New longform – Mirror Image
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Tag: Improvisation (Page 1 of 2)
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
I love Dave Liebman, his work, his philosophy, his artistry and his dedication to craft. As a devoted musical improviser, when I learned of his book, The Art of Skill – Establishing the Mindset For Unleashing the Music Inside You, I was super eager to get into Lieb’s brain and see what insights this master could offer. Instead, after thousands of purchases across more than two decades of using Amazon, I was moved to write my first product review. Here tis:
I don’t think that I’ve ever written a review for anything in thousands of Amazon purchases, but I definitely feel obliged to issue a ‘buyer beware’ warning for this unfortunate collection of pages attributed to Dave Liebman, as author. I say attributed because there are references in the text stating that this was a project of a Michael Lake, who I can’t seem to find anything biographics or CV on – He is credited thusly, on the cover: “Edited and Designed by Michael Lake”. No other credentials are included.
When I first heard about this book from Lieb, I went to Amazon and reluctantly swallowed the thirty bucks thinking that this might be a real chance to get an insight in Lieb’s perspectives; that was partially true. However, when I first received this in the mail I was taken aback by the paltry, print-on-demand collection of perfect bound pages that arrived. To call it a book, m’mmm… not quite, only if, say a pharmaceutical insert stuffed in The Times is considered a book or more aptly, a Scholastic Reader, which is what this 50ish pages of wide margins, poorly written and even more poorly proofread text alongside a mish-mash of motivational stock imagery with a few pics of Lieb and friends through the years thrown in for good measure seems to be. A book? That’s a tough proposition by any measure.
I didn’t pick this up for about six months, but when I finally picked up this collection of pages, it was, well, not great. A series of shoddily edited interviews (maybe?). I know now that LIeb almost became an orthopedic surgeon and a lawyer, but that didn’t bear repeating four times in, sort of, tangential asides to other things Lieb was talking about. And that’s the thing here, there’s no editorial throughline and no narrative to speak of. I surely didn’t get any insight into ‘the art of skill’ or really an insight into anything except Lieb’s other potential career directions! Without a doubt, you’d get more, better articulated (and edited) insight if you were to just read the first ten articles in a Google search for “Dave Liebman”. Certainly, this collection was not, is not, worth thirty bucks. And that’s the thing that’s outrageous here: Dave Liebman is known for quality and lifelong dedication to craft; this poorly written, poorly edited, poorly assembled, poorly laid out, cheaply printed and extremely overpriced collection is far beneath Dave Liebman. If anybody ever reads this, I’d say a fair price point for this is about $10 and with the printing costs you should still be making $9.
If it were some rando jazz guy, I’d give ’em a pass, but with lieb, man, I just can’t do that. He’s a teacher, master, musician and founder of the International Association of Schools of Jazz. Was there really nobody in his orbit that he could have shared this with to get an opinion on the writing, the editing, the layout, the presentation, etc. As someone who worked in publishing, I’d wager that a second set of eyes were never laid on this collection. Perhaps, the price tag can be attributed to the astronomical price of college textbooks and somebody was hoping to get this on some syllabi? I really don’t know, but this is an unfortunate and overpriced collection of pages that’s not worthy of having Dave Liebman’s name on it or associated with his amazing legacy of excellence.
As disappointed as I am with this work, I’m being generous with the three star rating. I think there are some, just Ok, insights within these pages, but it never scratches the surface of the promise of the title: The Art of Skill – Establishing the Mindset for Unleashing the Music Inside You, this collection of pages and random images, definitely ain’t that!
Anyway, my work is done. I’m disappointed, but hopefully, other folks can avoid the same disappointment and maybe even the editors/authors will take another look at things in the second printing. Lieb’s an amazing and awe-inspiring artist, a true craftsman, don’t let this dissuade you from his work.
I’ve been quite inspired with the songwriting aspect of my work for the last couple weeks. Towards a Western Sky, while a bit of a sleeper amongst my soundscape work, was a pivotal release for me in many ways, something that I’ve been reflecting on recently.
When I started making ambient and soundscapes 30 years ago I came at things as a singer/songwriter/guitar player. As I explored soundscapes and moved to computers, synthesizers and sound processing I would often wonder: What if I could bring about these sound worlds, these portals to deep listening with a basic augmentation to my singer/songwriter guitar set up. I explored this in parallel to my soundscape work for years and pursued many experiments to try and make it work.
I got close a few times.
Mostly it never worked until one day when I realized that it wasn’t about songs and songwriting as much as it was about textures of the guitar, voice, words, rhythm, nuance, timbre and color. The sonic palette is much more rudimentary, guitar, voice, words vs. the wide stereo of synthesized soundscapes, kind of like comparing a black and white photo to a high resolution color photo; different perhaps, but the essence is the same.
As I work on the new songs, I encourage my listeners to forget about “songs”, as the pervasive ear worms that invade our thoughts or become sonic bookmarks of our lives and rather think of them as sonic vignettes on the other side of the spectrum from the longform soundscape. Each of them is an invitation to deep listening. Start here: https://mattborghi.bandcamp.com/album/toward-the-western-sky
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
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New longform – Dispatched from Darkness
New releases are always $0/name your price on Bandcamp until the next one comes out.
