Home of Michigan Ambient Guitarist, Music Producer and Writer, Matt Borghi

Tag: Ambient Guitar (Page 1 of 2)

Last Bi-Weekly Longform and New Music Hiatus

I wasn’t going to post this. I deleted it… twice, but somehow, I just can’t let go of the feeling that I should share this… So, here goes, it’s a long one…

Welp, that about does it.

After three years and nearly a hundred releases, I’ve wrappped up the Bandcamp bi-weekly ambient longform series. The final release, “When you’ve given all – The end abides, fraught notions and ill-conceived expectations; deliver us.” is now live. This is another long, mouthful of a title, common in this series, the act of creating, I’ll miss as much as the music.

I started the series in the autumn of 2021, while still deep in the pandemic (but seeing some light on the horizon) and looking for a way to keep my creativity engaged. Three years later, I’ve covered a lot of creative ground within myself, my approach to making music and managed to stay fully engaged, creatively… First and foremost, this was a creative test, an act of creative endurance that started with this question: Did I have the creative stamina to release thoughtful, engaged, original and well-produced longform ambient tracks bi-weekly? 

Honestly, I didn’t know the answer to that question. I wanted to do it without recycling or rehashing old material or phoning it in with crummy improvised one-offs framed as a present moment creative act; I set a high bar for myself and, three years on, I feel like I achieved it.

To be fair, I have enough creative energy and ideas that I think that I could probably keep the ambient longform series going forever. In fact, at one point, I almost moved to weekly releases as I felt that bi-weekly was too spread out, but alas, I didn’t want to be like so many of the newer breed of artists and labels working to maintain a cadence designed to feed an unsustainable algorithm (looking at you Spotify). If you’ve read this far, I don’t have to tell you that the rate at which new music, particularly ambient music, is being released is very high, breakneck, even and while the algorithm gets new content to churn through for an hour or a day,  where does that leave artistry, creativity and the inspired gift of creative process? That’s a rhetorical question, because if it leaves it anywhere, if it’s even acknowledged, mostly, it leaves the creative work and the artist as little more than desiccated husk cast into the gutter to blow about until it dissipates into the ephemeral dust it was always destined for. Grim, I know.

Music is ephemeral, it always has been. If you don’t believe me, tell me what the number one hit, or whatever the comparable would be, around the shire when Joe Bard was busking on the streets of Nottingham in 1501. I’m sure somebody did a PhD thesis on this, but I surely don’t know. Or, a little closer to our own time, who was the #1 selling sheet music artist in 1901 or the Billboard #1 artist in 2001, or 1991, or 1981… Maybe it’s someone we’d still know; it’s also entirely possible that we would have no knowledge and couldn’t hum a single measure of one of the popular hooks of those times. Sure, some cream rises to the top: Mozart, Beethoven, The Beatles… Great hooks and great marketing to boot, pressing those melodies into our brains like slithering earworms for time immemorial, but we’re talking about ambient music… No hooks, much of it sounds the same, almost completely independent, anonymous and reliant on grassroots DIY marketing, mostly online. Brian Eno is the top of the heap, but is it because he’s the father of ambient or because of him being one of the best-selling music producers of all time, surely Music for Airports or strange experiments with Antares auto tuner in some weird contemporary art installation are not the reason we know the name Brian Eno; we have U2 (and their marketing arm) to thank for that, to take nothing away from (would-be) Sir Eno’s excellent body of work.

Ambient music lends itself particularly well to being discarded, forgotten, listened to or ignored. That’s the genre I work in. That’s the genre where I discovered my voice. Unfortunately, over time, my voice sounded just like everybody else’s and, when included, blended excellently into the chorus of other anonymous indie artists without Wikipedia entries that make up the bulk of the sleep, meditation, yoga and relaxation playlists on Spotify. Cool. We found our place, being even less offensive, characterless and more plain vanilla than the attributes of the ambient music genre allowed for. And let’s face it, crickets, river sounds, birdsong, etc… well, it doesn’t make it more interesting… instead it just feels like an errant, stale walnut that was floating around clandestinely in my bowl of plain vanilla ice cream – Yuck!

Where am I going with all this? I don’t know. I’m a little jaded and I feel like the genre has been over-run with a lot of disingenuous noodling. I got involved with ambient music, as a proficient, working musician. Ambient music became a musical meditation on opening up sonic spaces to “do” less and “be” more. This was hugely zen and totally freeing, for me. I could be with the sounds. It wasn’t about fast guitar “runs” on a variety of scales and modes and wringing out an instrument and instrumentalist’s virtuosity with every song, every measure, every note, but instead it was a response to that: Letting the sound and music breathe and using the instrument as a staff to navigate the unknown. Ambient music required an undoing, not a doing of less, which is quite a nondualistic perspective, I guess, because it is not undoing and doing less, but it’s both, and, but not doing less because it’s simple and it’s easy to produce or run a quick patch on your modular synthesizer so that one can put out a release every hour on Spotify and dominate the keyword search for a particular genre; but that’s exactly how it’s been used.

So it goes, I guess. Some might call that progress, but the diminishing of humanity from the creative process of ambient music will only pave the way to make AI-created ambient music the primary artist on your favorite Spotify playlist; a story that’s already begun to be written. Maybe that doesn’t matter so much, as long as there’s a ready playlist of music for meditation, yoga, sleep, bowel movements, etc… 

In fact, all of this reminds me of the legend of John Henry. As you may recall, John Henry, the ‘steel-driving man’ took part in a mythical contest of man vs. machine, where he worked with his sledgehammer against a steam powered rock drill to drive steel stakes for the railroad into the rock, ultimately beating the machine, but then died, sledgehammer in hand, as his heart gave out from the activity.

I’m no John Henry and I can’t compete with algorithms or AI that wants to supplant humanity and I’m not willing to die trying. Frankly, as far as the arts and humanities, including music, are concerned, removing the inspired spark of humanity’s creative genius is something that we should all be reluctant to accept. Use AI to automate dishwashing, grass cutting and other repetitive and mundane tasks that take time away from our human ability to enjoy being alive, but AI for the arts and humanities, including music, is the beginning of a dystopian future where even the most sacred acts of humanity and our collective human experience can be be diminished into oblivion; where does that end?

These are just a few of things on my mind as I enter a musical hiatus; a period of dormancy that I’ve never really considered because music and the creation of music has always been the blood in my veins and the breath in my lungs. This is a big deal, for me. But I’m reminded of something I read and, honestly, couldn’t comprehend many decades ago, when I first picked up the great Sufi musician and spiritual teacher, Hazrat Inayat Khan’s The Mysticism of Sound and Music – He talked about giving up music so that he could get closer to the deeper spirit within music. This was a preposterous proposition at the time and had been for many years, but now, nothing makes more sense. Once again, this is nondualism at work, it’s not either/or, but ‘both, and…’ My commitment to music and understanding music is deeper than it’s ever been, but it’s time to unmoor myself from this land that I’ve become so familiar with and to set out for worlds I’ve never even imagined. As Joseph Campbell said: “We must let go of the life we have planned, so as to accept the one that is waiting for us.

 

The Last Gig – A Story

I needed to do one last check of my cables. At a gig it was Murphy’s Law that the cable you’d been using for months or years would die. Perhaps it was the energy surrounding the anxiety of the performance or maybe it was… no, it was some strange energy, the kind of meta energetics that Jung wrote of. Something was happening, some vibration on a higher level has a way of intervening, somehow. I always had extra cables and extra power cords. To not have those was an amateur move. A broken guitar, a blown tube in your amp could all be excused but basic cables and cords: Must have.

I had gone through this ritual so many times that it was automatic. But how did I feel to be going through it for the last time? After thirty years of driving long hours with a small cache of gear to make almost no money the prospect of wrapping up this aspect of my life brought me some peace. Sure, there were many good parts, the socializing, the camaraderie, the connections and meeting new people, but all of those things were happening less and less. The crowds were getting older and thinning out. I was driving to most gigs alone. And the money, what of it, there was often wouldn’t pay for the gas to make the drive, to say nothing of lodging or even a pizza or a burger after the show. Playing live was something one did to feed their soul not their family and this was proving to be more and more the case. With this gig, in particular, I was taking a sleeping bag and preparing to sleep in my car in a Wal-Mart parking lot and I was happy for it. It’s not a bad deal, but things have definitely changed and not for the better.

When I was young and coming up, you didn’t need more than your friends, a grilled cheese sandwich and an attitude of world domination, which was good because that was about all we had. As we got older, for a time, the musicians’ plight got better, but the law of diminishing returns ultimately kicked in; fewer opportunities, fewer audience members, less money and more hassle. To young folks coming up and the folks behind them and so on, whatever the current state of things is will be better for them than those who’ve been at it a while? Beginner’s Mind? Perhaps. Also, when you’re young things are just different, you have less experience, less of a reference point and perhaps best of all for any nearly impossible things: Less expectations. In fact, my sage advice for anybody from 15 to 50 is to let go of expectations. If I could do that this probably wouldn’t be my last gig, but I can’t seem to do that.

After a final check of my gear, I load everything up, grab my pillow, throw it atop the sleeping bag in my backseat motel. I always do a quick check of my tires, make sure they look good, a pretty pointless gesture unless they’re really flat, in which case a light on my dash will begin beep and illuminate, but old habits die hard and soon I’m pointed north and on my way to the gig. 

When I first started driving alone I would put together elaborate playlists and looked forward to hours of uninterrupted listening. For the travelling musician there’s little as satisfying as sitting, talking and bonding with your bandmates about a record or whole discographies, with whomever is driving or riding shotgun calling out the tunes in some semi democratic way; many a fascist band member found themselves on the receiving end of walking papers after a grueling road trip where they imposed their musical will on folks from Grand Forks to Philly. Every band knew this guy and it was almost always a dude. That guy sucks. 

It’s hard not to think about that guy, actually there were several, as I drive alone, with little more than the din of a local public radio station playing classical music in the cab at a volume slightly louder than the rubber of the tires moving over the asphalt below. With this being my last gig, I’d never hang awkwardly with frustration bordering on anger ever again. I’d never see his face or listen to him spew bullshit stories to whomever was in earshot ever again. That’s definitely a tick in the pros column.

At the same time, some of the greatest moments of my life and some of my deepest connections happened while driving to or coming from a gig. There was the time that we were driving into Brooklyn just at sunrise and the orange and red brick buildings became alive with a kaleidoscopic flare of early morning light. There was the time when I almost didn’t make a gig on account of getting lost, found the venue by accident and met the woman who would become my wife later that night.There was the seven day trip with one of the best friend’s of my life and after being together for every waking hour for a hundred plus hours we never ran out of new topics to talk about. A year later we did it again and still every conversation was fresh and new. Circumstances changed but I got out of his car and still had things I wanted to talk about. Those moments have been the building blocks of my life, I wouldn’t trade those moments for ten lifetimes. And still I’m going to play my last gig.

I guess I feel like there comes a time when one needs to put away childish things. I wonder, though, if that’s just bullshit I tell myself because my back hurts more, I feel less creative than I used to and more indignant about small audiences and even smaller payouts. I never cared much for sex, drugs or rock and roll, so those don’t factor in so much. When you feel defeated and like you’re at the end of your creative arc, it’s easy to say something has lost its thrill and is without merit. Are those fair assessments? Was there ever that kind of calculus? Some kind of existential cost benefit analysis? I don’t think so. And therefore I don’t think it’s fair, but that reconciliation doesn’t put a spring in my step nor does it put a spark of excitement in my belly. Instead, I think ‘Well shit, I was hoping to watch Antiques Roadshow this weekend…” I think when that’s one’s first thought when it comes to show availability it might be time to mothball your roadcase and begin looking for another hobby; golf or fly fishing might be better suited to my temperament. 

There’s just me and another car on the road. It’s mid-afternoon and I’ll arrive at the venue soon. I remember before Mapquest, a little Easter egg for the real oldsters, Google Maps and GPS there was a real satisfaction about having actually found the venue. 

Amount of times bandmates and myself showed up at the wrong location: Dozens of times. 

As band member you learn a lot about how addresses and addressing works. You also learn how many cities have Lincoln or MLK streets. Manhattan makes it easy with streets going one way and avenues going another, uptown is north and downtown is south; thanks Manhattan for making it easy to get around. Got lost in Akron once for a show that started at midnight in a factory district. Knocking on doors at midnight trying to find an illegal venue; what could go wrong. Fortunately, very little did.

There’s a golden ratio for touring musicians, but actually its not golden, maybe more like rusty iron that sat in a dirt pile for a while and it’s the ‘everything else to performing’ ratio. The average band plays between 1-3 hours at a gig, depending on the gig, to get to that gig, the touring musician drives anywhere from 4 to 12 hours to get to that gig, could be less, could be more, but let’s call it six hours and the touring musician could easily wait three to eight hours to play, for one reason or another. Touring musicians are masters at killing time because there’s always so much time to kill. On average, the typical touring musician will wait and travel up to ten hours for every one hour of performance. But I hear you say, musicians have tour buses to party, drink, fuck and whatever other debauchery you equate with the road. Unfortunately, only the upper echelon have tour buses to while away time, for the rest of us there are diners with endless coffee, parks to sit and read, bookstores, libraries and other places we can congregate like homeless nomads without being hassled for loitering, a very real problem for the touring musician. Pretty glamorous; not. #rockstarlife

I’m pulling up at the fairgrounds where the gig is to take place. I can’t find where I’m supposed to load in so I’ll leave my thousands of dollars worth of gear in a sea of unattended, unsecured vehicles, that on the average are worth slightly more than my guitar, to try and find the load in spot. I’ve always been lucky about leaving my gear in the car but luck runs out. Will I get lucky for one last gig. In the words of one of the great touring bands of the age, Phish, ‘maybe so or maybe not’.

Having parked I begin walking towards the entrance, seeing as there’s no signage for musicians, artists for backline folks… Also, there never is. Bands get top billing and low treatment; like a hobo symbol on a kind home, every musician knows the good ones and every musician shares that info with the next musician, an active telegraph across a guild of fellow travelers.

An elderly lady at the entrance is confounded by my question about where to load in. A county sheriff is on hand and tries answer my questions about load in but he has to call someone who doesn’t seem to be picking up just then. I don’t have a ticket so they won’t let me in. I refuse to buy a ticket on principle as every bit of the income from this gig is accounted for and I’m not paying to get in because somebody didn’t put any signage out. There’s plenty of time, see the previous passage about waiting. I stand there for a while making small talk until a guy with an air of authority and a T-shirt with that says S-T-A-F-F in black letters comes by. I ask him about load in, he apologizes and says that their signage blew down but it’s just around the corner. 

‘Just pull back there and load in…”

“Thanks,” I tell him and walk back to my car.

Load in was easy and uneventful. Over the years I’ve learned to carry as little as possible – I call it the one trip rule. One time I was performing in Manhattan, the West village specifically, and we had to load in, several blocks away and stay with the gear once dropped at the venue. There were two of us, leaving us with a problem of mathematics. We took a chance and left stuff unattended, but after that, lesson learned: Get it all in one trip from the car to the venue. Admittedly, this isnt always possible especially for drummers, but keep it in mind, it can help mitigate problems.

I sat for a few minutes on a stage monitor tuning my guitar, letting the wood of the neck adapt to the humidity of the summer afternoon. It wasn’t too humid but giving your wooden instrument time to acclimate to environmental conditions will never hurt and will likely ensure that you’re able to tune to concert pitch and the instrument will stay there. This is a pro tip. Instruments that don’t stay in tune are little more than noise makers. But actually any musician reading this probably already knows this, so maybe it’s not a pro tip and I have an overly enlarged sense of wisdom and experience where the touring musician’s life is concerned. Either way, not for much longer. In a few short hours, this part of my life will be wrapped up. I’m honestly not sure what I’ll do with myself.

Some gigs have elaborate sound checks, some gigs have no sound check at all, today’s gig fell somewhere in the middle. It’s a small stage and we’re a basic quartet with a pretty standard setup so we got through it pretty quickly. With little to do until show time besides wait, I head out into the fair to find something to eat. Perhaps it will be an elephant ear or a sausage on a stick or maybe sausage on a stick fried in a donut. Either way, yum. 

The faces at every show are all the same. Some folks know where they’re going in life and otherwise, some do not. Some are drunk and some are working on it. Some are old and some are young and some are somewhere in between. Some dress up, some don’t. One time there was a guy dressed in full Cowboy gear like he was going to or coming from a rodeo or something; hell, he might have been. Another time, there was a guy in a head to toe blue tie-dyed unitard bodysuit. You just never know who or what you’re gonna see at shows. I’ve seen other famous musicians, famous chefs, TV personalities, comedians, etc. They’re people just out doing the shit that people do when they’re not doing the thing that they’re known for doing. Nothing fancy to it, but it’s kind of exciting. There’s nothing like that at this gig. It’s a pretty tame bunch all and all. 

I start talking to a guy while I’m waiting in life for my elephant’s ear. He’s an older gentleman and told me that he’s been retired from General Motors for thirty years. We talk about that. He asks where I’m from. I tell him. We talk about the weather. He tells me he’s excited to see the band. I tell him I’m in the band. He asks me questions about being in the band. I answer them. We get on well. We get our elephant ears and talk a bit more. He tells me that he always wanted to play drums. I tell him that they seem like a lot of fun, while thinking that many drummers in my life have gotten on my nerves. Out of a couple hundred drummers I’d played with, two I desired to play with and one I was going to playing with in just a little bit at tonight’s show. We sat for a while longer chatting and then he got up. 

‘Break a leg…’ he said.

I told him ‘thanks!’

I sat at the table in a makeshift beer garden for a while, a rare bit of shade in an otherwise open field converted to event space. There were many smells, sights and sounds; I drank them all in. I thought about the gig and the drive and being alone. I thought about the ride home. I thought about how my ankle hurt a bit, an old injury that acted up from time to time and whether it would act up during the show. I thought how I should have cut the grass before I left. I thought about how I hadn’t a good pizza in a while and I thought about how I should have something more to think about it, as I headed into the show, but shows were automatic. Years, decades of practice came together for a show. Things worked on inertia. An object in motion stayed in motion. If you stopped, then you might as well stop for good, because getting back going again would take more than sheer force of will. Somehow, the universe needed to give a bit of an assist to get things off the ground. You go and go and go and keep going until something prevented that forward motion. Contemplating a last gig, at my age, with a steady line-up of gigs on the horizon was something that I would be saying goodbye forever. Even if I got involved again, later, it would be different. Done was done.

Showtime came and showtime went. 

We played a great set. The audience was good and full of energy.

We were the ‘kiss good night’, as Walt Disney World refers to their fireworks show: Show’s Over – Get out! And the fair manager was eager for us to pack up, load out and move on. This was not uncommon. So we packed up, loaded out and moved on. 

The four of us talked for a bit in the parking lot, but the show was over. Gone were the days of surfing into the next morning on dopamine hits and whatever else we could find. Now, most of us just wanted to spend the night in our own beds, if at all possible. I didn’t like driving at night and as the heat day wore on me, I decided I that I didn’t want to sleep in my car and I wanted a hot shower; that would put me in the red for this show, but so be it. 

The rest of the band were eager to get going.

“Is this still gonna be your last show?” One of ‘em asked.
“Yep,” I said.
“Alright, then, let’s talk more next week.”
“Ok,” I said.

And with that, the last gig had concluded. 

Had I hoped for more of a send off? Maybe. Maybe not. I hate good-byes so I just wanted to make it as painless as possible and move on.

We got in our respective cars and drove off. They high-tailed it out of town to the highway, I went the opposite way towards my motel. 

I got my key and went to my room. I unlocked the door and turned on the light. The pine walls had a cabin-like feel; a common bit of decor in this part of the country. I sat on the edge of the bed, the ringing in my ears quickly being overtaken by the loudness of the still quiet.

I laid back on the bed and let out a sigh.

‘Welp, that’s it then, I guess…’ I said to the empty room.

When I woke up the next morning I didn’t feel any different; no seller’s remorse floating around my psyche. I guess I thought that when someone turns their back on the thing that they’ve done their entire life they might feel different, but I didn’t. Maybe I would in the days to come. 

With a cup of weak coffee from the hotel room, I walked towards my car. I set the coffee cup in the cup holder in the dash and started the car. I walked around the car and looked at the tires. I looked at my gear and with a quick visual inspection decided all was good. 

The sun was up over the buildings on the horizon. The hot rays of the sun warmed my forehead as I went back to the driver’s side and got in. Putting the car in gear, I looked at the road ahead and took a deep breath in as I accelerated towards the road out of town.

When you start something you never know how it’s going to end. Was this the end? 

The lane markings shined with the reflection of the morning sun making the dull asphalt brighten; like seeing an old-friend in a crowd and their sudden recognition comes across their face. I had never known where I was going, why should things be any different now.

Bandcamp’s Not Going Anywhere…

bandcamp is not going anywhereAs I sit here writing this, there’s a lot of talk on social media and elsewhere about Bandcamp’s impending demise. If you’re not familiar with the situation, Bandcamp was sold by Epic Games, who bought them from the founders about 18 months ago; they were then sold to a start up I’d never heard of called Songtradr, Google: “Songtradr is a B2B music platform that claims to facilitate brands, content creators, and digital platforms in their use of music for licensing purposes. As of 2019, Songtradr was the largest music licensing platform in the world.” As someone who uses Bandcamp quite a lot and has really benefited from it, I was surprised at how little coverage everything was getting and then Songtradr/Bandcamp busted their union; kind of a tone-deaf move in the current climate. This has sounded the current death knell for Bandcamp

But I don’t think so…. 

I rely on Bandcamp as an independent artist. It’s a wonderful tool that makes music easy to release, get paid and interact with fans of the work. There have been many such tools through the years, the last, best one, in my opinion was Mp3.com which was a going concern when I first got online in 1999. It was also a great resource for artists and musicians; it was the dawn of the Mp3 and the great DotCom boom; by 2003 it was all but gone. I had moved on to my own website and working with labels and distributors at that point, but I still felt like something significant was lost and grateful for the opportunities it gave me. For years after, I was skeptical about investing time and energy into another platform that could be gone with the wind; that’s why I was such a late adopter of Bandcamp. I believe I joined in 2014 after years of people telling me how great it was; I don’t regret joining.

In my musical life I have two primary release channels, Bandcamp and my digital distro, which includes Apple Music, Spotify, etc. As most of my readers know I haven’t done hard copy releases in over a decade, so digital is my only outlet. Basically, it breaks down like this:

Digital distro means good availability for anybody almost anywhere that wants to listen, but there’s next to no fan engagement and even less $$$ because of the pittance that streaming pays. Might be good for some, at scale, but it’s not a scale that about 95% of indie music artists can/will achieve.

Bandcamp, on the other hand, is an artist-first tool – They have great features for marketing, promotion, distributing/selling your music to fans, selling merch, doing live streams, etc. It’s a wonderful 1:1 tool for artist engagement and with the artists getting a fair share of $$$, it provides a nice subsidy, too, but it’s been lacking in some key areas:

  • Digital distro: Bandcamp should be tied into digital distro, like Distrokid, Tunecore, etc. In my mind, this is a significant missed opportunity. Sure, there’d be a lot of work to do and maybe it becomes a premium add-on or something and/or they take a cut of streaming royalties along with a premium fee, but to not have digital distro in-line with everything else Bandcamp does doesn’t make any sense. It’s possible this was on their roadmap before the acquisitions began. Maybe they’ll get to it.
  • Listener User Experience – Playlists weren’t an option until 15 years after Bandcamp was founded. Think about that. They had sold billions of dollars of music and probably billions and billions of tracks, but there was no great way to listen to them without organizing them on your own device. That lack of user focus is both the problem and the opportunity – Bandcamp is artist-centric. Spotify & Apple Music are user-centric. Bandcamp needs to evolve to be able to cater to the user/consumer every bit as much as the artist. A happy balance could definitely be struck. Bandcamp has the intellectual and business infrastructure to rule this domain.

And that’s why I think that Bandcamp isn’t going anywhere. 

I believe that there’s a significant opportunity with a big payout to anybody that can strike a balance serving both the artists and the consumers. From a product management and experience perspective, if each of these were to get equal attention, now then, you’d really have something. I’m talking about a balanced product roadmap that ensures the users and the artists are being served equally. Bandcamp is the darling of the indie music industry; they’ve made billions of dollars catering to that audience, they can make billions and billions of dollars if they can bridge this gap. The Epic purchase was always a head scratcher, but could Songtradr be the one who decides to move a bold agenda forward. So far, they don’t look great, but maybe they can turn that around? Maybe it’s someone else?

What I wonder, at this point, is if Bandcamp just ends up in the startup sales and acquisition churn where any number johnny-come-latelys come in with big pockets and big ideas, but no ability to execute so it just gets passed around like a joint on a Friday night until it burns down to nothing but ash. Or will somebody come in and make something happen? One thing is for sure, we indie artists are a viable and lucrative audience and we keep demonstrating that, but nobody’s been able to mainstream it. Admittedly, few have tried. I believe that Bandcamp could be on the precipice of that. Will it happen? Let’s wait and see… 

Matt Borghi, Singer/Songwriter Bandcamp Page

I’ve been trying to figure out how to promote my singer/songwriter work for, well, quite a while. I tried a bunch of pseudonyms, but maintaining all the different accounts became quite a challenge I couldn’t really keep up with. I’ve tried intermingling the ‘songs stuff’ as it’s come to be known in my marketing shorthand, with the ‘ambient stuff’, but my problem here is that when you buy something from an artist, most people want to have a sense of what they’re buying. If I bought my favorite bossa nova artist’s new recording and found out they were now doing free jazz, I might be a little bummed. At the same time, I think of artists like Miles Davis and Frank Zappa who’s style was to explore wherever they were at; there was no ‘off brand’ for them. Simpler time, maybe? Maybe.

After much fretting and hand-wringing I just decided things were irreconcilable. I’ve been a singer/songwriter since I was 13, but I made a name for myself making ambient music. I love both. I love electronic music synthesis, but my favorite instrument to play is the steel string acoustic guitar. My situation is full of dichotomies as is the case with most of us, I’d imagine. Finally, or at least this time, as every time I make a proclamation something changes or proves said proclamation moot, I decided to create a Bandcamp page for my singer/songwriter stuff and a Bandcamp page for my ambient stuff. 

So that there’s no confusion, the singer/songwriter stuff is simply called: https://MattBorghiSongwriter.bandcamp.com

The other, exclusively for ambient and drones, is:
https://MattBorghi.bandcamp.com

Yep. Pretty creative stuff. I’m glad I spent the better part of a decade trying to work all this out. (Insert sad face emoji here).

Now, with Spotify, Apple Music, streaming services, et. al.. things aren’t that easy, so you’re still going to have to try before you buy, but fortunately, trying things out is built into the experience. 

Here’s are my three singer/songwriter recordings, with a little bit of ambient guitar thrown in for good measure… Also, new songs and recordings are in the works.

Ambient Guitar is Dead. Long Live Ambient Guitar!!

I had no idea what I was doing. I had no idea what I was trying to achieve. It was one of a hundred experiments at the time and one of hundreds of thousands since. It was 1998; 25 years ago. Then, like now, I had an economy of musical gear. At that time, I hadn’t even moved to recording music with a computer yet, so armed with my old Fender Gemini acoustic guitar, a Woody Seymour Duncan pickup and a brand new Alesis Nanoverb I plugged it all into my Tascam four track recorder and began to experiment with a variety of noisy and hissy experiments. 

At some point, after a couple hours of fruitless experimentation, I set it to plate reverb and turned the effect and the mix all the way up. In seconds, I found what I was looking for.

What was I looking for? Hell if I knew, but I could try to explain it in my vocabulary of the time. I wanted to be able make music like Claude Debussy’s solo piano work, utilizing an almost chromatic dream-lime lack of a tonal center that’s just awash, ebbing and flowing, without an attack; like a piano key struck with the sustain pedal down all the way and the stroke of the key removed, or imagining the strings rising and falling as in Ralph Vaughan Williams Fantasia on a Theme of Thomas Tallis. The guitar, acoustic, especially, is/was effectively a percussion instrument. What I was imagining simply wasn’t a thing; physics precluded it…  at least I thought so until this experiment.

For me, musically and artistically, this was a defining moment. My creative life is divided between before and after this discovery. I called it space guitar, then ambient guitar, but really it was a drone style of playing; a pedal note sustained while other harmonic goodies occur all from the sound hole of my acoustic guitar and into the spaciousness of the reverb. Anything was now possible. A couple years later live looping via Ableton and reliable looping pedals made whole soundworlds possible with just a guitar, imagination and a couple doodads. I went in this new direction hard. I explored sound with many guitars, effects, players, ensembles and pretty much any scenario I could imagine. 25 years later, dozens of recordings and hundreds of gigs all over the continental US came to be and I explored anything and everything that caught my fancy. 

In the last few years things have dissipated for me creatively where the guitar is concerned. At a time when there are hundreds, maybe thousands of ambient guitarists with music on Spotify and videos on YouTube there’s a lot of droney, textural and ambient music out there. To be fair, a lot of this stuff sounds the same and “ambient guitar” has gone the way of a million vaporous piano recordings that may or may not be informed by the work of Harold Budd. I have ambient drone music on nearly 24/7, in my various spaces and while I couldn’t name most of the artists I hear from the derivative lack of variance and the ephemeral nature of new music showing up, I’m glad that new voices are putting new spins on guitar and reverb. The more music that comes out, the more likely that future greats will be revealed.

For me, though, it’s becoming harder to put original, thoughtful sound into the perpetual motion machine of streaming and social media. I don’t want to release garbage just to keep momentum, to keep something out there feeding the machine. 

With all of this said in what is possibly the longest preface ever, I’m afraid I’ve reached the end of my period of exploring the ambient guitar. I’ve made this pronouncement before and like all pronouncements, no sooner do I make one and inspiration strikes. Honestly, I hope that happens. It’s really hard to look at my guitars and feel nothing but frustration at the lack of ideas for new work; the same objects that I’ve looked at for decades, played all day/night and could barely bring myself to sleep out of an anticipation of what new sounds might come the following morning. To be fair, I’ve been extremely lucky and prolific; I count those blessings. I’m reminded of an interview where Doc Watson talked about getting his first guitar and his father told him “…so that life might be a little better with it.” My life has been better having picked up the guitar and better still when I connected it to an old Alesia Nanoverb all those many years ago.

There are so many situations and aspects of sound that I want to explore and I will, just sans the guitar. The guitar is the instrument I’m most proficient on so it will be my primary instrument in any band or ensemble situations, maybe even some ambient artists will reach out with ideas and ask me to contribute (something that rarely happens) but as for ambient guitar, by myself, that will only show up on droney periods in the various ensembles I play with when I kick on one of the several reverb pedals I have on my effects board.

Ambient guitar has been really good to me.Ambient guitar is dead! Long live ambient guitar!!! 

Please enjoy my final ambient guitar longform work: Castles, originally titled “Castles Made of Sand”, an allusion to the beautiful Jimi Hendrix song of the same name that aptly reflected my feelings as I created this final work.

“And so castles made of sand
“Melts into the sea eventually”
– Jimi Hendrix

Sunset Crest Out Now on Valley View Records

Matt Borghi Ambient Guitar
Hey Friends,

I’ve got a new full length recording out: Sunset Crest. Links to Bandcamp and most major services here: https://valley-view-records.fanlink.to/Sunset_Crest/

As some of you may have noticed, I’ve been releasing a lot of longform works on Bandcamp and mostly “singles” on the streaming services, all of this due to the nature of how folks listen to music on these services. This varied approach to releasing music sometimes makes my head spin, but I want to try and put the music in the best possible situation to be heard, otherwise, what’s the point.

This is what makes Sunset Crest different and interesting – Sunset Crest is probably the first full-length recording of individual, shorter tracks, I’ve released in over a year and there aren’t any other full-lengths like this in the works. In fact, I would say, that Sunset Crest is, in many ways, the follow-up to Music for Meditation and Sleep – Short Forms, Vol. 1. I’ve had to stop using terms like “meditation” and “sleep” in my titles due to keywording guidelines (read: censorship), which is pretty lame, but that’s a discussion for another time.

Additionally, Valley View Records out of Australia is doing an amazing job with the sonics (mastering), artwork, promotion and the release of my work, so check out the latest, Sunset Crest: mattborghi.bandcamp.com/album/sunset-crest

matt

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