Borghi, Matt

Artist: Matt Borghi & Michael Teager
P: 2013
Recorded as a series of improvisational structures in spring of 2012, this is the first recording that Borghi and Teager have done together after a half-decade of working together.
With Convocation, Borghi brings in spacious guitar textures to create a harmonic fabric for Teager to lay out his saxophone playing with subtlety and nuance. With a background in classical and jazz saxophone, Teager brings a wide palette of influences to the music. Listeners will hear aspects of Jan Garbarek, John Coltrane and Dave Liebman that are juxtaposed over Borghi’s pastoral guitar sounds that have more of their timbral origins in the work of Claude Debussy or Ralph Vaughan-Williams than they do other contemporary ambient guitarists.
Convocation, as a whole, aims to create a deep and timbrally interesting listening experience while also bringing together an interesting musical pairing and improvisational process. Saxophone and ambient music have never sounded like this, and Borghi & Teager attribute this to their friendship, their approach to the work and their diverse musical interests.

Artist: Matt Borghi & Michael Teager
P: 2014
Matt Borghi & Michael Teager know well the night. Why then, with evening sleeping so well, should they disturb the Universe with the smooth tones of their second studio album Shades of Bending Light (56'33")? This music from a farther room unfolds in a rhythm dictated by moments not nanoseconds. Their work belongs to the unconscious as it leaves the relaxed listener neither knowing where the music would go nor to what it belongs. Summoning seven sonic spaces this duo enchants us with Teager's reverberant saxophone solos, which call to us from above Borghi's breathing and billowing clouds of processed guitar. Combining the intellectual heft of Jazz and Ambient Music with the appeal of New Age/Contemporary Instrumental Borghi & Teager highlight a range of different tonal modes and musical moods. Their idealized cerebral realm is where atmosphere and melody share a common spirit in a vocabulary of undulating guitar riffs and lustrous reed leads. They play as if they were praying. Artists are supposed to hear life's dissonance and reflect it in their work, but throughout Shades of Bending Light it is as if Borghi & Teager cannot imagine the world before they came into it. Let us go then, and make our visit with these two men, to listen to the dark truths as well as the reassuring aspirations of our kind. Their genre strives to lift our inner lives, and Borghi & Teager are right up there among the best.

- Chuck van Zyl/STAR'S END   16 October 2014

Artist: Matt Borghi
P: 2009
Matt says: The Phantom Light is a work that's comprised four compositions with titles derived from some of the most remote lighthouses on the northern Great Lakes.
The works are inspired by sailor's tales of being adrift on The Great Lakes during storms, and catastrophic weather. Sailors, looking out on the horizon for a sign of life, a light of hope, aimed their ships towards the safety of these phantom lighthouses hoping to get to a safe harbor. Often times these phantom lighthouses just lead to a rocky shoal and a watery death. These phantom lights have been a thing of myth for as long as The Great Lakes freshwater seas have been sailed. In many ways, The Phantom Light is a sequel to Huronic Minor, as Great Lakes lore, and Matt Borghi's own experiences on The Great Lakes were the creative impetus for this work. The four long pieces exhibit Borghi's characteristic simplicity and restraint.