Part 1 of my Big Summer Update!
Hello, friends! Summer is always the craziest, most productive time of year for me – a time of festivals, wide rambling, big plans, and major changes. A lot of new readers, too! Whether this is your first time getting one of my updates, or you've been getting them for years, thank you SO MUCH for taking in all that I have to offer. I don't think the muse would speak to me so frequently if I had no one to sing to, or to paint for...
So here goes. In this update: I rededicate myself to music; share two sweet paintings from Sonic Bloom Festival; and link you to the most important and high-profile talk I've ever given...
So here goes. In this update: I rededicate myself to music; share two sweet paintings from Sonic Bloom Festival; and link you to the most important and high-profile talk I've ever given...
Check out my new press reel featuring previously unreleased footage from my history-making 2013 concert with Google Glass and my full-band experiment with the AI music visualizer Synesthesia! This video is my love letter to the music career that I've neglected for the last few years, and my battle cry for getting back in there to serenade and rock you, my friends, as hard as possible.
To support the soul-work of my music, I'm now offering folks the opportunity to join a small group of backstage subscribers who get early access to new albums, as well as exclusive tracks and live sets.
Subscribe to me and you'll help fund a constant stream of anthems, ballads, instrumental voyages, inspired collaborations, local residencies, visionary ventures, and extensive touring that began for me in high school, and will hopefully continue until death.
With your support, I'll get creative in my giving. I'll send you special treats throughout the year reserved for this community, and you'll get to bask in satisfaction knowing you're a patron for a true and dedicated artist, helping me inspire people without worrying about how I'll sustain myself.
Thank you for listening, for sharing, for subscribing, and for anything you do to help me share the music in my soul!
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New Live Paintings From Sonic Bloom Festival
A moment of surprise, a burst of color, dinner interrupted by – what? Tyrannosaurus turns to see the unexpected, just off frame. Is it the UFOs that haunt the background of this ancient scene? Or were they always there, and something even stranger lurks just out of sight?
Alternatively, our protagonist has waited long and hard for his ET compatriots to land and save the last few dinosaurs by lifting them off-world. The Earth has suffered for two million years' of asteroid impacts, volcanic eruptions, mass disease, and other catastrophic changes. Those who still survive will find a new home somewhere else, another planet orbiting a distant star – and possibly return, one day...
Painted live with oil and acrylic paint on a 3'x4' canvas at Sonic Bloom Festival 2016, to the music of Seied, Cloud D, Milky.Wav, Space Jesus, Insightful, Giraffage, Louis The Child, Living Light, Prophet Massive, Quixotic, Kalya Scintilla & Eve Olution, Phadroid, Tipper, Clozee, Phaeleh, Govinda, Djunya, SoDown, Fort Knox Five Feat. QDup, The Cat's Pajamas.
I already knew they were great people, but it turns out they're all amazing teachers, also, and I was inspired to FINALLY see this kind of learning space facilitated in the festival community, which has in ways assumed the burden of the University without actually living up to it. To start the week with intimate, hands-on initiatory craftwork - Music, Visionary Art, Flow Arts, and Permaculture sections, running parallel - transformed the whole event and I am now excited for the prospects of real lineage transmission in that venue. I have hope for festivals as a rhetorical device to lure our culture's pollinators into curious communion, in a way I haven't had for years.
That's not to say that it was easy or one-sided. Lots of people worked through major darkness in that class and in the festival that followed. I was one of them - and while hurling paint at this dark emblem of my transformation, Martina chatted with me on the balance of the light and darkness of the artist's vision, Giger's fear that he would die to learn his afterlife is like his paintings, my conviction that creators have responsibility to those with less imagination to communicate the best of future possibilities (as agents of reconnaissance - for all of us, like Jews in Exodus, wander through the landscape wondering, and benefit from climbers in our tribe whose bodies love to see the view from nearby hills). This set the tone for hours of profound discussion later with the future-minded Adam Psybe and Robert Jacob Max, both of whom declare the need for, and embody, critics, jesters, and contrarians in the festival world's all-too-often cultish, caste-divided, and escapist attitudes.
This is the start of something beautiful - or, the maturation of a thing that desperately needs to find a master's stance and bear the weight of its identity in culture. The festival is more than just a party, people. We are seeing the emergence of a novel structure that transcends while still including both the city and nomadic people.
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My Moogfest 2016 Talk on "Technoshamanism"
"Easily the most mind-opening presentation Moogfest 2016 had to offer – a multidisciplinary monologue that rivaled Brian Eno’s Moogfest 2011 keynote for all the unexpected twists and turns it took. This one-man show saw artist-musician Michael Garfield take a captive audience on a vision-quest through the lands where metaphysics and emerging technology meet. Make no mistake – it was a ramble, but an insightful and fascinating one from start to finish that traveled from the ancient dragon god Tiamat to the Victorians laying the transatlantic telegraph cable to the Manhattan Project giving birth to a new age of fear and awareness. The 'psychedelic century'? That’s the here and now that’s just beginning, and the more our technology graduates us to the alchemical act of creation, the closer humanity comes to confronting 'the cosmic mystery that we are.' Heavy and heady stuff, and a pleasant counterpoint to the doom and gloom of the average transhumanist cybergrumps whose future-thinking seems improbably grounded in the limited perceptions of the present."
UPCOMING EVENTS
"Our responses to psychedelic experience represent a case study in our response to a transhuman, transpersonal, or posthuman condition...a signature of these varied and incessantly ineffable experiences has been what I will call the 'ecodelic' insight: the sudden and absolute conviction that the psychonaut is involved in a densely interconnected ecosystem for which contemporary tactics of human identity are insufficient."
- Richard Doyle, Darwin's Pharmacy, pp19-20
