New longform – Dispatched from Darkness
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Matt Borghi: A Journey Through Song and Sound
Singer/Songwriter Shaped by Americana, Meditation and the Spirit of the Grateful Dead
Matt Borghi is Michigan-based singer/songwriter whose evocative music resonates deeply with fans of the Grateful Dead and Brian Eno-alike. Growing up immersed in the rhythms Detroit and steeped in Canadian radio that drifted across the border, Matt found his inspiration early in the storytelling tradition of classic folk and the improvisational spirit of the Grateful Dead. These influences became the cornerstone of his songwriting style, blending poetic lyrics with captivating melodies that transport listeners to a place where tradition and innovation harmoniously coexist.
Matt’s journey as an artist began with a guitar in hand and a love for communal music-making but took an unconventional detour when he was struck with a rare heart condition at the age of 19. While he was on a course towards fulfilling his goals as a working singer/songwriter, his musical goals and focus changed as he was pulled towards contemplative and meditative music that aided in his recovery.
As the years passed, Matt became known for his meditative ‘ambient guitar’ music with features on NPR, BBC, CBC, Music from the Hearts of Space and Echoes with John Diliberto, as well as numerous licensing placements and dozens of record deals; his singer/songwriter work continued quietly in the shadows.
While Matt spent more than two decades working within the high-resolution production world of ambient guitar and drone-based music, he never moved away from his love of folk and Americana, specifically the Appalachian music traditions – His first guitar lesson took place on a porch during a cool fall evening, overlooking the foggy hills of his ancestral home in Van Lear, Kentucky—the hometown of Loretta Lynn—while he was visiting from Detroit.
Through it all, Matt has remained committed to his singer/songwriter work and in recent years has elevated its prominence and focus in his creative output.
Inspired by the acoustic richness of bluegrass, the heartfelt richness of Americana and the improvisational spirit of the Grateful Dead, Matt’s songs and live performances reflect both personal introspection and collective experience. His work often explores themes of wandering, belonging, and the search for meaning—echoes of the Grateful Dead’s own musical explorations.
Over the years, Matt has released dozens of albums that showcase his mastery of blending genres. Whether performing solo or collaborating with other musicians, his live shows are celebrated for their warm intimacy and improvisational flair, inviting audiences to become part of the musical journey. Matt’s dedication to authenticity and connection shines through in every performance, earning him a loyal following across folk and Americana communities.
Today, Matt Borghi continues to write, record, and perform with the same passion that first drew him to music. His work pays homage to the roots of American music while carving out a distinct voice that honors tradition and celebrates the spirit of artistic exploration.
Wise words about making art, the creative process and being:
“IN CREATIVE FREEDOM there is an inexplicable and mysterious power to create out of nothing, undetermined, adding energy to the existing circulation of the energy of the world…
“The enslavement and bondage of the world’s hierarchy of beings submit man to lower, moribund levels of being; they compel man by their material heaviness. This bondage, this heaviness of the lower hierarchy, conceal from us the creative secret of being.”
– A snippet of a quote from —Nicolas Berdyaev in this morning’s Poetic Outlaws email – https://poeticoutlaws.substack.com/p/the-meaning-of-the-creative-act-e77 – https://poeticoutlaws.substack.com/
Message originally posted to friends on Bandcamp in ‘Remember a time’ release announcement – Join us there, if you haven’t already.
Hello Friends,
I don’t get into talking about my creative process as much as I once did, but with this recording I want to say a few things. First off, this recording was completely improvised and recorded live yesterday, April 3rd 2026. I lost myself in it. My best ambient work, and much of the work that I share with you, is improvised. Sometimes, often actually, it’s not good and gets put in the trash, but other times, the best times, a sublime state of flow is achieved, sounds flood my brain and the world falls away – ‘Remember a time’, or as I call it on my hard drive: ‘04032026 – Guitar Improvisation’, was one such occurrence and now I’m sharing it with you.
I hope you enjoy it.
matt
Announcing my new ‘songs’ recording, Towards the Western Sky. It’s naked and stripped down; there are no big ambient textures or dense guitar drones supporting the melody or a voice buried somewhere in the mix, rather this recording is a folk recording, the songs taken down to their most basic essence: Guitar and voice. Get it here on Bandcamp for free/name your price.
I’ve recorded and released some of these songs before, but I had always wanted to do stripped down ‘folk’ versions of the tunes. Until now, and probably now, too, I’ve lacked the confidence to put these songs out there in that way, whether as the singer or the songwriter, probably both, I hid behind big production burying the tunes.
As I’m sure you’ve gathered, this is a very different recording, one that I’ve tried to record a hundred times over the course of the last twenty years, beginning around 2003. Hell, if I’m honest, I began making this recording with my first recording session and my first studio-recorded song in 1994, but I wasn’t very good and the song wasn’t very good either, but it was a start and through ten thousand start-stops, a lifetime, here I am releasing a recording that serves as a snapshot of my songwriting work, a collection that’s well into the hundreds at this point.
Folk songs are known for covering some dark territory, the yearning of the human spirit, the struggle of the human condition and everything in between. I’ve alluded to these subjects in abstract and poetic longform titles, but here they’re delivered by me without pretense and with a rawness that oftentimes has been too precious to for me to share; there’s a darkness, always just beyond on the edges – with these recordings, I try to tame it.
There are light moments in this recording, too, because after all, life is a balance and I’ve tried to embody that balance in this recording. To be sure, this isn’t an ambient or a drone recording, some of the songs on ‘Toward the Western Sky’ are thirty years old and some, barely thirty days old, but they all have something about them that begged inclusion in this humble collection of songs from a middle-aged Michigan songwriter fumbling towards self-actualization through song and story. Again, you can get it here on Bandcamp for free/name your price.
I hope you enjoy it!
-Matt
Mini bio –
Matt Borghi is a Michigan-based singer/songwriter fumbling towards self-actualization through sound, story and song. Matt is also a founding member of The Deadly String Band, an East Lansing-based Grateful Dead and Dead-adjacent cover band who approach the the music as an acoustic old time string band covering 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.
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.
Welp, my musical hiatus didn’t last very long, a few weeks maybe, but in that time I reflected on where I was going, where I’d been and what I hoped to achieve. As I’ve talked about elsewhere I had been steadily releasing the ambient longforms for years, bi-weekly and rarely missing a beat. It’s been a great time. I’ve heard from so many cool people and made so many new friends and I have to say a lot of credit needs to go to Bandcamp for creating an excellent and well thought out platform for independent artists.
Being an indepdent artist, these days, means you have to have a lot of irons in the fire, from social media posts to tracking streaming royalties/trends, licensing, playing gigs, practicing for gigs, booking gigs, promoting gigs and then somewhere in between you have to be creating some work that you like and hopefully others like, as well, at least enough to keep being interested in your work. Look, I’m not complaining, I feel pretty lucky to have this opportunity and to also have seemingly boundless creative inspiration and curiosity. I’d say, these days, you need to have boundless creativity and inspiration just to make a go of it. Without that, you better you have a good team supporting you and I’m not sure how you even get that team to begin with if you never had those initial energies to get things off the ground – Getting things off the ground, getting that momentum, that’s the hardest thing to do – Starting, just starting…
Beyond my ambient guitar work, I have a lot of things going that I’ll likely give updates on; a lot of things that don’t necessarily fit in my creative oeuvre, but nevertheless, I’m starting to put a greater focus on, particulary acoustic music and my body of singer/songwriter work. I hope you’ll come with me on that journey and hear the sounds in that work that have fed my ambient music for 25 years now… Yep, that’s right this is my 25th anniversary of my first ambient recording, For Running Time… Long out of print, a freshmen effort in every way, but I started and with a quarter-century down, I’ve got nothing but open road, to explore, ahead of me.
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.”
Matt Borghi’s Bandcamp page is updated often with new music, live shows and other releases. Specifically, if you’re looking for Matt’s bi-weekly longform ambient recordings that many use for yoga, meditation, sleep and study, visit his Bandcamp page for 100+ hours of original music.
