experiences, where
I was able to experience the sounds and experiences of people’s lives
vicariously. Those experiences opened me up to the experience of sound;
not necessarily from a scientific perspective, but from a personal
perspective. I could relate to these experiences.

The Music and Memory show that I heard today told an interesting story. This is the show preface from Weekend America:

In this installment of our ongoing series, “Song and Memory,” we meet James Palmer, a listener in Seattle, Wash. Palmer grew up in small town in Michigan. For much of his early life, his family
consisted only of himself and his mother. One of Palmer’s earliest

memories is a popular lullaby his mother used to sing to him. Years later, after quite a bit of hardship, the memory of the song became even more significant, if also bittersweet.

The story really gave a poignant bird’s-eye view into musical experience. Music has a way of sticking with us, kind of like boomarking the soul. For me there are indeliable marks that have been left on my soul, and there are also songs or musical experiences that can instantly recall the best or worst aspects of my life associated with those sounds.

I guess what really draws me to this kind aural narrative is the same thing that draws me into reading. Reading has allowed me to relate to people, characters, and stories. While the medium is different, the intention is the same, the expression of relative experience.

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I’ve been slacking on writing. You wouldn’t know that here, because luckily fruitful periods of writing over the last four months have given me an abundance of stuff to post. I’ve been slacking, as I always do, because of a focus on music.

I swear it goes both ways, either I’m slacking on music for writing, or slacking on writing for music, anyway, after years of this cycle, I’ve learned to just go with it.

A while back, just before saxophonist Michael Teager and myself did a three hour set of of reinterpretations of my Huronc Minor, The Phantom Light and Images at the East Lansing SCENE Metrospace I started putting together ideas for an ambient, consonant, contemplative, almost free jazz ensemble, that I was calling the Long Now Ensemble. Finally, after a few months I think that I’m finally making some progress towards that end.

I plan to post the recordings from SCENE Metrospace here to demonstrate the Long Now duo I just haven’t had the time to edit and clean them up.

Anyway, just a note that you might start seeing more info about the Long Now Ensemble on here, hopefully, as things start to progress, and I wanted to update you as to exactly what that is.

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Sitting listening to Rapoon this morning I started to contemplate sound, and compositional intention. In my mind’s ear I recalled many of my experiences and experiments. I thought about the various live presentations of ambient music, recordings, collaborations, and the variety of things that I’ve done in the last decade. I’ve come back to my past work more and more lately, as I’ve been pooling ambient music and acoustic ecology writings that are available online with the intention of posting them in a repository here at mattborghi.com. In going over these writings I’ve come across Brian Eno’s original liner notes to Discreet Music, and what many believe to be the conceptual beginnings of ambient music many, many times (Read them here). I’ve also been refreshing my understanding of R.Murray Schafer, and the acoustic ecology movement that evolved out of his 1977 book – The Tuning of the World.

In reviewing these two perspectives of ambient music (whether self-described or not) I’ve come to more closely understand my own intentions. Years ago after first learning about Eno’s sonic wallpaper, and Schafer’s soundscape of natural environmental noises I was inspired to write Life Musik, which was my attempt at encapsulating what I had learned from Eno, Schafer, Satie, and Cage. I felt then (2003), and still feel that compositionally, I hit the mark in creating a hybrid theoretical concept of Eno’s ambient music, Schafer’s soundscape of natural sound, and my own belief that some combination of the former and the latter could be juxtaposed over one another, thus allowing us to tune our sonic environment. However, with Life Musik, I still felt as though there was something that I wasn’t getting. Something still felt like it was missing. On the one hand, there was the music, on the other hand was the poetics of experience, and a conceptual framework, even still there were presentations of the sound and the concept that took place all over the world. However, something was still lost. I shelved the project, and considered it only a partial success.

In the last six months I’ve started to pick that project up again. Time has allowed me to frame my own work, the work of Satie, Eno, Cage and Schafer in a way that I couldn’t have seen before. I realized that the one component that was missing was that of a pure experiential perspective. I tried to wrap this aspect of it into my Life Musik paper, but my thoughts in this area were abstract and still needed to be refined. I felt that my feelings, with regard to present moment listening from a Vipassana Buddhist perspective satisfied the experiential component of my theoretical framework. I felt that was true for a long time, until I actually moved away from writing, and music composition, and instead truly focused on the experience of listening and space. I realized that the experiential aspect that was missing was that of creating an experience for the listener.

It could be argued that through recordings and live presentations of sound I’ve created an experience for the listener. However, I wouldn’t agreed with that argument. I feel that if one is to truly set up and experience for the listener, then that must be undertaken with an integrated approach that includes a pre-selected space, a composition that’s been crafted for that space, and possibly a conceptual position that’s been established so that a listener has an idea of the listening direction; the latter could be as brief or as elaborate the composition or anticipated experience dictates. I also want to make it clear that sometimes, perhaps even often times, a conceptual position is meant more for me, as the composer, and what my feelings are, rather than providing a road map for what I feel a listener and/or participant should be experiencing.

So with all this said, I have some ideas, and I look forward to the journey and the exploration with this new approach and new perspective. I imagine this will yield more recordings and experiments which will yield more releases on our Slo.Bor Media label. I also hope to get active in working on site-specific ambient music compositions that marry space and sound, and sound and space.

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I’ll be doing a live re-interpretation of Huronic Minor, Images and The Phantom Light featuring saxophonist Michael Teager, Friday September 11th from 6-9:30 pm at SCENE Metrospace in East Lansing, as part of the 3 Cities in 3D opening – Flyer is here. SCENE Metrospace is located at 110 Charles Street in East Lansing, Michigan. There’s a map here.

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Interesting article here by Johnny Greenwood, guitarist and keyboardist of Radiohead, claiming an interesting position on Mp3s. This is part of Sasha Frere-Jones  (a writer that I’ve really come to respect and enjoy reading who also has a nice site here.) New Yorker series Dithering.

I have to say that for the most part I agree with Greenwood’s position, and as such this is something that I’ve embraced with my own work. He makes another really interesting point that I’ve heard among my own friends and collectors of audio:

“The downside is that people are encouraged to own far more music than they can ever give their full attention to.”

For myself and my friends this is something that we haven’t really been able to reconcile outside of dedicating a certain amount of time to hearing and experiencing the music outside of the commute and work day… actually making time for leisure listening… which I, personally, find to be real treat.

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This post was one that was originally posted here, but kind of got lost in the mix, and I wanted to repost it for two reasons. First, this is a great example of using the Web to create and be creative. I was surfing Flickr, a free picture sharing site, and I found this great series by Indy Kethdy, he had them marked with a Creative Commons license, so I downloaded them, created a video, and then composed a soundtrack to the photostream. Then I posted the video on YouTube to share. This sort of the full-circle of open sharing, social media and creativity on the Web. My second reason is less profound, I know the site has some new readers, and I thought that they might enjoy checking out this video montage. Enjoy.

Indy Kethdy Video Montage with Matt Borghi Soundtrack

Surfing Flickr, as I so often do, I find images that inspire me. Last Friday night, though, I found the fantastic work of Indy Kethdy. I spent hours, and hours pouring over his pictures of Lake Michigan from around Wisconsin. I started to hear music in my ears, and imagined putting these images to sound. I was in luck, because Indy had set his pictures with a Creative Commons license that allowed me to make a video of his photos, put them to music, and then post it here for you to view. I highly recommend visiting Indy’s Flickr page – http://www.flickr.com/people/indykethdy/ and getting a taste of his excellent artistry first-hand. First, though, check out the video homage and the music that I created from the inspiration of his gorgeous still images:

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A lot is being said about “free” these days, especially with the release of Chris Anderson’s book on the subject, but ever since I came online I’ve been interested in the economics of free, whether it was freeware, free music, or free information.

Story: I ran a series of free Mp3 downloads back in 2003 at mattborghi.com, and those downloads brought in more hits to my Web site than being featured on the nationally-syndicated space music program, Hearts of Space. To be fair, the program didn’t feature my music, exclusively, and no link was included to my site, but I thought that it would at least have generated some inquiries, and it did. However, I didn’t see nearly the response that I thought I would from that exposure compared to the interest generated by the free monthly download series.

It’s with that experience in mind that I released a variety of my long-form ambient music tracks to be freely available (some of which are from that monthly download series). Here’s the official announcement from my homepage at mattborghi.com:

Freely available Mp3s of long-form ambient works

I have freely released several hours worth of my long form works in mp3 form here, approximately a dozen tracks. Most of these tracks haven’t been available in quite a long time. Some go back as far as ten years and my early Mp3.com page, some were out-takes from records, and the 2003 series was a monthly download series that I did throughout 2003 during a particularly prolific period. I hope to add other long form works over started adding these tracks.

My reasons for doing this are two-fold. First, these tracks haven’t been available in a long time, and to me it makes more sense to put them out into the universe, where people can enjoy them, than let them take up space on my hard drive .

The second reason has to do with my how I measure the success of social media. Social media metrics and measurements are something that many folks talk about, and ponder but I think that good social media metrics aren’t in hit rankings or page views, but rather in how many people you are getting your ideas out to. The more people that download you free ambient music tracks, watch your videos, read your blog, etc… and comment on, think about, bring up in discussion, include in status updates or generally take an interest in your ideas is the best way to measure the success of social media.

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