New longform – Mirror Image
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Tag: Ambient Guitar (Page 1 of 3)
New longform – Energy Away from Light
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For more three decades, I’ve been exploring a simple question:
Can sound change the way we experience the present moment?
I discovered this through meditation in the mid-1990s, when I found that listening to music while practicing deep breathing gave my mind something to rest upon—a kind of mandala for attention. That experience eventually led me into deep listening, ambient music, improvisation, and the ideas I began calling Life Music.
Nearly thirty years of composing and listening have taught me something I didn’t fully understand then: while any sound can become an object of contemplation, some sounds are better vehicles for getting us there.
Certain timbres, harmonies, sustained tones, repetitions, and textures can help quiet the mind, settle attention, and create a contemplative state more readily than others.
I’ve become increasingly interested in this not simply as a composer, but as a practitioner.
This is where my interest in sonic meditation has taken me: using sound deliberately to cultivate presence and deeper listening.
The music is the vehicle.
The listening is the practice.
And perhaps my role is becoming less about simply making music and more about teaching people how to listen—sharing the things I’ve learned through decades of exploring sound, attention, breath, and presence.
I’m still learning. But the question remains the same:
Can we learn to listen in a way that changes how we experience being alive?
That’s what I want to explore next.
For a long time, I thought of myself primarily as a musician. Looking back now, I think I was actually pursuing something larger: the possibility that sound could change the way we experience being alive.
That realization takes me back to around 1995. I was having some health issues involving my heart and found that I couldn’t relax. I began practicing relaxation meditation and deep breathing simply as a way to calm myself. Music soon became part of that practice. When I listened while breathing deeply, the music gave my mind something to rest upon—a kind of mandala for attention. I discovered that listening could help change my state of mind.
I didn’t have a name for what I was discovering.
Over time, this led me toward meditation, deep listening, and eventually what I came to think of as sonic meditation. Only much later did I discover that Pauline Oliveros had used the term Sonic Meditations for a body of work in the early 1970s. That coincidence has always fascinated me, particularly because I had arrived at many related ideas independently.
By 2003, I was trying to understand where all of this was leading me. I wrote a lengthy piece called Life Music Defined and Explained, an attempt to articulate my evolving philosophy of sound and listening.
I was interested in the possibility of listening more closely to the world around us and experiencing all of its sounds as part of a larger musical experience.
My thinking drew from several places: ambient music, Brian Eno, John Cage, Vipassana Buddhism, and eventually Pauline Oliveros and her concept of deep listening. But the important thing is that these weren’t simply ideas I had adopted. My experience with music and meditation had led me toward the questions first, and the intellectual framework came afterward.
In that 2003 writing, I described the project itself as becoming “a great big vipassana meditation.”
What interests me now is how clearly that experience anticipated much of what I’ve continued exploring ever since.
I began to see music less as an object and more as a way of directing attention.
A recording could create an atmosphere. A performance could create a space for listening. A sustained sound could give the mind somewhere to rest. But ultimately, the most interesting thing wasn’t the sound itself. It was what happened inside the experience of listening.
That distinction has become increasingly important to me.
It also helps explain why the work of the 1970s Human Potential Movement and related consciousness-oriented communities has always resonated with me. I was born after that cultural moment had largely passed. I didn’t consciously inherit that worldview, but for some reason it was often present in my thoughts and perspectives.
I had arrived at some of the same territory through music.
Experimental musicians were questioning what could be considered music. Ambient composers were exploring music as environment. John Cage challenged our assumptions about silence and surrounding sound. Pauline Oliveros developed deep listening as a practice. Meditation traditions explored attention and direct experience. The Human Potential Movement explored consciousness and transformation.
Somewhere in that larger constellation, I found my own way of asking the question.
For me, the question increasingly became: Can sound become a doorway into presence?
Can music help us become quieter?
Can listening interrupt our habitual relationship with the world?
Can a sound become something we don’t merely hear, but something through which we experience ourselves and our surroundings differently?
And perhaps most importantly, can music serve as a portal rather than a destination?
I think that’s what I’ve been circling for a very long time.
The Ambient Soundbath Podcast was one expression of it. Longform recordings have been another. Performance, improvisation, writing, and the broader body of work I’ve been developing have all been different ways of approaching the same territory.
The music matters. I love making it. But I increasingly understand it as a means of invitation.
An invitation to slow down.
To listen.
To become present.
To notice the extraordinary fact that sound is happening all around us, all the time.
And perhaps, through that attention, to experience something larger than the music itself.
When I look back now, I don’t see a series of disconnected musical experiments. I see a thread that reaches back at least to the mid-1990s, when I first discovered that music could help me become still.
I see it in the writing I did in 2003.
I see it in my fascination with ambient music, deep listening, meditation, and consciousness.
And I see it continuing into the work I’m doing now.
What kind of experience do I want to invite people into?
The answer has been there for a long time.
Listen deeply.
Be here.
And see what happens.
New longform – Close of Day – Longform Rework
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This was originally released in 2022 as a shorter track on Valley View Record’s Sleep Cycle II compilation, but was removed when our contract ended.
Recently, the unavailability of this track was brought to my attention and I thought that I would re-release it and rework it as a longform.
I haven’t listened to it in a while and I am finding it to be a very enjoyable track; I hope you enjoy it, too.
matt
As was started over a year ago with the release of Consciousness of Light and I continued to work on through the early pandemic lockdown, it’s all about the songs and songwriting. I’ve released a few things in that time, a new series called Dronearium (1 and 2 are out now) of mostly long-from atmospheric soundscapes – I have about ten of these that are mostly finished that I’ve worked on over the last year, as well as releasing a recording that Michael Teager and I had worked on for quite some time, Subterranean Bearings.
Through it all, through all of this crazy 2020, the songs have been a touchstone. I constantly come back to the songs. I’ve tried to create a follow-up to Ambient Guitar not less than 40 times and I have dozens of guitar-centric ambient tracks. The smart money is on an Ambient Guitar follow-up, which folks have loved and has given me no shortage of good energy inspiration, but the inspiration continues to move to the songs – Back to basics.
I’m particularly proud of this May YouTube performance, where I brought together the songs with ambient guitar in a live performance setting:
I feel like this is the future, right now, but usually no sooner than I’ve said it, the muse takes me down some other creative rabbit hole.
For the better part of this year and last, I’ve been working on a recording I’ve been calling “Within/Without” but then I found another record with that name, so now I don’t know what I’m calling it. This record is song-centric. It could be summed as songs with ambient drones and textures, like Olagra, like Consciousness of Light, but, presently, there’s only one instrumental track.
It’s been with no shortage of self-consciousness, which is likely why it’s taken me 15 years and more start/stops that I can recall, to make the songs the focal point. I’ve loved my exploration of sound and textures and raw, unbridled creativity, but I’ve also felt, at times, emotionally absent from those recordings, perhaps its the lack of ego in that music and perhaps it’s a good thing. Perhaps the songs are the ego’s way of pulling me into myself rather than focusing on a music that’s beyond myself and not about me. That’s plausible, but I have to take the journey. No shortcuts.
So, yeah, that’s where things are. I’m writing songs. I’m singing songs. I’ve called it ambient folk, drone folk and dreamt up many more marketing categories to try and relay, in a few words, what I’m trying to achieve. It just doesn’t work that way.
I hope you’ll stay with me, but I understand that, as a friend once told me as a punchline to a joke: “I’m not interested in growing with you as an artist; just play the hits.”
Recently, I had a band. My first band in years. A band I assembled mid-pandemic; no small feat. It lasted for about two months, mostly because I’m not a great band member and lack the ability to compromise where vision is concerned. Some, who are inspired by leadership books, might think this is admirable. Some others, who aren’t, might just think that I’m challenging (to put it nicely) to work with. I’ve been around long enough now to know who I am and I’m not above change, but when it comes to musical vision, I have a stubborn and uncompromising streak that’s very unZen and frequently has me getting in my own way. We live, we learn, we evolve. That’s the journey.
In an effort to communicate that musical vision, I drafted the story/note below. It’s not impertinent to my musical journey, so I thought I’d share it here:
Several years ago, when several of my longtime collaborators relocated, geographically or temporally, I started looking for other musical likeminds. My interests could be jazz, rock, jam bands, country, folk, what have you, but at the core was group improvisation.
I stumbled upon this art quite by chance when I was sixteen. I was hit with a sudden moment of deep and profound awareness. I remember it very clearly: A dark and dingy basement. A gang of lackluster, wannabe, punk musicians trying to make art, trying to begin a journey of musical exploration by going in any direction, knowing only that the call was real and palpable, but otherwise clueless as to how to proceed.
We were trash, mostly from broken homes. A couple us played in school band, but mostly we knew nothing about assembling a band, making music as a group or even making a go of such a thing. While we were trying to be punk, thinking that that was a skill level we could meet, we all loved and bonded over Pink Floyd. One night we decided to try and do “a Pink Floyd kind of song” – Whatever the hell that meant. We had no real effects, just a bass, drums, two guitar situation, so we got to it. It started with some cymbal washes and I played a droney bass guitar line. The guitar players tried a two guitar harmony thing. Neither of them knew their scales so after a series of wrong notes that didn’t help the vibe, they telepathically and mutually agreed to stick with the couple notes that they had learned through real-time trial and error and were in key. We jammed on this vibe for about forty minutes – We were stone cold sober as a deep harmony and resonance took us over. What we lacked in technique we made up for telepathically, each player knowing where the other player was going to go; playing, blending, truly in concert until we were musically one. Our connection to the music, the moment and each other was deep and palpable. After the jam, nobody spoke, nobody made eye contact, we just looked at the ground in awe. Silent. A couple of us lit up cigarettes and just let the vibe sink in. Finally, somebody made a joke to ease the awkwardness of such a vulnerable experience. We laughed, but shit had changed; we had just taken a ride on some celestial plane.
For me, music would never be the same; it became a readily-accessible, substance-free, vehicle for transcendence and for thirty years, my life since that point, I’ve been driven by the pursuit of solo and group musical improvisation.
Reveries from the Cosmic Horizon – An ongoing and largely solemn practice whereby I record an unpolished, never practiced or even heard before and quickly forgotten improvised acoustic solo to a particularly moving piece of drone ambient music that’s playing in the background while I practice.
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New longform – Silence Beneath Memory
New releases are always $0/name your price on Bandcamp until the next one comes out.
New longform – Dispatched from Darkness
New releases are always $0/name your price on Bandcamp until the next one comes out.
