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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 |
