Huronic Minor

Huronic Minor is one of Matt Borghi's more accessible (i.e., easy to listen to) albums. It is also the one that comes closest to what most people usually understand as "ambient music." It offers 70 minutes of lush synthesizers and a treated acoustic steel string guitar that brings in shimmering tones like delicate ripples on the surface of a lake. Much more droning than melodic, just a bit too dark to fit the new age criteria, it remains a comfortable, engulfing listen. The album is based on The Great Storm of 1913, a storm in the Great Lakes area that stretched over three days. You may feel that the concept translates into the music or not, but it is irrelevant: the music stands well on its own without it and remains unchanged if you take it into account. If anything, Borghi didn't focus on the violence of the elements, but rather on the waiting, the resignation, and hope for better days. The music stretches out slowly, expanding without getting anywhere, breathing softly. It lacks just a bit in variety and runs maybe ten or 15 minutes too long, but fans of ambient music with an industrial touch (the droning textures, here much gentler than in the music of, say, Maeror Tri) will find it absorbing. Borghi released more challenging music in the coming years, but Huronic Minor makes a fine entry point, together with Tiem Parade, which is also listener-friendly but for completely different reasons. ~ François Couture, Rovi