About Matt’s solo work:
Textura ranked Ambient Guitar, as one of their best recordings of 2016 (#40 of their Top 40), among hundreds of other releases… they also said: “Ambient Guitar is so personal a creation one ultimately comes away from the recording thinking of Borghi alone.”
“Borghi’s deep tones and resonant sounds are the perfect counterpoint for balancing sound and silence. Truly a music for thinking and being” – Whole Living Magazine
“…drifting ambient music par excellence.” – Bill Binkelman, Wind and Wire
“Simple, restrained, and artful.” – Hypnos Recordings
“Matt Borghi’s music is gentle, reflective and meditative.” – Legends Magazine
“Despite a self-professed love/hate relationship with the guitar, Borghi manages to distill magic from its strings through an array of digital effects, but also, more importantly, an unrestricted approach.”
– Tyran Grillo, ECMReviews.com
“To be a real creative artist making original work, your personality must shine through. You don’t always have to be ploughing the same artistic furrow, but we need to know who you are. And Borghi’s distinctive work shows us that. His music is not “easy”, ie pretty ambient that sparkles like the noonday sun. It’s moody, sad, melancholic and hazy.”
– Make Your Own Taste
“Swells of sustained tones permeate the environment, nullifying all tension and replacing stress with equanimity. Now that the audience’s mind has been wiped clean of agitation, Borghi’s harmonic structures enter to fill the psychic space, instilling their pacific stability on all neurons. Gentle pulsations establish ghostly suggestions of potentiality; it is the listener’s task to match this artificial quiet with meditative composure.”
– Sonic Curiosity
“If you did a fast-motion film of Detroit’s downfall–buildings slumping, falling, weeds and trees shooting up in the bombed-out lots–this would be the soundtrack. This music has sadness and grandeur and–yes–compassion for a city that has become as hollow, as tragic, as the American Dream. Dunno who Manitou is–but this album is heart-wrenching and profound.”
– iTunes review for Matt Borghi/Manitou’s All Points North
About Matt’s work with Michael Teager:
“The third time is yet another charm for Borghi and Teager. Shades of Bending Light has managed to improve on what was already pretty amazing.” –Hypnagogue
“The duo draw the listener into their music using understated means… The result might be described as ambient-styled soundscaping whose lustrous sheen at times exudes a New Age-like placidity without turning soporific in the process.” – textura
“Combining the intellectual heft of Jazz and Ambient Music with the appeal of New Age/Contemporary Instrumental Borghi & Teager highlight a range of different tonal modes and musical moods… Their genre strives to lift our inner lives, and [they] are right up there among the best.” – Star’s End
Praise for Borghi | Teager:
“Their ‘jambient’ style…is deep and soulful and gorgeous and pretty damn near perfect… Borghi’s ambient washes are ever so deep, quiet eddies of sound in constant motion, and Teager’s sax and flute find perfect expressions to complement them, whether it’s the rapid trills and fiery run of jazz or long, breathy chords that twist their way through the air.” – Hypnagogue
“Guitarist Matt Borghi and saxophonist Michael Teager have fashioned a wonderful ambient-styled recording [Convocation] that distinguishes itself dramatically from others in the genre.” – textura
“Awaken the Electric – Live from Star’s End, is in part to hear welcome vestiges of Hassell’s tried and true Fourth World, from the plaintive melodic line to the slow-motion tribal pace, but it is also to hear those same sounds seeking to make peace with the current era. The result is a fascinating aesthetic feedback loop: something from the past taking root in and attempting to sound of the present. And on those terms, the music succeeds.” – Disquiet.com