Cutting Through: Now with an Even Longer Now & More Creative Service

No point in pretending otherwise: these are dark times. So I hope the treasures that I have to share with you help carve a bright, warm haven in the fear and loathing, and restore a sense of peace and beauty to this otherwise benighted Autumn.

NEW ACOUSTIC GUITAR EP

Let's start with some music: twelve minutes of guitar that an executive at my all-time favorite label told me was "a perfect soundtrack for an autumn morning."

Mudras, my new EP of solo fingerstyle guitar tunes, is now live on major streaming platforms. Reviews have been entirely positive; one of my friends, a fabulous guitarist, told me that it made him cry. Maybe 12-minutes of your attention doesn't make even free music exactly "free", but I hope it's the kind of listening that benefits you:

Listen to Mudras EP

I'm also hard at work on The Age of Reunion, the insanely ambitious singer-songwriter album I've been teasing on this blog for over a decade. It's now halfway done (!) and the latest finished track, "You Don't Have To Move", is up on Patreon. Four other songs are up on Bandcamp, where you can listen to them all and pre-order the LP.

NEW LOOP LIBRARY

And for fellow musicians and sound artists, I just released a library of over 300 loops from some of my most inspired improvisations, recorded on tour across three years and three continents. This archive is organized into 65 tempo-matched scenes in a ready-to-jam Ableton Live set, but fans of other audio software can easily lift the WAV files as-is for use in Logic, ProTools, or whatever floats your boat:

NEW PODCAST EPISODES

I've been chipping away at a couple of paintings; you can follow their progress (as well as the drawings I've made in my daughter's first sketchbook and a colorful bouquet of other visual miscellany) on Instagram. But lately, much more of my time has been going into Future Fossils Podcast, which has become a totally reliable font of inspiring conversations with amazing people:

In episode 151 I talk with Jon Marro, one of the purest creative souls I’ve ever had the luck to encounter, about his relationship to time, identity, and purpose, his commitment to service and the creative life, and where he thinks we are in the Big Picture amidst all the chaos and possibility of 02020.

I speak with the ultra-talented, immediately relatable, and immensely likable Colin Frangicetto about what we’ve learned from our high-dose psychedelic experiences, from our extended and potentially crazy periods of constant synchronicity, and from traveling the world playing music and making art.

I talk with Burning Man’s resident philosopher Caveat Magister, anarchist community organizer Naomi Most, and playa trickster historian Mitch Mignano about the festival’s uneasy but remarkable transition into virtuality. We cover everything from complex systems and the evolution of the city, to the unquantifiable value of culture, to the strange ontologies emerging in our screen-bound era.

An excerpt of this conversation's transcript made it up on Lucid News, one of my favorite psychedelic culture mags, as "Can Burning Man Be Replicated Virtually?" Quick and illuminating read.

NEW WRITING & ANIMATION ON "SLEEPING BEAUTIES"

My first long-form article for Long Now, "Sleeping Beauties of Prehistory and the Present Day," explores five new discoveries, in the fossil record and in living organisms, that interrogate the boundary between the living and the dead...

...and, poetically, at the same time I was writing that I was assigned to produce a new animation for the Santa Fe Institute about what Sidney Redner learned from his survey of 110 years of physics papers — and why some scientific discoveries (what Redner calls "sleeping beauties") take so long to get noticed:

I'll part with the friendly reminder to help keep everybody safe with proper face masks. If somehow you've made it all the way to Autumn 02020 without one of these — or you just want to level up your style — check out the four designs I have up at Idea Fab Labs. You can select from head straps (which I like) or ear loops (if that's more your kind of thing) and each contains a pocket for a fancy filter, if you want to take your safety measures all the way:

Happy New Year! It's An Art Explosion: John Speaker Collab // Free Ableton Live Pack // Future Fossils Episode 13 // Synchronicity & The Inner Eye

“We try to be conscious and respectful of our neighbors…and yet, we MUST prevail.”

– Alex Grey

Greetings, friends, and Happy New Year!  According to the Chinese Calendar, 2017 will be the Year of the Fire Rooster.  Given my love for sacred flames and bird-related things, I'm already gearing up for a year that feels like home:  wild independence, visionary ventures, channeled positive aggression, yang creative push to new horizons, yes let's do this!

Making room for new beginnings also means the end of some things I've held dear.  Tonight is the last Loopers' Night (the music monthly residency that I've hosted here for years).  I'm painting much less live work now, and more at home (where I can join you guys for webcast art jams, like next Friday's).

Fewer public appearances in general means more time to work on my book, album, and podcast – all part of an ecosystem of ideas and art I'm making this year to help people navigate our increasingly psychedelic century.  If you'd like privileged access to my new work and the satisfaction of supporting independent art, please check this out:

And now here are the new things.  Enjoy, and Happy New Year...!

New Collaboration with John Speaker

18"x24" // acrylic // canvas // sold

Buy 11"x17" prints

A collaboration with John Speaker, to whom I mailed this painting halfway through.  He took a piece that led to a dead end for me, and lifted it to new heights. (We've never met in person.)  Check out our as-yet-unclaimed other collaboration by mail here.

Free Ableton Live Pack

Download this Live Pack

I've been making music with the amazing digital audio workstation Ableton Live since I got my first Macbook in 2004...but I've mostly kept it to myself. As I embark on the adventure of recording and publishing my first studio album in nearly a decade, I'd like to share with you some of the tools and toys I'm making for this project. So here is my way overdue first Live Pack, containing two drum racks I'm using for sample-based electronic percussion on the new album.

Both of these drum racks are based on a single-take sample recorded through a Beyerdynamic M88-TG microphone, a hypercardioid condenser mic renowned for its excellent flat EQ response and full-spectrum sound. Both slice one sample into sixteen short clips to be triggered as percussion hits (in my case with a Keith McMillen QuNeo MIDI controller – but you could use just about anything that will send pressure-sensitive commands).

Plenty more sample-based synthesizers and drum kits to come. My hope is that you have fun with these – and that you share whatever music they inspire!

(If you would like to learn the basics of music production and performance with Ableton Live, I'm happy to get you started with lessons over video chat. I'm eager to share more technical knowledge in the years to come, and share the joy of making music/paintings/writing/podcasts/anything I do...)

New Episode of Future Fossils with Rupert "Dr. Chill" Till

“I keep saying to people, this is work. I’m not here on holiday…I’m here disseminating the results from a 3.5 Million Pound European research project.”

– Dr. Chill

Our thirteenth episode features Dr. Rupert Till, aka Dr. Chill, the world’s first PhD in Electronic Chillout Music. Dr. Chill has a habit of reconstructing ancient acoustic spaces from caves and temples, then writing electronic chill out music with 3D printed replicas of the world’s oldest instruments. In other words, he’s a badass at the intersection of academic archeology and international dance festival culture. A pretty great place to be!

We had an amazing conversation about his research, rites of passage, and the perennial trance dance that defines us as human beings at Boom Festival.

Subscribe to, Rate, and Review Future Fossils Podcast on iTunes or Stitcher Radio.

(Or download the episode and read show notes here.)

Guest on Synchronicity Podcast

I had a wonderful time on the Synchronicity Podcast, discussing "the usual": psychedelics, shadow work, nonduality...dinosaurs...we really went for it with this one.

Give it a listen here.

Guest on The Inner Eye Podcast

The Inner Eye podcast is a collection of spontaneous and casual conversations with visionary artist Jake Kobrin exploring the subjects of art and creativity as well as things of relevance to navigating our existence such as religion and spirituality and psychedelics.  

Listen to our episode here.

Upcoming Awesomeness

The FINAL Loopers' Night is this Thursday.  For the last two years, my cohost cellist Jen Mulhern and I have led groups of daring instrumentalists through alternately groovy and hypnotic electronic live improvisations.  Every month we welcomed new musicians into the adventure.  This month Jen and I move on to dedicate ourselves to other projects, but we're going out in style...

RSVP and learn about participating acts here.

Painting While Dancing, Part 2: How I Got Into This

Live painting was a curiosity to me, bizarre and insignificant, until last summer, when I finally got to see it actually happen. I had just moved to Boulder from Lawrence, Kansas, where I had been working as a scientific illustrator. Colorado seemed fertile with opportunity, but I was crazy from coasting on my last few hundred dollars while finishing an online degree program and recovering from what may or may not have been the flaming crash of a three-year relationship. I was teetering like a drunken meadowlark on the fencepost between manic exuberance and a panic attack, when my buddies from Lawrence drove up and took me out to the Red Rocks Amphitheatre to catch Sound Tribe Sector 9 (STS9) in concert.

STS9 is the flagship of a recent musical movement called "livetronica," an integration of traditional band instruments with electronic music elements, manipulated as it is happening, on stage. Although artists had been playing around with "live PA" set-ups for years, a full marriage of traditional and emerging technologies only happened a few years ago, when laptop music production software like Ableton Live suddenly made it possible for artists to do all of their soundsculpting in realtime, while recording, under the heat of stage lights. Live turned the laptop computer into a legitimate instrument, and one of the first bands to capitalize on this was Sound Tribe, for which computers perfectly complimented their already-quasi-electronic breakbeat drumming and trance-inducing guitar patterns. (You can find features on their use of computers in concert here and here.)

But that's all pretext for me to explain how the band's reputation for innovative syntheses led them into partnerships with other performance artists, to augment their already-dazzling concerts. The most famous of these is Kris Davidson, a painter whose works have morphed over time from pretty but somewhat prosaic geometrical diagrams:

...into vivid, layered, and organic dripping scapes reminiscent of natural history illustrations and mycelial microscopy:

The point is that Kris D was painting with STS9 when I saw them at Red Rocks last September. And for the first time in my memory, I got to watch someone paint and dance at the same time. I showed up for the second night of a two-night run, so the evening began with what looked to me like a finished painting on stage...and then Kris spent the next three hours burying it in washes and strokes that systematically and repeatedly redefined it. What started out looking like a wall of cubes became a sprawling cityscape, then the face of a mechanical goat, then a spray of tribal warpaint. The painting was breathing and dripping, shifting and blooming, while Kris dashed in for a few quick brushstrokes before retreating a few feet to gain some perspective. He bounced back and forth in a wide stance, perched on the stage with the ready tension of a bowhunter and the easy, casual hips and shoulders of a track runner.

There was something playful, almost flippant in his back and forth: the springy rave dancer with eagle discernment swooping in to exact some measured micro motion and then yaw back out into loose-limbed and watchful bouncing. And back and forth in those oscillations all night. It was an exaggeration of the double-moded painter stereotype, juiced into a higher octave by the uptempo beats and epileptic light show. Ah: this is the difference between painting alone at home, and painting on the receiving end of ten thousand intoxicated dancers. The incredible intensity of Red Rocks - literally, built over the bones of indians and dinosaurs, and channeling thousands of watts of sound between two ruddy monoliths that thrust up from the mountainside like heaving whales - that energy was rushing down onto the stage and through that brush into the painting.

While my own ass-shaking had merely bled heat energy into the mountain air, Kris D funneled that same vibe into a haunting and mysterious work of art:

Here was someone who wasn't merely doodling in class, or cooped up at home with his canvases and cats. Here was someone who had managed to shine, to really shine, in front of thousands of people, without being a member of the band - a rockstar painter who musicians request to goof off with them on stage. Here was someone who got to play pro at some of the best parties in the country and had found an audience for his work that studio artists can scarcely imagine. Here was someone who made his living by painting while dancing.

And that's when I started taking live painting seriously.

(Written for iggli.com)