What is the Opposite of Fear? + The Evolution of Beauty + Talk & Music from COSM + JF Martel on Future Fossils

“Ultimately, art does have a function: it’s to help us better navigate the infinite chaos that is reality.”
– JF Martel

Yay, it's spring!  Time to navigate the chaos of 2017 with grace, open-mindedness, exuberance, and playfulness.  Here are some things that, hopefully, will help you with that – starting with a few quick videos and one extremely deep and magical discussion...

New Videos

On my recent tour of Oz, I stopped by Uplift Connect to chat with them about what I've learned from studying the fossil record and what it can teach us about the extraordinary times we're living in.

Here's a quick two-minute takeaway insight I hope serves you as well as it serves me.

I think this is the coolest video I've ever made – in which I lay it plain how sex, art, and consciousness all intersect and led to the creation of the world we know.  Bookmark this for when you have seven minutes to appreciate it.

It's a 360º time-lapse live painting video of my first collaboration with my friends Randal Roberts and Morgan Mandala, two of the coolest people I know.  But the real magic sauce is in how the music and narration combine with this video to create a synesthetic, synergetic and emergent something-greater-than-its-parts.

I literally spooked myself with the synchronicities of the end result.  Enjoy!

New Podcast

My latest inspiring conversation about the cosmos is with JF Martel, film-maker and author of Reclaiming Art in the Age of Artifice – as well as the three-part essay "Reality is Analog," about the philosophical themes lurking behind Netflix's series Stranger Things.

You can download it here or subscribe to the show on iTunes or Stitcher Radio.

New Music & Talk from COSM

Stream or Download it here.  

Recorded live on 12 November 2016 at COSM, Alex & Allyson Grey's Chapel of Sacred Mirrors, in Wappingers Falls, New York.  Performed on acoustic guitar, voice, and hardware effects pedals (no computers, no prerecorded samples, entirely live and improvised).

This music is an invocation of creative spirit for the benefit of all beings. Recommended listening environments: painting parties, cuddle puddles, chillout sessions, game night, long daylight drives, and making love...

33% of sales go to supporting the Chapel of Sacred Mirrors and their project to build Entheon, a museum of visionary art.

Stream or Download here.

Delivered at the Chapel of Sacred Mirrors (Wappingers Falls, New York) on 12 November 2016, this talk – my first at COSM – was truly epic (three hours, minus the half-hour of pauses and throat-clearing I edited out for your benefit). Based on the work of Penn State professor Richard Doyle – especially his book, Darwin's Pharmacy: Sex, Plants, and the Evolution of the Noösphere – this is a talk about art as magic, and awareness as the medium of all creative work.

It's about how we got here and what we're doing and how the cosmic table's tilted in favor of evermore creative and intelligent ideas and organisms. It's about your purpose in the world and where this ride is taking us and how you can embrace the change and chaos for a more creative and rewarding life...

New Merch

I've been slacking on my society6 merchandise shop for a while, so I just fixed that with dozens of new items featuring some of my favorite recent pieces.  If you have a new device or space, consider fancying it up with some of these new decals, cases, pillows, notebooks, tapestries, etc.  ...

That's all for now.  Thank you for reading and have a magnificent week!

love

Michael

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.

MG on Third Eye Drops Podcast / Oodles of New Original Art / New Tunes from Paint Jam, Loopers' Night, and Austin Airport

This newsletter is already too long, as usual – so thanks for reading, and away we go!

love

Michael

• Email Me

• Original Music

• Available Paintings

• Prints & Other Merch

––––––––––––––––––––– New Words –––––––––––––––––––––

I just love sitting in on Third Eye Drops – one of my favorite podcasts (and I listen to a lot of them).  Shane Mauss, you may already know, is a superb comedian, and host Michael Phillip does a great job of steering every conversation into splendidly bizarre directions.  Click the image for a listen:

Podcast Notes & Download Page

Also worth a mention that my Third Eye Drops appearance with Erik Davis is now up on YouTube, in case you want to see the funny faces we were making while we spoke.  :)

––––––––––––––––– New Visual Artwork –––––––––––––––––

"Leviathan (or, Technocore in Love)"

oil and acrylic paint on masonite panel (48"x24")

About this painting / View with a magnifier.

Grab a poster or full-size canvas print.

- Available and negotiably priced. -

(There are also plenty of pictures and videos of this piece in progress on my instagram profile.)

"Kaiju (or, This Time The Turtle Wins)"

oil and acrylic paint on canvas (36"x24")

About this painting / View with a magnifier.

Grab a poster or full-sized print.

- Available and negotiably priced. -

This spring has been a total spree of small new canvases and other tiny pieces.  Lots of new collaborations, sketchbook pages, custom painted items – most of which are still available and very inexpensive.  This is the best way to grab original art from me right now, for less than a lot of you spend on your monthly internet bills:

View on Instagram

- available, make an offer -

View on Instagram

- available, make an offer -

View on Instagram

- available, make an offer -

View on Instagram

- available, make an offer -

View on Instagram

- available, make an offer -

View on Instagram

- available, make an offer -

View on Instagram

- sold -

View on Instagram

- sold -

View on Instagram

- NFS -

View on Instagram

- NFS -

View on Instagram

- NFS -

––––––––––––––––––––– New Music –––––––––––––––––––––

Please accept this windfall of ripe fruit, raw and full of juice. By no means are these polished studio recordings; these are artists who have not all played together like this, diving headlong into mystery, elaborating silence, weaving light and color into music.

This free recording of the highlights from our second Paint Jam features a rare Chapman Stick appearance by yours truly; Math Judson (drums); Andrew Noble (violin); Noah Peterson (saxophone); Shane Dooley (acoustic guitar); Matt Belluomini (electric guitar); and Caitlin Callas (viola).  

(For fans of Cinematic Orchestra and Godspeed You! Black Emperor, because that’s what this reminds me of.)

And then there is this...

Sometimes I have a show on the other side of a security perimeter, no guests allowed.  This bugs the hell out of me, so I'm glad that Facebook now allows you to stream video from anywhere.  Although I've streamed a few live events on my YouTube channel (including my "historic first" Google Glass POV footage while performing at Gratifly Festival, as well as various podcast-format conversations), it was super fun to stream the second set from my recent solo acoustic gig at Waterloo Records in the Austin-Bergstrom International Airport.  

If you like acoustic music, percussive guitar and fretboard tapping, songbird baritone-tenor warbling, and deep-as-space songs, you will enjoy this set.

But for those of you who like a more carefully curated package, not the raw live feeds with network latency disasters and potentially embarrassing stage banter, I've just added one more song (my favorite performance yet of "Let It All Get Out," with a slow-burning apocalyptic outro) to Live at Strange Brew Loungeside.  Strange Brew is a fantastic listening room, and these recordings really sound "alive" – it gives these songs, for which I've usually spent years in composition and rehearsal, something special.

Also new this month: three new (and fantastic) free recordings in the Loopers' Night musical archive with yours truly alongside Jen Mulhern (cello); Shane Dooley (guitar); Sarah Jane Hargis (flute); Ana Barajas (voice); Jason McKenzie (percussion); Math Judson (drums); Andrew Noble (violin); Art Pinsof (iPad synth); and Todd Sloan (flute).

Follow us on Facebook if you like live looping music – there will be more, oh yes!

––––––––––––––––––– Upcoming Events –––––––––––––––––––

Full calendar here with many more events.  Let me know if you'd like for me to visit your town and we can get started scheming it to life!

Giving two talks at this amazing event in just one week!  Moogfest is "The Synthesis of Music, Art & Technology" and devotes a very awesome daytime program to the future of creativity and the human experience in an era of technological empowerment.  Thanks to a referral from polymath-wizard Bruce Damer, I'll be speaking on the festival's "Technoshamanism" theme,  getting into a bunch of the issues I discussed with Erik Davis in our last YouTube chat – as well as providing my first interactive live looping playshop.  Read on for more info:

Presentation:

Technoshamanism: A Very Psychedelic Century!

Workshop:

Live Looping For Our Cybernetic Age

I'm back at Sonic Bloom Festival this year, on an incredible live painting lineup as well as presenting my new talk (tongue-in-cheek title: "How to Live in the Future") alongside some real wizards and witches.  No live music this year on any stage, although I may plan some late-night psy-ambient sets in the SolPurpose Gallery...

Is anybody else attending Boom Festival this year?  My first trip to Europe and I'm super honored that I get to play and speak amidst the international community of visionaries that converge there.

A dream come true!  I'm teaching my first workshop – and playing my first concert – at Alex & Allyson Grey's Chapel of Sacred Mirrors this fall.  I'll have more to say about this later.  Details here.

And that is "all" for now.  Thank you so much for reading, looking, listening, and all of your support!

“Polar flip-flops are the engines of conversions and suicides.  Preferred is the witnessing of the infinite polarities without sinking into the conflict.”

– Alex Grey

- "A Million Anniversaries," My Sleek New CyberAcoustic Guitar LP -

"Fortunately, most people still believe in love, and love, after all, is God's secret name.

The inevitable consequence of love is the building of temples."

– Alex Grey

“When we win it’s with small things, and the triumph itself makes us small. If only we would let ourselves be dominated as things do by some immense storm, we would become strong too, and not need names.”

– Rainier Maria Rilke

This spring, I was blessed enough to perform my evolving "cyberacoustic" guitar music for audiences across Colorado, Texas, Oregon, Arkansas, and New Mexico. These improvised instrumental pieces soaked up the energies of each location – places with history and holiness that I can't even describe, except through music. From the sacred deserts of the Southwest to the rain forests of the Northwest...playing along with aerial fabric dancers in Denver and to dinosaur skeletons in Dallas...I gathered the most evocative and inspiring numbers into a new double-disc LP that takes my experiments in acoustic-electronic integration to a whole new level.

An all-terrain album if there ever were one, A Million Anniversaries: CyberAcoustic Guitar for Lovemaking journeys through anthemic electro-grooves into hypnotic tribal ambience, cinematic instrumental rock and tender romantic interludes. It's a testament to the orchestra hidden in an acoustic guitar, pushing the envelope of this traditional instrument into an age of digital angels and mycelial technology – and after months of preparation it's finally available:

A Million Anniversaries: CyberAcoustic Guitar for Lovemaking

The entire ninety-four minute, two-disc album (along with liner notes and exclusive high-resolution fractal zoom poster art) is yours for supporting my tireless tour schedule with your donations.

I'm also offering six of my favorite tracks together as a free EP for people who dig this music but can't purchase the whole album...just head over to the download page and turn yourself on to the freshest, deepest, grooviest, most intelligent music I have to offer!

Please blog about this, share it on Facebook and Twitter, and turn on your friends in the live music scene. Word of mouth is really important and anything you do to spread the word about this work makes an incalculable difference. Playing for you is my passion and I deeply appreciate your support!

Beyond the music itself, this album is a milestone in another important way: it marks my first physical release and a new style of hybrid freehand/digital illustration. The music is free when you buy a package of the ayahuasca-inspired fractal zoom stickers I designed while on retreat at Shimbre Shamanic Center with Papadosio & Kurt Redeker back in March:

A Million Anniversaries stickers!

Two each of all three fractal zoom designs

3.5" across, printed on die-cut glossy sticker paper

$15 for the set - free shipping & digital download of A Million Anniversaries with purchase

The first video showing how I layer all of these tracks live is now online – a romantic clip from The Manifestation Celebration with Alex & Allyson Grey, The Nadis Warriors, Govinda, Phutureprimitive, D.V.S*, and many other amazing talents at the Dallas Natural History Museum (!):

Watch it in full HD!

"Extinct" is one of the six free tracks from A Million Anniversaries. Go grab it and join the celebration – the new era of cybernetic instrumental folk music is here!

For anyone curious to learn more about the story behind this new work, Matthew Warnock of Guitar International Magazine recently interviewed me about making a career out of improvisation:

GI: Improvising that much on an album seems to offer up a lot of freedom...but there is also a lot of other pressure due to the fact that no one, including you, knows what’s coming next. Do you think that this is why more artists don’t attempt this sort of thing, that they’ve weighed the options and the risks outweigh the rewards?

MG: I think it’s a more common thing these days. I’m basically following the lead of live electronic acts like EOTO, who are very vocal in their publicity about how they improvise everything. On the other hand, you find out very quickly the result is that you end up flying in small tight circles, improvising similar patterns over and over, precisely because you don’t want to explode in flaming wreckage by taking it too far out of your zone. At some point I started wondering just how adventurous it really is, if you’re not writing anything but you’re not really putting yourself out on a limb, either.

(Read the whole interview here.)

...And while we're on the topic of interviews, I just published a fabulously far-ranging interview with Shannon Clay of Evergreen State College on SolPurpose.com. It's my most articulate attempt yet to explain how I see art & science as two wings on the same bird, and to offer a unifying paradigm in which everything can be seen as both art & science:

SC: What are the benefits of reconnecting the two and how can we combine them? Talk about how we can do this in the scientific world…a lot of people in academia are very sincere about keeping science and the metaphysical separate.

MG: It’s like having two separate personae and you can’t show your friends one, and you can’t show your parents the other. You know you’re both, but those two lives can’t meet. It’s an awful place to be. Science and art are interwoven so profoundly that to speak of them as NEEDING to be bridged belies a horrible rift in the modern mind. [We are] getting to a place where there isn’t “a dialogue between art and science,” but rather both are recognized as specific strategies that we may choose to adopt in order to frame our experience in a particular fashion appropriate to the place and time.

It’s not about building a bridge between art and science, any more than we can build a bridge between your left and right arm. That’s ridiculous. It’s about recognizing the larger context in which both of these methodologies emerge to answer specific needs in human culture and psychology. It’s about moving into an “integral” perspective, within which all of our various methods of inquiry – art and science being only two of many – precipitate as adaptive responses.

(Read the whole interview here.)

Last but not least, I just edited the HD video I took of our amazing live art team at Wakarusa Festival. I am so incredibly proud of everyone involved and look forward to doing it again in just a few days at Sonic Bloom!

(If you happen to be in Colorado this weekend, you'd be silly to miss this one – in addition to 78 of the world's finest electronic acts on three stages, workshops, aerial and fire dancers, and gorgeous installations, I'm also coordinating an eleven-person live painting team and our new Unified Field Gallery in Grassroots California's 30-foot dome! More info here.)

Watch it in full HD!

Next Week: tasty new custom fedoras, another live music video from A Million Anniversaries, and the recording of my talk at The Manifestation Celebration on "Evolution, Astrology, & The Science of 2012"...