Tag: Michigan Songwriter
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.
November 2020 – and The Lost Year
Hey there,
It’s been a couple months since my last email. I hope you’re doing well and staying healthy.
I haven’t been feeling very promotion-oriented lately, but with the release of The Lost Year and the release of the first three Dronearium series (1, 2, 3) recordings over the last couple months, I decided that I should probably send out a note.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. A quick bit about the Dronearium series:
“Dronearium is a series of long form musical soundscapes that takes listeners into an array of ambient soundworlds, all anchored in resonant drones and treated with texture and melancholic nostalgia. Inspiration for these works come from science fiction, archeoastronomy, pre-Columbian peoples and myths, as well as landscapes, seascapes and the natural world, imagined and reimagined.”
The Dronearium series (1, 2, 3), for me, started when I wanted to take a break from the songwriting work and just make drones, sounds and textures of a sci-fi or otherworldly nature. The Dronearium series is different than my other ambient music, of late, because music for meditation and sleep has been the focus. With that music, I avoid sharp tones, dissonance, rhythms, etc. things that I enjoy in other music, Stanley Kubrick’s soundtrack to 2001: A Space Odyssey comes to mind. All told, the Dronearium series is still very ambient, but the intention behind it is different.
That’s all for now.
Enjoy the new music and let me know how you’re doing.
Matt
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.
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
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…