Merry Christmas! My Biggest Update Ever: 2 Large Collaboration Paintings • 1 Psychedelic Future Rant • 4 New Podcasts • 5 New Live Releases • And A Patreon For You And Me... (Oh, and I'm Going to Australia!)

“I can at best report only from my own wilderness.”

– Loren Eiseley

Greetings, friends.  I know this newsletter's insanely long.  It's just that I've so much to share!  To keep these updates more bite-sized, I will be shifting strategy toward sharing everything on Patreon instead of social media or email – also, ramping up the publication schedule of this blog a little.  I won't be offended if you'd rather not sift through a magazine of new work every month...

But I would be DELIGHTED if you joined my Patreon community and let me shower you with all of this enthusiastic creativity and thoughtful wonder!  I am taking on my biggest and most meaningful projects ever, right now – not just my first book, but my first (legitimate) studio album, a weekly podcast, and some truly epic gallery pieces for upcoming art shows.  

If you would like to be a part of all this as it comes together, join my awesome crew of patrons and enjoy the wealth of inspiration (and fun ephemera) that I have to share with you.  I'm only 17 subscribers from my goal for this year and I hope you're one of them!

New Paintings & Canvas Prints

Leviathan (or, Technocore in Love)

24"x48" - oil and acrylic paint on masonite
Read more / Buy prints

Wet Eschaton (Leviathan 2)

24"x48" - oil and acrylic paint on masonite

Read more / Buy prints

Two collaboration with Elliot Rogers: the top one was mostly my work, and the bottom one was mostly his, but we swapped back and forth a couple times and inflitrated one another's visions.

We finally have high-res SCANS of both of these and can produce museum quality canvas prints!

Click through on either image to read more about the piece and maybe even score yourself a print...

How to Live in the Future – Boom Festival 2016

Stream/Download • Talk Notes
"I’m hoping that by the end of this talk you all feel slightly more empowered to participate in this future, and to participate in the growing number of people worldwide that recognize that it falls upon us as we birth a new age, to love what we create. And to infuse it with love and creativity, and not to reject this baby, but to raise it right. We have this profound opportunity to invest as much beauty and love and creativity into this new space as we possibly can."

My talk from Boom Festival's Liminal Village – in which, while trying to make a case for how to sanely navigate the next few years, I somehow manage to discuss Jurassic Park, Terminator, Pokémon, cat videos, Radiolab, Google, DARPA, Charles Stross, the Singularity, Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, Martine Rothblatt, Genesis P Orridge, nondual philosophy, and angels.

How do you live in the future? By getting used to the new everyday reality in which transcendental mystery, rapid transformation, and networked selfhood is the norm. I caught most but not all of this talk in 360º video, so if "being there" is your thing then watch part 1 and part 2 on YouTube.

New Future Fossils Podcast Episodes

We're finally getting into a regular swing with this fantastic conversation series, in which very interesting people talk with me about the future.  Subscribe, rate, and review us on iTunes or Stitcher!

Episode 11 with Shaft Uddin (Tantric Unicorn)

Streaming/Download • Show Notes

This special double episode with "tantric unicorn" Shaft Uddin of SacredSexualAwakening.com (I kid you not) is the craziest, most stimulating and far reaching conversation we've had on the show so far.  This one goes everywhere from polyamory to political theory, shadow work to civil engineering, ecstatic sensuality to time travel, crystal meditations to the TPP, past life regression to permaculture, synesthesia to church, Universal Basic Income to the benefits of global festival community.  Hold on tight!

Episode 12 with Mark Lee (Somnio8)

Streaming/Download • Show Notes

In this week's conversation with visionary painter Mark Lee (aka Somnio8) at Boom Festival's Museum of Visionary Art, we get into scalar waves, free energy devices, getting back to nature with new paradigm technologies – and yes, of course, his awesome art.  Prepare to have your physics challenged...

Guest Appearances on Other Podcasts

Streaming/Download • Show Notes

In this week’s episode of FuturePrimitive, host Joanna Harcourt-Smith invites me into an exquisite conversation about paradox, intensity, casuality and the art of fun. For those of you who don't already know, Joanna once snuck LSD into prison for her lover Tim Leary and is the most dedicated podcaster I've ever met – her archives stretch back over 500 episodes, and are well worth your exploration.

Streaming/Download • Show Notes

A great chat with Third Eye Drops host Michael Phillip and Shamans of the Global Village director Niles Heckman, in which we discuss the war of art, the endless retelling of the hero's journey and Hollywood's amazing lack of imagination, occult teachings in blockbuster films and the lost ayahuasca scene from Avatar, why what you do for a living isn't who you are, and the future of virtual reality immersive storytelling.

(FIVE!) New Live Albums

Two new instrumental improv sets and three singer-songwriter performances – all of which are available for free download to my Bandcamp and Patreon subscribers, and can be streamed for free by anyone (with small but possibly annoying buffer gaps between tracks).

For fans of my instrumental psychedelic ambient work, two new recordings offer novel sonic saunters through the convoluted tunnels of imagination-space:

• Duende was recorded at the SolPurpose Visionary Arts Academy at Sonic Bloom Festival 2016, live music for a painting session hosted by Martina Hoffmann, Randal Roberts, and Morgan Mandala. Rare electric guitar only set. 

• Campfire was a super dark, cold, wet, and smokey backyard party at my friends' in Nashville – and it definitely carries all that autumn spooky splendor.

Three singer-songwriter performances that weave together storytelling, avant-garde guitar technique, and jewel-like songcraft – plus a hefty dose of spontaneity:

• Concert Window was a set I streamed from home, and features first performances of some new songs as well as one completely tasty improv. 

• Whip In was a strong, eclectic set I played for my fiancée's 30th birthday (so there's lots of heart, and silly banter).

• Synergia Ranch was played in an original Buckminster Fuller dome, so this short set (with special guest Andrew Stocker on a trancey throat-singing looper jam) has awesome natural reverb.

Upcoming Festivals

Oh, and I'm going to Australia for a month-long tour in February!  NBD.  (I'm freaking out.)

~ love ~

Sneak Peek at my new Dinosaur Painting • Coming Down from CoSM • Live Looping Pedalboard Teardown • New Live Album • Read the First Few Sections of my Book • My Talk from Sonic Bloom 2016 • And I Love You

It's been a crazy autumn, friends. I pray that it's been relatively smooth for you, and that you recognize your challenges as collective opportunities for learning, growth, and evolution. May we live in interesting times! It may be hard to keep up the enthusiasm for a transformation that could stretch out past our lifespans, to contribute all we have to building something we won't live to see completed. But that is the human project. Keep with it and I will do the same.

If there's anything that I can do to help you find your peace or purpose through the madness, let me know.

Meanwhile, I'll continue working on what gives my struggles in this life a sense of meaning. Right now that means a book, a studio album, and a podcast, each of them focused on the complicated blessing of a human life in this specific time.

My Patreon subscribers have an inside track with all of this, including early access and exclusive content – plus, the benefits of knowing that you're helping me give everything to spreading messages of inspiration:

Now for all the new work.  As always, thanks for reading – and may you discover all of your forgotten blessings, like a twenty in your jeans...

Sneak Peek: New Dinosaur Painting

Here are some sneak peeks of an epic dinosaur piece that I'm working on right now, another window into that revisionist prehistory, The Psychedelic Age of Dinosaurs, I started with these pieces of Tyrannosaurus, Carnotaurus, Spinosaurus, Nanotyrannus, and Triceratops.

Subscribe to me on Instagram for "stories," videos, and other fun ephemera as this piece comes together.  It's already shaping up to be one of my most intensely detailed, luminous, and weird live paintings yet...

Hummingbird Blankets Available to Order!

It's time again!  I only have a few of these lovely woven cotton blankets on hand that I can ship in time for Christmas – once they're gone, the wait time goes back up to 6-8 weeks, so if you would like to order one of these for someone now's the time!  Grab one here (or share this link on wishlists).

Coming Down from CoSM

I just played (and spoke) at Alex & Allyson Grey's Chapel of Sacred Mirrors in upstate New York!  CoSM is an amazing place, a worldwide hub for visionary art.  My offerings felt very overdue.  It's one thing to feel part of a "noetic polity," a community of mind, and quite another to ground that connection face-to-face, together in a place and time.  I finally saw and felt what the Greys are building firsthand and it was a truly humbling weekend.

Both my three-hour presentation and my instrumental live set will be made available for free to Patreon supporters soon (and to everyone else sometime in the New Year).

Meanwhile, here's a selfie that my painter hero asked to take with me.  :)

Live Looping Guitar Pedalboard Teardown

I would like to make more of an effort to put my skills to work by training other people (in guitar, live looping, paint pens, live art, and whatever else you think that you could learn from me).  Skype lessons are one way so let me know if you are into that – another is this walkthrough of my rig:

"Guitar Moderne reader Michael Garfield has a natural science-based perspective on looping and live sampling that is mind expanding. He also offers some straight, nuts-and-bolts info about his gear and how he uses it."

Read all about how I turn one guitar into a symphony of glitched-out cybernetic awesomeness at Guitar Moderne (my favorite blog for experimental guitar).

New Live Release: Austin, Texas 2015-11-11

While I continue grinding away at my book, podcast, and first album of actual SONGS in many years, here's a peek at some of those songs in their earliest public appearance, stripped down solo acoustic, still finding their legs but obviously chomping at the bit and rearing at the gate.

New songs here range the gamut of geek, from a piece about Jurassic Park coming true ("Life Finds A Way") to a piece of gonzo journalism from the space between birth and death ("Indecision") to a weirdly tropical number about the neurophysiology of awakening ("Always Catching Up").

You'll also hear some time-tested versions of old fan favorites like "You Don't Have To Move" and "Let It All Get Out" sprawling into lengthy and weird looping explorations, and – this is a storyteller format set – listen to a lot of weirdo ragged banter between me and everyone who was there for my girlfriend's birthday...  Stream or download it on Bandcamp.  (This one is free to my subscribers.)

Read the First Few Sections of my Coming Book

Here's the preface and first two short chapters of the book I'm writing, How To Live in the Future.  It's an evolutionary tour of hyperspace that hopefully helps people find their way through all the change of our extraordinary century.  It begins with an homage to Archeopteryx, my spirit animals, and possibly the most important fossil ever found.

We humans are creatures of becoming, works-in-process – just like the legendary Archeopteryx, the so-called "First Bird" whose discovery in 1861 was the first fossil evidence of evolution by natural selection. Half bird, half reptile, Archeopteryx has much to teach us as we navigate this turbulent transition from apes to angels.  This piece I originally wrote for Projections Magazine may well become the preface to my book.  Read it here.

My Talk from Sonic Bloom 2016

In this talk I conjured up an even more ambitious bouquet of ideas than usual, constellated around the work of Penn State information scientist Richard Doyle and the argument that art and language grew from psychoactive interspecies intercourse.

What does the evolution of the Mind-At-Large teach us about the role of creativity in culture? How do artists function as the organs of erotic signaling within the selves-enjoying superorganism of the Biosphere? What is the highest purpose art can serve?

All these questions – and more – will be danced around, linked, juggled, entertained, and possibly even answered in this mind-expanding thoughtstream as it makes its way to spill out in the Ocean of Primordial Awareness...  Stream or download it here for free.

And, Lastly:

Gift yourself the glowing warmth and satisfaction that you get with patronage this season, and get your front-row seat to my creativity in every medium.  It is 1000 times more awesome than just getting emails from me – I host ask-me-anythings, you can connect with other patrons and meet new friends, and you get your name in the acknowledgments when I release the book and album:

Thanks again for reading and may all your days and nights be full of sweet embodied ease!  Now:

"Find what you love and follow it to glory.”

- Abraham Simpson

I'm Teaching at COSM! How To Live in the Future Part 2. Future Fossils Episode 10. Third Eye Drops. Live Looping. Understanding Ayahuasca.

“It’s always nice to start a religion with a miracle.”

– Alex Grey

Hey, folks.  It's time to knuckle down and make great things.

...I hope that what I do makes life a little brighter for you:

So I'm Teaching A Workshop at COSM!

I'm teaching my first workshop (and playing my first concert) at Alex & Allyson Grey's Chapel of Sacred Mirrors this weekend! It's based on the work of information scientist and mystic sci-fi scholar Richard Doyle, whose work on the co-evolution of animal courtship with psychoactive plants refigures human selfhood as an aspect of ecology.  If we are something that the Earth is doing – if attention is the way that energy and information move through ecosystems – artists of all kinds are cosmic router switches, working on the only medium:  awareness.

Join us there.  If you can't make it, I'll record and share both facets with my Patreon supporters.

How To Live in the Future (Part 2)

"If you plan to live in the future, you have failed already: one of its defining traits is that it’s unpredictable... Every moment’s an inflection point between the end and the beginning of innumerable stories flowing in all possible directions."

I'm writing a book-length essay of psychedelic prose on evolution, technology, and how to navigate our ever-weirdening world.  Here's part two at Metapsychosis Journal.  Here's part one.

Endorse my leap of faith to serve the world as a full-time idea-splicing agent of visionary reconnaissance:

I'm writing this abovementioned book (and publishing this podcast, and recording this studio album) with the support of a small community of awesome fans at Patreon.  Patreon is a website that empowers independent creators and helps us make a sustainable living – my supporters pitch in however much they like each month and get some very special treatment as a gesture of my thanks – as well as a much closer and more rewarding relationship than is possible through social media.  Check it out!

Future Fossils S1:E10
with Anthony Thogmartin & David Krantz

Subscribe to us on iTunes // Episode Permalink

In this special double episode, we're joined by musician-wizards Anthony Thogmartin (Earth Cry, Papadosio) and David Krantz (Futexture, former Moog Music employee, and director of psychoacoustics at Apeiron Center) in which we have a crazy conversation about:

- creative process workflow time loops and the difference of looping over minutes or years
- artificially intelligent digital simulacra of ourselves, exploring alternate biographies
- analog modular synthesis as collaborating with a living creature
- random number generators and the ghost in the machine - collective consciousness
- tripping with cats and electronics
- sensitive instruments detecting invisible realities and scalar waves
- synchronizing people with trees, brains with other brains, and other entrainment weirdness
- Data Garden’s MIDI Sprout and using plant vibrations to control robotic servos and welcome vegetable intelligence into human political discourse
- the anechoic chamber and psychoacoustic biofeedback programming the human body
- video chat telepresence barbershop quartets

Yeah, it's good.  There are nine other episodes up there for you already, and many more to come...

I also recently appeared again on Third Eye Drops, one of my favorite podcasts. Episode 28 features a conversation between host Michael Philip, scientist Bruce Damer, and myself. Episode 29 includes a shorter chat with me about what message I would send my younger self – along with similar chats with Mitch Schultz, Rick Strassman, and Daniele Bolleli.

Article on Group Looping at LoopingLive.com

For the last few years, I've hosted Loopers' Night and Paint Jam, residencies for experimental live looping music collaborations.

Group looping improvisation is like weight training while simultaneously freestyle rapping – it requires players to learn a set of common basic gestures and commands to adequately guide each other. However, it only works when everyone is in a flow state and can turn together like a flock of birds with zero hesitation when the music asks for it.  Read the whole piece.

19 November Gig in New York City

Understanding Ayahuasca – w/ Alex & Allyson Grey, Luis Eduardo Luna, Ralph Metzner, Daniel Pinchbeck, Allan Badiner, Steven White, Esthela Calderón, and Skytree

I'm playing music – that is, taking people on a journey through the transcendental textures of acoustic electronic steel-string spaceship instrumentals – for the evening part of this event.

RSVP & Tickets Here.

“It is not your business to determine how good it is, not how it compares with other expressions. It is your business to keep it yours clearly and directly, to keep the channel open. No artist is pleased.”

– Martha Graham

I'm Going To Get A Little Vulnerable With You, New Electric Guitar Tunes from Sonic Bloom 2016, Kishi Bashi Interview, New VR and Robotics Essay for the Body Hacking Blog, More Technoshamanism Goodness

“We are at the end of an era in which lies can be used to steal from the public and the commons. We are at the beginning of an era in which truth in public service can restore us all to a state of grace."

– Former CIA agent Robert David Steele

(My latest live painting in progress at Green Beer Fest, alongside a piece by my friend Martin Cash.)

I'm writing a book and recording a new studio album, both projects I've been promising my friends and fans for years.  It isn't easy but it IS exciting, and inspiring to share this process with you.

Here's the climax of a recent exercise in vulnerable and transparent writing:

------

If you are anything like me, the last ten or eleven years have not been easy. You were probably, like me, sold on the dream that your involvement in the pyramid-building of somebody else's vision would reap you rewards you haven't seen. You sought outside yourself authorities to help make sense of all the change, and wondered where you fit in all of it, and wondered if our parents had it easier, without the crushing daily in-your-face reminders that it isn't simple anymore.

But hopefully, then you are also like me in that you have recently decided to stop waiting for the aliens to land and give us Cosmic Christmas, you've stopped buying into party lines and flawed but visionary projects that devour your power and convert it into someone else's profits. You have made the change and now you hope that you can live as an example of the new model of the interdependent human being, motivated by your own relationship to intuition and the loving intelligence that speaks through it. You've given up on gurus, leaders, priests, your parents, bosses, and the future, and you're dedicated to the work of simply being true and clear to what you are and what you're called to do.

If you're like me, you aren't an "independent artist" - you're the intersection of colliding infinities, the universe unfolding as a human life, the product of an ecosystem. You are not "self-employed," because you are employed by that intelligence that lives distributed between all species and their interactions, what cybernetics calls the "Mind at Large." You are employed by everything to serve no less than everyone.

You can stop looking for a home. You have no home. The world is your home.

You can stop looking for a job. You know what you have to do right now. Go do it.

And now for as much music, art, and writing as I can create and share with you for free:

New Electric Guitar Track from Sonic Bloom Festival

I played my first electric set in years for the SolPurpose Visionary Art Academy at Sonic Bloom this June – the soundtrack to a live art session with instructors Martina Hoffmann, Randal Roberts, and Morgan Mandala.  Here is a clip from that performance – the whole show is a perk for all my Patreon and Bandcamp subscribers.

Honestly this one is kind of scary. It has pretty passages but they’re all in between a lot of roaring, black hole grooves and deadly space. There are some clearings of real beauty in there, sentimental lovely lead guitar lines. There are also plenty of unpleasant noises, hatching dragons, flying metal crumpling in a firestorm - even so, they’re interesting, raw and vivid like a heart attack or car crash filtered through slow motion overload, like music from the mothership that feels like maybe it’s just peaceful inquiry…but also could be reprogramming your brain with sound. Some parts of it are distinctly sexy. Not on purpose and it kind of spooks me. I don’t know where any of this comes from, so it’s listen at your own risk, guys. Thanks!

Listen to "Redisintegration – Final Breakdown" here.

Kishi Bashi Interview for Performer Mag

I recently interviewed one of my favorite musicians, Kishi Bashi, for Performer Magazine.  We had a totally bizarre and wonderful discussion on the past, present, and future of music and human connection.  Here's a tiny piece:

"I also had this thought the other day that in the future there may not be any music. Neuroscience will be at such a point where, I feel like within my generation, we’ll be able to recreate the effect of hearing a great song in our head. That little dose of that Dylan song you love and gives you goosebumps? That feeling will probably be able to be recreated, and there’s going to be people who will be able to map out the emotion of a great song, or a great movie, or a great book. Some of them will probably be more complicated than others, but I think people will start combining THAT with new visual and physical experiences. It’ll be a weird world by the time I’m dead."

– Kishi Bashi

Read the whole thing here.

New Writing on the Future of Virtual Reality and Robotics

A huge part of the book I'm working on right now is inquiry into the future of the human species and how it will feel to be alive once everything has stopped exploding quite so much – or, once we're used to it, at any rate.  Here is the latest, on the Body Hacking Conference Blog:

"It took less than a decade for the smartphone to insinuate its way into our sense of self. In some important senses, most of us are now dual-platform beings, living in at least two parts: the flesh and the machine. We don’t all think this way, yet – it takes time to steer the paradigm – but five billion people live with some device connecting them at all times to the sum of human knowledge, incredible machine intelligence, and the mediated life experiences of those other cyborgs. That phone is kept at all times inside the envelope of the magnetic fields projected by our hearts and brains, and someday soon we’ll think of human being-ness as slightly more about these organizing fields than what continuously cycling meat exists within them. So we’re each a binary: a person and a cellular device, a wizard and its owl familiar…if you don’t mind reviving the archaic to explain what modern language can’t sufficiently address."

Read the whole thing here.

Moogfest Technoshamanism Lecture Audio on Bandcamp

When Dennis McKenna and Bruce Damer weren't available to speak, Moogfest gave me the opportunity to present on "technoshamanism" at this year's event.

Consequence of Sound called it "Easily the most mind-opening presentation at Moogfest 2016" which is CRAZY TALK, but I'll take it.

You may have heard it already on the Psychedelic Salon Podcast – but for my own upload, I edited about 5 minutes of "uh" "like" "you know" out of the recording. Enjoy!

Listen to the whole thing here.

Catch Me Live

An intimate show with the amazing musical talents of Daniel Hansen aka RootFlute, who makes his own sacred instruments; and Johannes Rath, the only "guitalimba" player in the world. Both of these guys are experts in weaving trance-inducing, magical music out of their virtuosic playing – and we're going to mix solo sets with a group jam for maximum effect. Plus we get a double cherry on top: live painting by two of my favorite Boulder artists, Martin Cash and Joshua Wine Morriston. This is my only public concert on the entire Front Range until 2017!

Details and tickets here.

FINALLY! I'm teaching a class AND playing an instrumental cyberguitar set at the global epicenter for visionary art, Alex & Allyon Grey's Chapel of Sacred Mirrors. My three hour afternoon workshop will focus on focusing – that is, how to gather and apply attention – yours AND your audience's – for the benefit of all beings.

Details and tickets here.

For anyone in the New York area, I'm playing music for this amazing event with Alex & Allyson Grey, Luis Eduardo Luna, Ralph Metzner, Daniel Pinchbeck, Allan Badiner, Steven White, Esthela Calderón, and my friend Skytree.

"Join leading authorities on ethnobotany, ayahuasca, anthropology, visionary art as we explore the cultural history, traditional and neo-shamanic practices, artistic and literary inspirations, and the scientific, therapeutic and ecological dimensions of the sacred Vine of the Amazon."

Details and tickets here.

Thanks for reading. :)

Now on Patreon, Live at Boom Festival, New Live Painting, Technoshamanism at Moogfest, New Future Fossils Episodes, How To Resolve A Paradox

Hello, friends!  A note about creativity and courage:

If you're reading this it's probably because we met while I was painting and I inspired you to stay in touch.  The funny thing is that I've been an emblem of this "daring artistic lifestyle" for several years, but visual art was something I stumbled into as a way of making ends meet. It wasn't a courageous swan dive into the creative life; it was the path of least resistance for someone who'd grown up doodling in class. I've always liked painting but being called a "painter" is like getting stabbed a little.

Now I'm at the point where I either put the emphasis back on my writing and my music, where my soul really is, or I die a little inside. And I'm standing at the edge where I've seen so many people falter, on the cusp of taking that leap of faith and embracing the thing I can't imagine actually paying for itself, and pissing off most of my supporters in the process. And wow, it really IS scary here!

Selling art was never going to buy the life I wanted for myself and for my imaginary future family. (At least, not without my heart in it.) But NOT constantly producing pretty flash for people to consume means stepping out across a chasm with no bridge in sight.

I've set up a Patreon account for anyone who cares about the work I offer and who'd like to see me emerge victorious from this transition with an album and a book and lots of extra podcast episodes.

If I've inspired you at any point I hope that you will join me for this ride, and that I can be – more authentically and deeply than ever – a living example and a catalyst for anyone who's scared to follow what they love beyond the point of sense and into wondrous things...

And now onto the offerings I'm proud and grateful to share with you today:

Live in 360º at Boom Festival’s Chillout Gardens

Audio Recording Here (Name-Your-Price Download)

My concert at Boom Festival's Chillout Gardens was the most amazing gig I've had so far: playing to an audience of thousands in an eighty-foot-tall psychedelic stupa ringed with a six-point Funktion One sound array, stretched fabric and cushioned red carpet flooring on the beach of Idanha-A-Nova, a glorious and glistening lake that literally shimmers with flecks of golden mica.

I played the first set (after a short break) following an epic five-hour dance party by Gaudi – can't ask for a better energy than that – and improvised an hour of music that was alternately spacious, spooky, lively, trancey, woodsy, futuristic, and serene (and sometimes all at once).  For the first time I read some excerpts from a favorite book to deepen and intensify the space of my performance – in this case, William Irwin Thompson's book-length essay, The American Replacement of Nature.

Also for the first time, I included software piano – and recorded the first 25 minutes of the set as a 360º videosphere.  Check this out – you can scroll around and watch everything I'm doing with my pedals, gaze up at the amazing stretched fabric roof of the stage, and look out into the sultry deliciousness of the Chillout Gardens audience:

PS – You can see all of my 360º photospheres from Boom Festival and Portugal here.

New Painting: Eclipse Flower

Buy 11"x17" Prints

Astrologically speaking, I have a Pisces Moon.  That means I'm an intuitive, moody, empathetic, emotionally slippery kind of person.  This is true.  And at no time did it seem MORE true than in the final stretch of working on this painting, when a Lunar Eclipse on the exact degree of my natal Moon (24º) cast me into a Persephonic pit of oozing darkness known to the Internet as "THE FEELS."

In every medium, I find myself trying to express the dark-bright beauty of life's messy emotional paradoxes.  Like, for example, the closing track off my first album, "It Hurts So We're Not Dead."  And here we have the visual representation of that:  is it one plant blossoming riotously in the moonlight, or is it two plants fighting one another for supremacy?  Do these distinctions even make sense when it comes to the inherently conflicted inner landscape of emotion?

This piece is for anyone who has ever felt like an alien cactus possibly attacking itself.

Original piece painted live on 40"x30" canvas with oil & acrylic paint pens at the Denison Cultural Arts Festival, SPRATX, and at home from 16-20 September over the Lunar Eclipse.

New Future Fossils Podcast Episodes

Subscribe / Rate / Review Future Fossils Podcast at iTunes

My podcast with cohost Evan Snyder, in which we take the perspective of future archeologists digging through the digital remains of modern culture.  What messages of value can we send posterity?  Explore the nature of time and our place in it through the conversations of the unconventional, bizarre, free-roaming, fun, irreverent, and thoughtful kind...an auditory psychedelic to get you prepared for living in a wilder future than we can imagine. Our latest episodes:

Author Kingsley Dennis on the emergence of planetary "new monasticism."

Author Ashley Dawson on the relationship between capitalism and mass extinction.

Both conversations were amazing.  Check them out on iTunes and leave us a review!

Video + Audio: "Technoshamanism" at Moogfest 2016

Stream/Download Audio

My talk from Moogfest 2016 was a highlight of my career as a public speaker – Consequence of Sound called it "Easily the most mind-opening presentation Moogfest 2016 had to offer," which is no small statement on a lineup that included virtual reality inventor Jaron Lanier and gender-bending transhumanist Martine Rothblatt.

I think part of what made it so effective was the audioreactive visualization software Synesthesia, transforming my words into flowing imagery behind me while I spoke. You may have already heard this talk as Episode 508 of Notes from the Psychedelic Salon, but seeing it is a very different thing. It was like having a cybernetic collaborator, early AI offering the digital ground to the figure of my presentation.

I've also made the talk's audio available in my own archives as a free download, for which I thoroughly edited most of the "ums" and "likes" so that you can listen to me wax visionary without having to suffer my atrocious Valley Girl dialect. ;)

Time-Lapse Mural Video: "How To Resolve A Paradox"

I had a little fun with the time-lapse app on my phone to capture most of the process while I threw this paint pen mural up in my friend's camper van.  Unfortunately he moved before I could finish it!  But here you are.  Voiceover from my talk at Sonic Bloom 2015, music from my latest album. 

 Hopefully this helps somebody you know that's confused about an either/or dilemma.

Catch Me Live

An intimate show with the amazing musical talents of Daniel Hansen aka RootFlute, who makes his own sacred instruments; and Johannes Rath, the only "guitalimba" player in the world.  Both of these guys are experts in weaving trance-inducing, magical music out of their virtuosic playing – and we're going to mix solo sets with a group jam for maximum effect.  Plus we get a double cherry on top:  live painting by two of my favorite Boulder artists, Martin Cash and Joshua Wine Morriston.  This is my only public concert on the entire Front Range until 2017!  Details and RSVP here.

FINALLY!  I'm teaching a class AND playing an instrumental cyberguitar set at the global epicenter for visionary art, Alex & Allyon Grey's Chapel of Sacred Mirrors.  My three hour afternoon workshop will focus on focusing – that is, how to gather and apply attention – yours AND your audience's – for the benefit of all beings.  Details and tickets here.

For anyone in the New York area who can't make it out for the COSM gig (and also those who can), I'm also playing music for this amazing event with Alex & Allyson Grey, Luis Eduardo Luna, Ralph Metzner, Daniel Pinchbeck, Allan Badiner, Steven White, Esthela Calderón, and my friend Skytree.

"Join leading authorities on ethnobotany, ayahuasca, anthropology, visionary art as we explore the cultural history, traditional and neo-shamanic practices, artistic and literary inspirations, and the scientific, therapeutic and ecological dimensions of the sacred Vine of the Amazon."  Details and tickets here.

...in which I share my 360 Travelogue of Boom Festival & Portugal, announce the Future Fossils Podcast on iTunes, share my slow motion new music video, tell you "How to Live in the Future," spread Third Eye Drops with Erik Davis, support the Ayahuasca Reader, and launch my Patreon Campaign.

“We live on the leash of our senses. Although they enlarge us, they also limit and restrain us, but how beautifully. Love is a beautiful bondage, too.”

– Diane Ackerman, A Natural History of the Senses

Hello, my amazing invisible extended self existing in the gauzy web of long-term friendships and connections made since this blog started in the misty dawn age of 2008!  I'm finally back from my first experience of Europe and I have so many great treasures ready for you to enjoy.

It's been a totally transformative summer for me, both good and bad.  The hardest part is always coming home and trying to make sense of all the lessons...so while I sort that out, here is the first round of my offerings to you, beginning with the photosphere travelogue of my experience in Portugal.

(All of this is freely given to you and the commons. There's nothing here to purchase. If you would like to show support, subscribe to me on Patreon or Bandcamp – or if you're broke, just share it with your friends. Whatever you can do is more appreciated than you know.)

360º Photos from Portugal & Boom Festival 

I spent my three weeks in Portugal taking as many beautiful 360º shots as possible.  Boom was supremely beautiful (both for its quieter and louder moments), but I also managed to great plenty of great shots while hanging out in Lisbon (and the world's best hostel); Cerro de Janeiro (an awesome workaway in Odemira); Sintra (a landscape of awesome ancient castles and a UNESCO world heritage site); and Cabo da Roca (the westernmost point of continental Europe).

Here they are:

View the full set (200+ photos without captions) on Google Plus.

View a select handful of photos with mini-stories about each one on Facebook.

Every one of these can be explored by clicking on the image, then scrolling with your mouse or touchscreen to explore the whole environment.  It was a trip to work with this new photographic medium that captures everything around the camera – you can't escape the "selfie" but it renders the photographer as part of an entire scene, more accurate than both the selfie and the old tradition of remaining hidden from behind the camera.

Feel free to leave your comments and questions!  I'll be happy to respond to every one of them.

Future Fossils Podcast FINALLY on iTunes & Stitcher!

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Subscribe/Rate/Review on Stitcher

For everyone who loves a deep dive into the weird, wild, and wonderful, my podcast with cohost Evan "Skytree" Snyder, Future Fossils, is finally live on the major podcast syndication platforms and ready to water your brains with delicious crystals of expanding contemplation.

We've put SO much work into this podcast and there are already some amazing conversations up there, with folks like comedian Shane Mauss, origins of life researcher Bruce Damer, author Tony Vigorito, director Mitch Schultz (DMT: The Spirit Molecule), and cyborg anthropologist Maraya Karena – plus some very 

Coming soon, episodes with author Kingsley L. Dennis, sociologist Ashley Dawson, musicians Anthony Thogmartin (Papadosio & EarthCry) and David Krantz (Futexture) – as well as a few amazing field interviews from Boom Festival with tantric unicorn Shaft Uddin, visionary artist Mark Lee, and Rupert Till, aka "Dr. Chill" (the first person to ever receive a PhD in electronic music, who has 3D printed reconstructions of the earliest known instruments and used them in his set!).

(We also have a Facebook Group, if you would like to join the conversation.)

Music Video: "Lambent" w/ 320 fps Bubble Glory

Download this album on Bandcamp

Stream this album on Spotify

1/8th speed bubble awesomeness I shot on site at Highberry Music Festival to the music I improvised last fall for Aubrey Marcus' fundraiser for the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies.

Performed and recorded live in one take on guitar, voice, and effects. Slow motion video shot on a Samsung Galaxy S5 at Highberry Festival (Mulberry Mountain, Arkansas), June 2016.

If you're like me, you will appreciate how well the music syncs up with the iridescent shimmering mystique of evanescent membranes, rippling as they float through summer air...

"How To Live in the Future" at Metapsychosis Journal

My first piece for an awesome new web magazine, Metapsychosis.  Their roster of contributors is out of this world – definitely worth some exploration if you like reading that expands your consciousness.

"When I attempt to visualize 'the future' as I learned to think of it in childhood, I see the image of a silvery, metallic, shifting sphere – presumably, the boundary of some 4D portal casting shadows into the mere three dimensions that my pitiable primate eyes can see. Whether this is my enculturated mind presenting something physics experts tell me is the probable appearance of a window into other times; or whether it’s a genuine prophetic third-eye vision of the portal through which we can gaze at all of our innumerable futures; or it’s allegory and the image represents the Noöspheric nanotech that wraps our planet in a skin of thinking mercury; or I am actually observing my own body from the point of view of someone living in the future, someone who has cybernetic eyes and sees the spherical magnetic field projected by my heart, I do not know. Perhaps it’s all of these." 

Read the whole piece here.

New Third Eye Drops Podcast with Erik Davis

Another superb conversation with Third Eye Drops Podcast and Erik Davis – probably my favorite so far – in which we somehow connected augmented reality and Pokémon GO, the evolutionary benefits (and lurking evil) of cuteness, whether we should resist the torrent of technological innovation (and whether we even can), the promise and peril of inventing our own realities, and some exciting evidence that we can create quantum entangled brain states between gamers – technologically facilitated telepathy!

If you don't know Erik Davis' amazing work, or haven't heard my handful of appearances on his own awesome podcast Expanding Mind (here and here), this is a great place to start.

Unreleased Album as Perk for Ayahuasca Reader Campaign

My friends at Synergetic Press have done it again; they've put together a world-class compilation of essays and articles on a Very Important Topic.  Here's the link to buy this book and score a free copy of Duende, my unreleased electric guitar live set from Sonic Bloom's SolPurpose Visionary Art Academy.  (These were the tunes I played for Martina Hoffmann, Randal Roberts, and Morgan Mandala's visionary art class during the live painting session – very different music than what I'm used to coming out of me.)  A few words on this book:

The high-technology media ecosystems of our future, and the people we will become to live in them, have more in common with the spirit-infused Amazon than the abstract conceptual realities we inhabited as moderns. It is no surprise, but poetry, that ayahuasca shows up now to take the world stage and help us navigate these nascent, tangled and mysterious collective spaces: a perfect teacher for an age in which we have to learn that we (and our artifacts) are something Earth is doing – and "intelligence" (be it animal, or vegetable, or mineral) is everywhere around us. 

Anyone committed to inhabiting a future of AI, mesh networks, bioengineering, solar power, neuromarketing, and other tech-assisted wizardry should sink their roots into this awesome book and draw as much of its deep wisdom as they can – because the curanderos, daring scientists, and visionary artists represented here are voices in the vanguard helping us to understand what it will really mean to be an Earthling in the years to come.

Buy Ayahuasca Reader & get Duende for free, because I want to see this book succeed.

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