Matt Borghi

Home of Michigan Singer/Songwriter, Ambient Music Producer and Poet, Matt Borghi

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The Deadly String Band

October 13, 2025 / / 0 Comments

I haven’t posted in a while as I’ve been heavily involved with The Deadly String Band, a group I formed in early 2025 and is described thusly:

The Deadly String Band is Michigan’s premier acoustic old time Grateful Dead tribute band; playing Grateful Dead and Dead-adjacent tunes in the style of an old time acoustic string band. The Deadly String Band strives to cover the whole of the Grateful Dead’s song catalog, as well as their influences, including tunes from the old time blues, folk and bluegrass songbook.

Apparently, this concept was something that there was an appetite for as it really took off beyond what we thought was even possible in the Mid-Michigan/Lansing area. Having never been part of a cover band, I thought it might be fun to take some of the Grateful Dead songbook and their respective Americana influences and approach it in the style of a 19th century string band; being a Grateful Dead cover band also seemed like the perfect opportunity to inject the music with a lot of improvisation and exploratory jams. We’re slowly bringing all of this together.

I’ve managed to keep producing ambient recordings at a rate of about one per month which seems just about right; a good break from practicing guitar and learning songs to get back in the drone state.

The Lost Year

November 18, 2020 / / 0 Comments

My new recording, The Lost Year, is out now. I am really excited for the release of The Lost Year. This is a recording that I’ve been working on intermittently for the last year. If you liked Consciousness of Light, it’s the follow-up that I promised would be out in early 2020 but, when COVID hit, work crawled to a halt. The Lost Year brings together two things I’ve been trying to successfully merge for years: My deep love for textural, ambient drone music and the other side of my artistic self, my songwriting. I’ve gotten close to merging these at times, but never quite hit it in a way that lasted, for me. Consciousness of Light marked a change in my process, formula and approach; The Lost Year continues what started there. For me it perfectly merges what Brian Eno talked about with ambient music – ‘a music that be listened to as easily as ignored’ but also a music that comes from a deeper part of my artistic self.

Consciousness of Light

October 19, 2019 / / 0 Comments

I’ve been ‘woodshedding’ for the last 18 months or so, trying to find that sweet spot between ambient and songwriting that I began in 2004 with Olagra, and I’ve been exploring ever since, never quite able to capture the sound I imagined and heard in my head. Well, I’ve finally got something, a process, a sound that stands up to repeated listens. It’s ambient, it drones, it’s sonically interesting, but these are songs that I’ve crafted, words and singing that integrates my being into the music… it can be listened to or ignored, to hearken back to what Eno said regarding what an ambient music should be. 

For a while I was calling it Drone Folk, maybe it is or it isn’t… Either way, I’ve finally hit the mark, captured the lightning in the bottle and merged two sides of my creative self, successfully.

The new recording is called Consciousness of Light. It’s only on Bandcamp right now. I’ll be submitting it to my distributor soon (Spotify, iTunes, Amazon, etc.), but I wanted to give you, in my email community, first crack at this. Consciousness of Light is an EP. I believe that I’ll have a follow-up, full-length done early in 2020, as I have dozens of songs that I’m looking to work into this new process.

I’m super excited about this new recording and I plan to be performing it live as my entire new process is also something that I can recreate for the live audience; that’s really the second exciting dimension of this new direction. To that end, I’ll also be putting up live videos from time to time on my YouTube page – https://www.youtube.com/user/mattborghi

Playlists for Lesser-known Song Work

April 15, 2019 / / 0 Comments

I just wanted to take a minute and feature some of my lesser-known songwriting work. There’s the serious songs, which I put in air quotes, that’s the first playlist and then there’s the stuff that I do as Matt Bird, which is silly, jokey, bathroom humorey; fun to do…

Matt Borghi – Ambient Guitar – NEW RELEASE

September 30, 2016 /

mattborghi_ambient-guitar

Ambient Guitar is Matt Borghi’s first solo recording capturing the style of performance that he’s usually only done with saxophonist, Michael Teager, as part of their Borghi | Teager duo. With Ambient Guitar, Matt Borghi’s influences are on full display, from a resonant acknowledgement of Brian Eno, in the manner of production and texture to melodic elements that fuse in Harold Budd, Robert Fripp and the late Jerry Garcia that’s particularly reminiscent of his work on the Zabriskie Point soundtrack.

Matt Borghi’s Ambient Guitar is a texturally rich, unassuming and restrained recording that highlights Matt Borghi at his musical best.

Ambient Guitar is available in a variety of formats at the links below, including:

Out Now – Manitou – Landscape, Histories and Sentiment

November 7, 2015 /

manitou_landscape_histories

Hey there. About ten years ago I released a recording called All Points North under the Manitou pseudonym. It was my second letterpress-printed CD edition and a love letter to the city of Detroit, my home, for all intents and purposes. It was impressionistic with reflections on time and experience, but also not, a “Matt Borghi” record… I went into kind of a different process and different state of mind to make that record.

Ten years on, over the summer of 2015, I decided to visit that mindspace again and created a new Manitou record, possibly the last, this is a historical reflection on the city of Detroit, the city of my family, the city of my ancestry. For me, there’s little reflection on or identification  with the northern Italy of my great grandparents and my family name, nor is there much reflection on my Scotch-Irish Appalachian roots, instead, I’m a Detroiter, quintessentially, of mixed ethnic origin, steeped in many cultures and many experiences with an overtone of post-industrial morose and a hopeful optimism for tomorrow’s future. So, this is a long-winded way to say that the latest Manitou record is out. All of the tracks are named after things in 19th and early 20th century Detroit, the Detroit that I heard stories about on the knees of grandparents and looked at longingly in books when we were the “Paris of the Midwest”.  That’s it. There’s not much more for me to say. I hope you enjoy the recording and enjoy the experience.

Links for listening, purchase, etc…

Amazon – http://amzn.to/1kB9P5R

iTunes – https://itunes.apple.com/us/album/landscape-histories-sentiment/id1044015330

CD – http://kunaki.com/Sales.asp?PID=PX00H1TCH5

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