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A new long form work, Waters of March, is available here at Bandcamp. This track came about as a meditation piece. I was meditating and using the guitar and some sound synthesis to create a drone for the meditation, and as I sat and listened, breathing in and out of the sonic layers, an entire piece came to life and that’s what I’m presenting here. I love these works that come about through serendipity and I love that the web provides a forum for sharing these works with friends. Enjoy the music.

As is sometimes the case, I get inspired, break from any other work I’m actively pursuing and go all-in on a new idea or musical thought. Often, little of value comes from these pursuits, but, every once in a while, something does, and that’s the case with this new release, a long-form autumnal meditation on ambient guitar called Maple Tree with Red Leaves in Morning Mist.

Maple Tree with Red Leaves in Morning Mist, initially, is only available on Bandcamp. I may put it up on iTunes, Amazon and other digital retailers, eventually, but Bandcamp allows me to ‘strike while the iron is hot’ and get new work out quickly. That’s kind of awesome. Normally, it takes months to get a release out into circulation and get people the chance to hear it while it’s still new and interesting to me; not so anymore.

O-Town Cafe in Owosso, Michigan proudly presents: An evening of ambient music with Borghi | Teager –

This is our only performance of 2017 and a great chance to visit our friend’s new O-Town Cafe in Owosso, Michigan.

From email announcement…

Hello,

Matt here. I haven’t written in a while, as I don’t like to waste this opportunity to contact you, but there’s some big and exciting news for fans of Manitou, The Phantom Light and Huronic Minor.

I’ve been asked to do a special one-time performance in Northport, Michigan as part of the Leelanau Uncaged festival on Saturday, September 30, 2017. This festival is FREE. This performance will focus on live interpretations of various Manitou recordings, including All Points North, Landscape, Histories and Sentiment, Shadows of a Detroit Winter Sun, as well as The Phantom Light and Huronic Minor.

This is going to be a special performance: Autumn in Michigan, but not just in Michigan, but in Northport on the Leelanau Peninsula (the little finger of the Michigan glove jutting out into Lake Michigan). I’ll be performing at the historic Willowbrook Mill (built in 1875!). If there was ever a time of year and a specific setting that could be the spiritual birthplace of my music, this as close as any I can think of. If you’re a fan of this music, this is a once in a lifetime event.

I’ve created a special CD, True North, that will only be sold at this performance, highlighting the compositions featured. There’s more information at the Leelanau Uncaged site. If you’re not familiar with Northport, it’s at the most northern tip of the storied M-22 highway, in the heart of northern Michigan wine country, about 40 minutes up the road from Traverse City and next to the magical Sleeping Bear Dunes National Lakeshore — This is beautiful country, some of the best the world has to offer!

Again, here are the details:

What: Matt Borghi performing live selections from Manitou, The Phantom Light and Huronic Minor at Leelanau Uncaged festival
Where: Willowbrook Mill, Northport, MI, Leelanau Peninsula
When: September 30, 2017, Evening (hopefully at Sunset)
Cost: Free

I hope to see you there, and if you do, please introduce yourself.

– Matt

Also, here are a couple of recent long form ambient works that you might be interested in:

Gray’s Reef

Gray’s Reef an hour-long, improvised ambient guitar meditation inspired by the Gray’s Reef Light in northern Lake Michigan, in some ways an extension piece to Manistee North Pierhead and North Manitou Island Shoal from The Phantom Light. If you’re a fan of these recordings, you’ll really enjoy Gray’s Reef.

Parallax Drone

In the creation of this piece I’ve worked to create a texture or sonic fabric that’s labyrinthine, a place where one’s mind’s eye, and one’s mind’s ear could get lost following the shifting and juxtaposing sonic symmetries, like a musical mandala. I often thought of Philip Glass’ (now out of print) Early Works when working on this piece. I wanted to create something with a textural depth that the listener could retreat ‘into’. It’s not airy or spacey, but is quite dense, thick even, in its use of frequencies as sonic color and the equalization of those frequencies.

New long form work, Parallax Drone is up at Bandcamp – https://mattborghi.bandcamp.com/

In the creation of this piece I’ve worked to create a texture or sonic fabric that’s labyrinthine, a place where one’s mind’s eye, and one’s mind’s ear could get lost following the shifting and juxtaposing sonic symmetries, like a musical mandala. I often thought of Philip Glass’ (now out of print) Early Works when working on this piece. I wanted to create something with a textural depth that the listener could retreat ‘into’. It’s not airy or spacey, but is quite dense, thick even, in its use of frequencies as sonic color and the equalization of those frequencies.

Purchase Shadows of a Detroit Winter Sun here on Bandcamp.

Manitou’s Shadows of a Detroit Winter Sun is the most recent homage to the city of Detroit, a journey that began in 2006 with All Points North, continued with 2015’s Landscape, Histories and Sentiment and continues exploring the poetics of a disappearing Detroit.

Manitou’s Detroit is the ‘Paris of the Midwest’ a term coined in the mid-twentieth century to allude to the beauty and grandeur that was Detroit. The city’s decay was captured with the pre-bankruptcy All Points North, but the homage to what was began to be captured withLandscape, Histories and Sentiment and continues with Shadows of a Detroit Winter Sun. 

Manitou, is nothing, if not a vehicle for the sentimental and nostalgic feelings that I have of my paternal grandparents coming here from Europe and my maternal grandparents coming north from the hollers of Appalachia to work and make better lives for themselves in that ‘Paris of the Midwest’ at a time when possibility and majestic grandeur were ubiquitous in Detroit.

Shadows of a Detroit Winter Sun, mostly, is concerned with buildings and landmarks that are long gone, Water Works Park, Russell House, the Algiers Motel and some not so long gone, such as the Park Avenue Hotel which was recently razed to make way for the new Little Caesars Area (where the Detroit Red Wings and Pistons will begin playing in the fall of 2017) or the Eight Mile Wall, which was kind of like our very own segregated dividing line, ala the Berlin Wall, that you don’t hear much about… There are many history lessons here, probably, but I’m most concerned with the ghosts of yesterday and what they can tell us today about tomorrow.

Shadows of a Detroit Winter Sun will only be released on Bandcamp, initially, and will go to Amazon, iTunes, Spotify, etc… eventually… a CD of Shadows of a Detroit Winter Sun will happen if there’s enough interest.