Michael Garfield's Love Without End Tour Newsletter: 2019

02 November 2019

The deepest things I have to say, I SANG + New Science Podcast


Here's the shortest email I've sent out in years. It's because I've just published something I've poured an enormous amount of love into, and don't want to wait to share it, I want to make sure the message gets through loud and clear. 

Happy All Saints Day!

New Studio Recordings:
transparent


Two new songs that emerged from my time as a guinea pig for Google Glass and my time stranded in the gloriously overpopulated Hill Country of Central Texas while on probation—and that I've honed over years of live performance—now have their own lush and detailed studio recordings.

If you've never heard my music before, now is the best time to enter.  This is a true return to form completely different from anything I've been doing on the festival scene for years.

And if you think you know what you're in for, I'm delighted to pleasantly surprise you...

Please Help Me Launch:

Consider chipping some insignificant donation for the music at Bandcamp and leaving a review—Bandcamp uses your collection to make recommendations and drive more sales, help new people discover my music, and generally demonstrate your great taste to the world.

If you use Spotify, save this to your collection and playlists.
You can follow this album's ongoing production on Patreon, where I’ll keep sharing early mixes, Ableton Live sample kits and drum racks from the album, and more backstage goodies.

Credits:

Michael Garfield: voice, acoustic & electric guitars, synthesizers, field recordings, drum programming, engineering, mixing, artwork

Mastered by Terrarium (Dixon Stovall & Elliot Rogers) — huge thanks to these guys!

Please contact me if you would like stems for remixing!

New Podcast Episodes & Writing


I'm going to interrupt the regularly scheduled broadcast here to tell you about another thing I've been just gushing time and effort and devotion into for the last six months: a NEW podcast, COMPLEXITY by the Santa Fe Institute (which is really more FOR the Santa Fe Institute at this point, having taken over a large part of the work of my day job running their social media, and I'm the host and producer one-man-team).

This is kind of "Future Fossils Goes Pro," a remarkably intimate series of conversations with the world's leading scientists in areas like origins of life research, scaling laws and cities, swarm robotics, humankind's role in food webs, cognitive bias and stereotyping in criminal justice, computational social science, and other fields that are changing the way we understand the world.

The show is on Week 5 and it's already charting on Apple Podcasts and has a worldwide listening audience.  I'm still producing biweekly episodes of Future Fossils but this show is taking more of my energy these days, in large part because I think these conversations need to happen, and need to be heard.  You can subscribe anywhere you go for podcasts.  Enjoy, and leave a review!


And new Future Fossils episodes, both in the main feed and special bonus features:



And last, for The Day of the Dead, here's a piece on The Spooky World of Quantum Biology I wrote once upon a time for HPlus Magazine, making stops at the work of Paul Davies, Greg Egan, and Johnjoe McFadden.

13 October 2019

An Overflowing Cornucopia of Cool Stuff for Autumn

Hey friends! It's been six weeks since I last sent you anything, which means this latest blog is bursting at the seams. You're probably as busy as I am, which makes it totally amazing that you're reading this. So thank you!

If you're not though, here's a ton of cool stuff for you that will help you fill your time with something nourishing, instead of mindless scrolling:

NEW ART

Painted live on Procreate for iPad through a visual projector behind and during the music of Minneapolis-based DJs Simon Alaya, Jacob Hoffman, and Neil David Fox at The Hook & Ladder Lounge on Sunday, 6 October 2019.

For digital remixes and time-lapse video of this piece, visit my instagram account.

Feel free to email me if you'd like this printed or remixed for something specific!

NEW MUSIC

When I recently released the Joining Forces EP, featuring my old musical partner in crime Andrew Noble on violin, I made an out-loud wish we'd have another opportunity to play together soon. He lives in Austin, still, you see, and here I am in Santa Fe...

...and then the wish came true! Andrew just so happened to be here to join me for my monthly residency at the Santa Fe Oxygen Bar. Brave soul that he is, he sat in on both improv duets and some originals he'd never heard before.

No rehearsal, additional takes, or post-production. The drums are nylon brushes on my acoustic guitar. The bass synth is an Ebow run through pedals. Everything you hear is either a guitar, a violin, or my own voice.

These tunes are spacious, atmospheric, deep, warm, and organic – dreamy, and then groovy, and then both at once. (My favorites are two improvisations – "Dream River" & "Jigsaw" – which I liked so much I think I will commit them both to memory, and keep on playing them.)

If you'd like to share this with your friends, please feel free! I'd love their feedback.

NEW & OLD WRITING

I've moved a lot of my old articles from Reality Sandwich to Medium after RS, long the bastion of psychedelic culture, has been taken over by some folks who do not seem to care about the site's community of contributors. It's sad news to find out RS is now some weird and hollow imitation of itself, but hopefully they'll find a way to steer it in a good direction.   

NEW PODCASTS

First of all, I had an intense (albeit amazingly friendly, open, and curious) debate about emergent order, creativity, and the nature of time and the imagination with philosopher Tim Freke on his show.  I recommend watching this for a model of how to politely disagree with someone very smart about a viscerally divisive issue – a skill we all could benefit from cultivating in these crazy times:




Next, some of the most epic guests that Future Fossils has ever had have graced the show in the last few weeks.  (Yes, I know this looks outrageously white and male.  I have a ton of great female guests in the queue – hold tight!)

 
 

And the Future Fossils Book Club had our fourth call, about the awesome work of Cixin Liu.  Our next call, for his novel Death's End, will be on October 20th.  Even if you haven't read the book, you're welcome to join our calls and listen, or absorb the recordings at your leisure, by supporting me on Patreon at any level:


That's "all" for now! Thank you so much for taking the time to absorb this.  Reach out anytime.



"The growth of languages into their present shape and form—their syntax and grammar—has a universality that suggests a common rule. The rule is that languages have followed their own requirements. The rule is that they are charged with describing the world. There is nothing else to describe."
- Cormac McCarthy

31 August 2019

Attention is our greatest natural resource. [New Stickers | New Music | New Paintings | New Conversations]

Hey friends! Here's the best of what I've been up to for the last month.  

Hope you're staying sane, calm, responsive, loving, and alert...

Feel free to write me any time.  Good luck out there.

love,
Michael


I used to think imagination is our greatest natural resource – until I realized that attention is the upstream, limiting reality. In our distracted, breakneck age, sometimes we need a good reminder to pay more attention to our fleeting lives.

Inspired in part by Aldous Huxley's awesome novel, Island (in which his utopian society trains birds to squawk "Attention!" randomly, reminding citizens of opportunities to be more mindful), these glossy laminated vinyl stickers are so close to indestructible that they will keep inspiring mindfulness for years to come.

This is guerrilla intervention against the mind-eating nonsense of our tech-plutocracy. Concerned too many people live in algorithmic feed-scrolling fugues like thumb-bearing farm animals? Just slap a few around town and sit back marveling as your town becomes more aware!

While I have your attention:

Bandcamp (download in any audio format you like)
Feedbands (streaming plants trees, pays in Bitcoin)
Spotify (since you're there already)

My sentimental final gig in Austin before relocating to New Mexico was special for more than one reason: long-time musical conspirator and ally Andrew Noble joined me for two days of live performance at the Developer Week Conference. Andrew was a regular at Loopers' Night, the two-year monthly residency that I hosted at Strange Brew, Austin's best small listening room – someone with whom I had developed such a stage rapport, I knew that I could count on him to jump in with me – no rehearsals and no plan – and improvise four hours of killer music.

Most of these two fire days were lost in a recording error – but the music that survived demonstrates something rare and wonderful amidst the sea of mostly-solo tunes in my back catalog: two artists who have played together regularly for a while and learned to follow one another's lead; two voices that contribute to each other, finish one another's sentences, erupt into ecstatic swells and spacious interstices with a trained and listening synchrony.

It's yours to do with as you please – including remix, share, play backwards during rituals, etc.

Same goes for this 17-minute electric guitar instrumental from my performance at EFF-Austin's SXSW party in 2018, fresh on all the streaming platforms (cover art by David Titterington):

Bandcamp (download in any audio format you like)
Feedbands (streaming plants trees, pays in Bitcoin)
Spotify (since you're there already)

And here are the six latest amazing conversations that we've had on Future Fossils Podcast – including the first of three patrons-only book club calls for Liu Cixin's Three Body Problem trilogy:

  
  

I’ve also appeared on a number of other people's podcasts, lately:

The Myths That Make UsFuture Tech PodcastTap IñThird Eye DropsAwake Aware AliveMutations...I won't play favorites, but my personal best was probably on display for Artsy AF.

Speaking of being artsy AF, here are two new small paintings I made for my first gallery show in Santa Fe (at Eye on the Mountain).  Both of them are 12"x12" on stretched canvas and available for a crisp Ben Franklin apiece (or its digital equivalent).  Email me if you'd like one or both – I've been hanging them from the corners and they look great on the wall together:



UPCOMING EVENTS



13 July 2019

New Prog Folk Single "Indecision" • Live Notes from #IPFest 2019 • Upcoming Shows • New Archaeopteryx Painting • Secret Future Fossils Episodes

Happy summer, everybody!  We're well into the hot months, and insofar as life is the spontaneous formation of order for the dissipation of excess energy, I've been an actively engaged in the metabolism of our cosmos – making more art and music, I fear, than you can actually absorb.

So be it.  May this love's labor find you on a good day, when you're looking for some fresh and interesting stuff.  We seem to have less time for taking in new art and music than we did when this blog started in 2009, but I'm convinced the work just keeps on getting better, and I'm honored that I get to share it with you.

In this newsletter:  new (and very different) music; new live art (both analog and digital); two Future Fossils Podcast episodes (on time loops and on driverless hotel rooms); and a secret stash of never-to-be-aired recordings.


Michael


New Song: "Indecision"


"Mars Volta meets what Dave Matthews might hear after trying DMT? I love it."
- James Boswell (Ming Dynazty)

"Fantastic. Like a The Books track with extremely creative vocals."
- Anthony Thogmartin (Papadosio, Earthcry)

"It's like TOOL and Herbie Hancock had a baby."
- Matthew Foglia

"A great sonic achievement! Reminds me a lot of Peter Gabriel's best stuff."
- Norman "Dr. Blue" Katz


In the moment before acting lies a void
where every future gleams, reflecting every other
every moment a uniquely blooming world.
In the space between two thoughts
where every other instant grows
expanding now into infinity
and every possibility unfurls...
How do you choose your next life?

I'm finally back in the saddle with the project I began way back in 1998: to join the Great Parade of visionary and alchemical songwriters, marrying acoustic and electric elements for tunes that gesture toward the singularity we live within in every moment.

Whatever else I do, the songs I've offered to this world in a handful of rare studio efforts (2006, 2008, 2014) are the sharpest and most polished work, the closest to my soul and sense of what is truly meaningful.

"Indecision," paintstakingly produced by my partner in crime Mitch Mignano, is the fruit of an epic co-creative pregnancy.  Read all about it on my Patreon account...

(Special thanks to Randal Roberts for the perfect cover art!)

Upcoming Concerts:

27 July – Santa Fe – Oxygen Bar Apothecary Restaurant

New Painting: "Our Lady of the Late Jurassic"


Here is my latest painting, "Our Lady of the Late Jurassic" - a tribute to the amazing Archaeopteryx, my spirit animal and one of history's most legendary fossil creatures – painted live at Meow Wolf for my first Santa Fe gallery show at Eye on The Mountain.  (Acrylic and oil pens on 20"x20" panel.)

Read the whole story at michaelgarfieldart.com.

Notes from InterPlanetary Festival 2019


Signed Canvas & Cardstock Prints

Last year, Santa Fe Institute's InterPlanetary Festival changed my life: this confluence of luminaries celebrating complex systems thinking and space exploration inspired me to move to Santa Fe. (Here's the free live album of my concert from last year's event.)

This year, on staff at SFI, I got to sit on stage and take live notes on a huge LED wall for some epic panels on synthetic biology, science fiction, and visionary architecture:



Check out this Google Photos album for all of the notes I took this year (both final images and time-lapse videos), plus the painting that I made on stage alongside Santa Fe's Tone Ranger:


I highly recommend you watch the full-length videos of each discussion, with my notes unfolding in real-time behind the panelists, because those conversations rocked.  But if you aren't that curious, here's a fun 360º time-lapse of the UFO piece you can groove to in less than one minute:

New Podcast Episodes


The latest episodes of Future Fossils cover both ends of the spectrum this show seems to span:  on one hand, Eric Wargo's brilliant take on how the future co-determines history; and on the other, Nathan Water's genius mashup of self-driving cars, technomadism, and the blockchain.

And lastly, I have finally made good on promises to drop a cornucopia of secret episodes on Patreon supporters with more than eight hours of never-to-be-aired recordings – including a totally bizarre panel discussion on the nature of time from my 2017 Australia tour, chats with a tantric instructor and a standup comic, and three other would-be episodes too weird to live, too rare to die:


Subscribe on Patreon for Secret Fossils

"If the truth is so important, then why am I in trouble for trying to find it?"
- Shane Mauss

17 June 2019

Velociraptor Painting + New Tunes + Ten Amazing Conversations

Whew, okay!  This "biweekly" newsletter I've been keeping since 2009 went three whole months without an update...
but it's because I just became a dad!  I hope you'll understand and stay on board.  Thank you for tuning in!

Here are some of the new things I've created for you (and for the sheer fun of it):
Four new paintings, one new live album and a 360º video "single," and an entire treasure box of awesome conversations.  Enjoy, and drop me a line anytime if you're inspired!

gratefully yours,

Michael

"Our Lady of the Late Cretaceous"
24"x36"• acrylic and oil paint pens on canvas

 
"Xenoscaping III & IV"
2x 12"x24" • acrylic and oil paint pens on canvas

"Fire Jelly Fronds"
12"x24" • acrylic and oil paint pens on canvas

Live at the Apothecary
(Santa Fe, NM • 2019.05.11)
Bandcamp • Patreon • Spotify

My first concert as a father, and my first concert as a Santa Fean, this show was warm, intimate, and magical. Dear friends were in from out of town, and new friends were won over from the dinner crowd. My old friend Sydney Wright from Austin, Texas – one of the regulars at my two-year Austin residency, Loopers' Night – joined me while starting off her tour of the Western States, and captivated all of us. (Her songs were not recorded at this show, but I encourage all of you to check her out.)

Big thanks to Mya Kass & Cheryl Casden for inviting us to play this show at the Santa Fe Oxygen Bar Apothecary Restaurant – and even more for buying an entirely new PA system so Sydney and I could have the best possible sound for this. And thanks to Andee Jean Ostara for her concert photography – you can and should follow her new professional instagram account.

Here's one of my favorite moments from the show:


"Indecision" (Ukulele Arrangement) in 360º

In the moment before acting lies a void 
where every future gleams, 
reflecting every other 
every moment a uniquely blooming world. 
In the space between two thoughts 
where every other instant grows 
expanding now into infinity 
and every possibility unfurls... 

How do you choose your next life? 
It may seem your heart has stopped between two beats. 
It's not the universe that's ended 
but that you're already dead,
remembering everything at once 
seeing past the limits of your head. 

In the seconds it would take to drain 
the oxygen from your exquisite brain 
a few mere seconds, all your life replays 
an intimate refrain. 
It isn't just the fireworks of dying neurons firing. 
You are slipping from the grip 
of that which kept you in the slow procession. 
Now your feathered eyelids open to behold the whole terrain...

 

I'm especially excited about the Future Fossils Book Club on Patreon and the amazing video calls we've been having about the most mind-blowing books I can find.  Our first call on the science fiction horror masterpiece Blindsight by Peter Watts was great, and our second call on Diana Slattery's psychedelic science and philosophy opus Xenolinguistics was (for me, anyway) even better.

We're doing a call for Cixin Liu's Hugo-winning The Three Body Problem sometime next month.  
I'd love to hear you chime in on our next group call!

And since it's been so long since my last update, here are NINE new episodes of Future Fossils.
There's something here for everyone: Nadja Oertelt teaches scientists to speak to non-scientists; Bruce Damer's team might have figured out the origins of life; Erick Godsey has the most inspiring stance on personal mythology; Android Jones and I discuss what being visionary artist dads is like; Mitsuaki Chi leads therapeutic mushroom groups in Amsterdam; Sean Esbjörn-Hargens is about to teach a course about the philosophy of science through the lens of UFOs; Bernie Taylor has a powerful new angle on some of the oldest cave art in the world; Eliot Peper offers his empowering and sober view of history and tech; and Kevin Wohlmut offers up the first guest episode with essays on the next ten billion years.  Enjoy!

        

“All that is becomes connected even in its difference, as being and becoming share the same confused territory of ‘feathery incandescence’; ontology itself becomes not only dynamic but synesthetic.” 
– Richard Doyle, Darwin's Pharmacy