Annual Art Sale | Featured Artist on Integral Life | New Collab Painting | New Article on High Existence | Frank Heiss Remix | Sonic Bloom 2013 Panel | ISO Booking Agent

"Human beings must have an epic, a sublime account of how the world was created and how humanity became part of it.  Religious epics satisfy another primal need. They confirm we are part of something greater than ourselves.  The way to achieve our epic that unites human spirituality, instead of cleave it, it is to compose it from the best empirical knowledge that science and history can provide."

– E.O. Wilson

I have so much to tell you.  I'm sure you have so much to say.  I don't even know where to start having that kind of authentic exchange via this newsletter.  Feel free to write to me – I'd love to know what Great Work consumes you, these days, and if I could contribute to it.  And of course, more goes on in my life than I have space for in this newsletter – so feel free to follow my thoughts and recommended reading over twitter, instagram, facebook, tumblr, or youtube.

For now:

Annual Live Art Sale

Browse The Gallery | Join/Share FB Event

Last week I lost a shoulder bag containing about 150 of my prints and a nice presentation book, as well as electrical cords for live painting. In other words, it's Holiday Art Sale time! Take 30% off the listed price on all original paintings, and pieces priced on my (seven-year-old) hourly wage are now stupidly cheap (like the only live painting ever made at NASA, for example).  I'll accept monthly payments as low as $100 if you want a piece but have to pay for it gradually.

This isn't just good news for high rollin' gangstas who want to line their cribs with original art - you're also in luck if you want inexpensive prints, pins, merch, etc. for your loved ones (or enemies - good for you!) this year. More details on the FB event page.

Featured Artist on IntegralLife.com!

Browse The Gallery | Like/Comment/Share

Big thanks to Integral Life for featuring my art this month! Here is a community that really knows how to THINK about stuff...it's an honor.  I've been an admirer of Ken Wilber's integral philosophy for a whole decade, and am delighted to give back by sharing my art and ideas.

Check out the great gallery they put together with academic commentary and a new artist's statement...

The Encroaching Tides

(a collab with Tourmaline Todd)

Buy 11"x17" Posters | Like/Comment/Share

My friend "Tourmaline" Todd Shepherd is a fixture in the Austin, Texas live art scene and familiar to admirers all over the country for his cool work on hat racks, vinyl figurines, and all kinds of other unusual media.  I think his futuristic, spacey style and mine dovetailed together quite nicely on our first-ever studio collaboration...

New Article on HighExistence.com

Read It Here

We humans have a bad habit of assuming we're special.  But science teaches us over and over that we're not.  Here is my latest morsel of food for thought, on High Existence, about how to strike a balance between grandeur and humility.  A teaser:

The accepted story of physics right now is that we live on a miraculous, impossible planet where solar eclipses can happen because the Moon is the same apparent size in the sky as the Sun, and where our orbital wobble, the Precession of the Equinoxes, takes exactly as many years as we are light years from the center of the galaxy – which just so happens to be a cozy intermediate zone where core radiation won’t melt DNA and the frigid depths of space don’t render chemistry a moot point. (And all chemistry is biochemistry, it seems .) Above it all, we live at a special moment in the life cycle of our star, a narrow window before it swells to consume the entire Earth. Statistically, life is impossible, but if it’s possible anywhere, it’s here – in this impossibly convenient place.

This is the Goldilocks Hypothesis, and it’s junk. If we’re going to take the Copernican Revolution all the way, let’s go there: we are perfectly adapted for this place because life is always adapted to its surroundings. All that hawking radiation from the supermassive black hole at the galactic center might boil carbon-based life, but as NASA’s astrobiologists are quick to remind us there’s no reason to suppose that heavier elements haven’t grown metal minds, evolving at breakneck pace in the roiling creation, linked through the instantaneous communication of frictionless superfluid field dynamics, vortices within vortices.

Sonic Bloom 2013 Panel Discussion

Free Download Here

The third annual Sonic Bloom Festival all-star panel discussion was our most diverse and impassioned yet. In a conversation moderated by Solpurpose.com editor-in-chief Michael Garfield, festival director Jamie Janover, community builder Mark Heley, bass producer Lux Moderna, astrologer Ver Dar Luz, dream interpreter Jonathan Zap, healer Alaya Love, video blogger Jordan Pearce, and his friend Ray all gave real talk on life, death, and categories beyond and between. This hour is the fruit of a truly transformational festival - potent, raw, and deep...

Remixed by Frank Heiss

Download Here

I recently uploaded an archive of my guitar loops for producers to play with – little did I know that living legend Frank Heiss would take advantage of it for his next album!  But he did.  Now you can listen to his strange and beautiful remix, "The Good, The True and the Beautiful," the closer for his awesome full-length release.  You might recognize some of it from various instrumental improvisations on last year's Love Scenes & Field Recordings – as well as the artwork, by my homie Michael Divine.

In Search Of A Booking Agent

This week in the Ask-And-Ye-Shall-Receive Department:  I've been booking my own gigs for the last six years (full history here) and as successful as it may seem I've been with that, I can't keep making all of this art, music, and writing AND book 70+ shows a year.  It's hard work that I have to outsource if I'm going to take my career to the next level...and I'm ready to make friends in some different scenes.

So if you know people who represent musicians or performing artists, please introduce us!  Anyone who can hook me up with a good booking agent gets my eternal gratitude and a bunch of sweet art.  (Here is my full EPK, to make things a little easier.)

Thanks again for reading, enjoy the art and ideas, and have a beautiful day!

New Paintings from Papadosio, Burning Man, STS9 – and Vinyl Stickers!

"One doesn't discover new lands without consenting to lose sight of the shore for a very long time."

- André Gide

"In their daily life, all are braver than they know."

- Henry David Thoreau

My adventure at Burning Man 2011 was a success.  I played five concerts in an inhospitable desert environment, including one as "opening act" for living legend John Perry Barlow and one improvising the score for an aerial dance showcase; spoke to a packed house at Red Lightning Camp and sat in on a now-annual panel discussion with my friends Daniel Pinchbeck and Mitch Mignano; and helped hold it down at the kick-ass new visionary art camp, Fractal Nation Village in my own modest way.  More importantly, however, I helped friends new and old navigate their own rites of passage, and they helped me through my own.  I wrote a short note about it you can read here, if you like.

The music and talks will all be ready to share in time for the next newsletter...

In the meantime, here are the latest offerings from my visual universe.  Click any image to enlarge:

New Vinyl Stickers!

2"x6" die-cut vinyl indoor/outdoor stickers

$3 each or $10 for five (shipping included)

(to order, use the "donate" link at my blog – leave your address

and the name of the prints in a note when you check out)

This is the closest thing I have to a slogan – I came up with it in 2008 as a retort to the argument that capitalism could not continue to grow unchecked, because obviously if we trade in ideas we can have a closed-loop material infrastructure and continue to expand exponentially into the imagination.  Or maybe I'm wrong.  But insofar as the invisible environment of one age becomes the conscious canvas of the next, I do think it's time we took a lead from Terence McKenna and Bucky Fuller, and started treating our planetary problems as shortages of imagination.  There's always an overlooked perspective that solves even the most impossible paradoxes...and now you can share that insight with anyone who sees the back of your laptop.  Maybe – just maybe – this will help us reach critical mass.

River Dragon

2011 08 24 Hodi's Half Note & 2011 08 26 The Fox

(Papadosio, Damn Right)

24"x36" - paint markers on stretched canvas

signed 11"x17" poster prints $20/1 $30/2 plus $5 s/h

(to order, use the "donate" link at my blog – leave your address

and the name of the prints in a note when you check out)

original painting negotiable – serious inquiries, email me

I just finished reading David Wade's excellent Crystal and Dragon: The Cosmic Dance of Symmetry and Chaos in Art, Nature, and Consciousness – basically, a thorough overview of the ways that crystalline and fluid patterns have alternately dominated human art, religion, and philosophy.  Wade contrasts the intensely crystalline tradition of Islam, with its emphasis on extraordinarily precise geometries as a way of pointing to the ultimate reality of divine perfection, and the chaotic tradition of Taoism, with its emphasis on the light and motion of water, gnarled pines, and other ephemeral natural phenomena as a way of pointing to the ultimate reality of the ever-changing Tao.

He turned me on to an an awesome new term:  "shang shui," or "mountain-water," the name for an entire school of Chinese painting that praises the fluid forms of nature.  To the shang shui tradition of painters, it's less important that you capture the exact shape of a thing than its motion, life, and essence...and by that criterion, I identify with this tradition.  "River Dragons" is an attempt to connect with the vitality of this lineage and their higher truth.

Fiestaraptor

2011 09 01 Burning Man - Fractal Nation Village

(Imagika Om, Janover, Ganga Giri, Future Simple Project, Sub Swara, FreQ Nasty, Opiuo, LowRIDERz, PussyMonster, Heyoka)

24"x36" - paint markers on stretched canvas

signed 11"x17" poster prints $20/1 $30/2 plus $5 s/h

(to order, use the "donate" link at my blog – leave your address

and the name of the prints in a note when you check out)

original painting negotiable – serious inquiries, email me

Most of y'all know I was trained as a paleontologist and scientific illustrator, and every once in a while I try to bring my old life into my new life.  I get the feeling, after working on paintings like this one, that I'm not doing it frequently enough.  Somewhere between festival culture and museum culture lives "Fiestaraptor," the painting I made during Fractal Nation's opening night of all-star programming at Burning Man.

(For the record, I'm still kind of ambivalent about the idea of a big-budget production theme camp at what is supposed to be a radically-participatory event...putting on huge concerts out there seems to support spectator culture and ends up being a weird badge of pride for the producers, when what I really love about Burning Man is the emergent, collaborative, collective, personal, intimate, and weird experiences everyone creates together that cannot be reproduced anywhere else.  That said, this was basically a party put on by my friends, and it was an honor to contribute to it.)

While I was working on this piece, I was also responsible for keeping people out of the backstage area – so there was a lot of "bouncer" energy that went into it.  Sometimes I had to use my longer-than-Tyrannosaurus arms and actually grab people and pull them while they were jumping over the gate.  I can't help but think it influenced this intense, roaring, guardian vibe this one radiates.  Maybe, also, the fact that Tribe 13's unprecedentedly awesome sixty-foot dome visionary art gallery was just two hundred feet away had something to do with it.  I didn't see any ayahuasca-sauruses when I was down in Peru last March, but Lord knows Tyrannosaurus is one of my spirit animals...

STS9 Red Rocks 2011 (Guerrilla Poster)

signed 11"x17" poster prints $20/1 $30/2 plus $5 s/h

(to order, use the "donate" link at my blog – leave your address

and the name of the prints in a note when you check out)

My latest foray into hybridizing the hand-painted work with basic digital layering techniques to create something that shines with the best of both worlds, this piece alloys work from The Manifestation Celebration, Bear Creek Festival, and Electric Forest Festival.  It wasn't quite a full moon when STS9 showed up to rock Colorado's most legendary sandstone slabs, but close...so I worked to make something that conveyed what a lot of people were probably feeling (maybe even seeing) that weekend, crowded between the rocks and gazing into the extraordinary fullness of theater and the sky beyond.

This is a signed and numbered series of 75 prints and I have a few left, if anyone would like one.

Press

First, here's an entertaining short interview with me about my crazy path from biologist to vagabond-artist by precocious and inspirational video blogger Kevin May (aka Phil Osophical). I had the pleasure of meeting Kevin last month at Papadosio's Rootwire Festival and was happy to talk while we ran to the bathrooms in the crescendo of anticipation right before they burned the Man...the excitement is palpable all around us as Kevin and I run from my panel discussion to the bathrooms:

In music news, taste-making electronic dance music site TheUntz.com just gave my latest album, A Million Anniversaries, a sterling review – especially cool, given it's not really EDM:

"It takes creativity to make the next step in a newer, more shocking direction, but it takes a visionary to go beyond the breaking point and meet music on the other end of the spectrum. That’s what Michael Garfield does."

(read the whole review here)

Musician and blogger Skinny Hendrix also gave me a feature on his site and had some kind things to say about that same album.  It's always a special pleasure to find approval from a fellow artist:

"Beautiful soundscapes....Garfield has a dynamic ability to express himself on the acoustic guitar and to allow the listener to climb inside of his head and connect with him on a deep level."

(read the whole review here)

...and while it's not exactly a review, this lovely poem by my friend Sofia was inspired by the album and is a kind of tribute:  "The Dripping Place"

Enjoy!  Thanks to everyone for your time, attention, and support.  It takes a planetary village to raise the emergent starchild of the human "superorganism."  We're all in this together.

Two New Live Paintings, More Body Art, & A New Electronic Trio!

“The greatest achievement was at first and for a time a dream. The oak sleeps in the acorn;

the bird waits in the egg; and in the highest vision of the soul a waking angel stirs.

Dreams are the seedlings of realities.”

- James Allen

"At that instant he saw, in one blaze of light, an image of unutterable conviction, the reason why the artist works and lives and has his being. It is to snare the spirits of mankind in nets of magic...to wreak the vision of his life, the rude and painful substance of his own experience, into the congruence of blazing and enchanted images that are themselves the core of life, the essential pattern whence all other things proceed, the kernel of eternity."

- Thomas Wolfe

In the past few weeks I was blessed to participate in some rare and truly amazing convergences of visionary artists and great minds – Boulder shows with Martina Hoffmann and Amanda Sage; the Sonic Bloom Festival Pre-Party with Alex & Allyson Grey; and The Manifestation Celebration in Dallas (an era-defining, boundary-smashing event at the Dallas Museum of Nature & Science). Explosively creative shows lead to a profusion of intense new live paintings, body art galleries, and sketchbook pages, as you'll see below.

Somewhere in there I had the time to spark a so-new-it's-nameless live electronic trio with fellow Papadosio family friends Jeremy McDonough on keyboards and Renee Uzzardi on tablas. We captured one of our instudio performances on video...I'm on electric guitar for the first time ever (I bought it long ago from a gypsy in an ice canyon), and it's a beautiful sound.

It'll be a little while before I can release the new cyber-guitar recordings from Dallas (or my speech about the relationship between Earth's magnetic fields and human consciousness), but there's already a huge art harvest to share. You can listen to the new sound while you check it out:

"Space Migration" by McDonough, Garfield, Uzzardi

download this track free / watch on Youtube

If you happen to be in or around Ohio this weekend, come enjoy our first show at the Nelson Ledges Quarry Park's Mayflower Springdance Festival!

And now for the art:

- (Click any image to enlarge it for detail.) -

Under Another Sky

2011 04 20 The Root (Sacred Plants Visionary Art Panel) & Studio

24"x24" – opaque pens on masonite

original painting for sale – make an offer

signed poster prints for sale – 1/$20 or 2/$30 + s/h

4/20, Boulder CO – quite possibly the cannabis capital of the world. In the midst of this storm of heedless intoxication (once a campus display of civil disobedience, now an epic rager celebrating marijuana's medical legalization) we assembled a crew of respected "visionary" artists – Martina, Amanda, Krystle Smith, Mackenzie Page, Jumbie, and myself – and we had a nice long panel discussion about sacred plants and their role in the creative process. Kind of an antidote or counterbalance. Thoughtful and provocative, the discussion was well-received...and I went home loaded with the other artists' visionary mojo to finish the painting I'd started. Maybe you can see a hint of their flavor in this piece, another in a series of vegetable landscapes on other planets.

Moon Well

2011 05 06 The Kessler (Language Love, DVS*, Archnemesis)

2011 05 07 Dallas Museum (Bluetech)

2011 05 08 Ruta Maya (Polymyth, Dimitri's Ascent, Jamie Janover)

24"x24" – opaque pens on masonite

original painting for sale – make an offer

signed poster prints for sale – 1/$20 or 2/$30 + s/h

Still not getting tired of drawing golden spirals and moon portraits. What can I say? I have also been obsessed for years with creating gradients of complexity, leaving unelaborated sections, showing the weaving-into-being caught in action. Seems only appropriate for The Manifestation Celebration, which turned Dallas – if but for a moment – into one of the coolest places on the planet. Thanks to the hard work of the big-hearted people at Re:Evolution Media. Post script: I finished it up in Austin, during a few days of satiated lounging. Grounding that love, Texas...grounding that love.

Temporary flashback to April. While listening to Martina and Amanda give presentations on their artwork at Boulder's Shining Mountain Waldorf school last month, I regressed to "classroom doodling" mode and went to town on the paper plates they gave us for cheese and crackers:

The Love You Withhold Is The Pain That You Carry

I'm Too Wrapped Up In Not Being Wrapped Up

My extreme thanks to everyone who invited me to paint on them for Denver & Dallas's Alex & Allyson Grey shows. I take body painting seriously – a precious opportunity to see someone's soul and unfold it on them – and I got to work on some beautiful human beings. Here are links to body art galleries for both two-night events...as you browse, see if you can't absorb the ambience of each party:

Body Art at Unified Field - Denver

Body Art at The Manifestation Celebration - Dallas

Festival season is upon me (curious people: summer calendar on the blog), which means a lot more art and music, and less time to publish it. I already have a lot of work in store I'm honored-eager to share with you...in the meantime, take care and thanks for reading!

A New Landscape From The Whole Earth Festival

Regarding my inborn tendency to overwhelm with gifts (karma/dharma that manifests throughout life in different ways: dominating conversations, pushing my little brother, smothering with kisses, recounting unified field theories): some things are poisonous unless ingested in homeopathically-small doses.

Like this newsletter: now weekly, and bite-sized. No more, "Oh God, time to turn off the phone and lock the door for an hour" posts if I can help it. Following the natural flow of things, because time after all is speeding up and we all need permission to ask for one another's attention. Short, sweet, and to the point...but every instant of time can open to a flash of eternity.

This week:

- Learning how to freeze eternity in paint to the end of expressing an indomitable innocence.

Next week:

- Promised new live recordings from the Love Without End Tour's Spring 2010 adventures;

- Timelapse video of the below painting during its twenty-four hour creation.

- Wakarusa paintings, OMG.

Thanks for looking and listening closer to your own whole wild lives, everyone – and of course, for exploring this particular newsletter when it sidles into your mindspace...

Any questions, remarks, or possibly-misguided attempts to give me money for my art and music – you know where I am.

• Imagery (full gallery here)

Finally, Release

2010 05 07 & 08 Whole Earth Festival

(Lynx & Janover, Faun Fables, Seven Sisters, Taarka, Boca Do Rio, Locura, Z-1 Project, Aaron Ableman, Makosa, Nada Brahma)

paint markers on masonite - 24"x40"

original painting available - make an offer

signed full-size giclees & poster prints - inquire

You'll have to click and enlarge this image to get a sense for just how much detail I put into each of the major elements in this painting. (Check out those double rows of gold along each petal of that sun...the multiple purples and myriad white speckles on each of the bufferfly's wings...) Its forthcoming timelapse video, two days handily condensed into about twelve minutes, gives a few minutes each to the grass and ferns, the butterfly, and the blossoming sun. There's an invisible breeze. Distance is distorted; the simple perspective forces viewers to acknowledge that our minds are responsible for sizing and placing everything, appropriate to our experience.

That's the thing about Davis, California's Whole Earth Festival – which, by the way is free, has been around for forty-one years, is held on Mother's Day, and used to be hosted by Wavy Gravy. There's an almost pornographic explication of interconnectedness at this event. We are wearing flowers in our hair and walking barefoot in the grass. We are crying for the Earth and holding hands and singing. How could I not paint something like this – simple, honest, straightforward, and green and gold and growing. Love is on parade.

I painted a lot of bodies at this festival. So many radiant people. You can find them in my facebook galleries...

New Year's 2009 Week Paintings (Denver & Boulder)

Each painting is available in 11"x17" prints for $15 each.
(Email me - michaelgarfield at gmail dot com - if interested.)

18x24, available for sale - 2008 12 29 Cervantes (Everyone Orchestra, Eric McFadden Trio)
Experiment in pseudo-tesselating stars, hexagons, and diamonds; three variations on a bubbling fringe; suggestions of a hidden gold and white layer behind and between; broad hatches as background noise; an occasional eye; implying directionality in flow. At Everyone Orchestra conductor Matt Butler's suggestion, I got this one signed on back by half of the band (a first).


18x24, available for sale - 2008 12 30 Cervantes (Panjea, DNALand, Lynx & Janover)
Play with ribbons: creation of an "obstacle scape" through which to thread orbs while teaching myself about layering; precision trial in black outlining; attempted "curtain" effect with ambiguous implied-motion relationship between ribbons and orbs (Rising together? Falling together? Moving past one another?); use of simple color theory to suggest depth (blues behind reds to simulate "bluing" with distance).


18x24, reserved until February - 2008 12 31.1 Quixotes (Sporque, Vibesquad) (late show for the 30th)
One continuous field of hexagons (reiterated inside themselves) split into two "passing" schemes; an attempt at something more primordial and diagramatic (as if those two things go together). Purple lines in the blue sections half-create cubes, and half leave it looking like a cross-section. It reminds me of a microscopic view of pollen collected on some membrane, or maybe natural glass.


18x24, available for sale - 2008 12 31.2 Cervantes (Panjea, DNALand, Lynx & Janover)
Another study in curtains of helices and bubbles, this time more formally related. Hoping to follow the festive New Year's theme resulted in inadvertently and uncannily illustrating the purple ribbons hanging from balloons on stage (although they weren't released until after I'd started the painting...). People kept asking if I was painting the balloons. I guess I was.


18x24, available for sale - 2009 01 01 Crowne Plaza Hotel & Owsley's (Boombox, Everyone Orchestra, & Vince Herman) (late shows for the 31st)
Picked up from a monochrome tunnel pattern I started on this board but left in my trunk for a month, this one's awkwardly balanced between two and three dimensions (Are the minicubes inside the bigger ones, or attached to their faces? Are the bubbles emerging from the golden void within each cube, or resting on their golden lids? Are the cubes actually receding into the distance, or just getting smaller?). Ambiguity and liminality were kind of themes for the night, but I can't claim total intentionality.


18x24, reserved until February - 2009 01 02 Rock N Roll Grill (Project Aspect, Motion Montage, Jeff The Box)
I wanted the ribbons in this piece to obviously organize the orbs, sweeping them up into a coil rather than just interacting idly - not a caress, but a grab - thus the contrast between free-floating and "wrapped" elements. Hexagons give a "trellis" style backdrop, and I finally attempted some kind of patterning on the ribbon itself. Lots of silver outlining. The artists at this show are all local basement projects that merit your attention - I can easily see this same line-up selling out The Fox in a year, so take notice!


18x24, available for sale - 2009 01 03 The Fox Theatre (Bonobo, Big Gigantic, Future Simple Project)
Varying states of completion in two interlocking elements (the flowers and orb clusters) made for a quick background that still gives the sense of approaching/receding and various depths; "plants" and jellyfish in the foreground rooted the image in something recognizable and took the flow off the sides of the board. Simple foreground coloration didn't confound the already-intricate backdrop. Modularity was emphasized. After a year of people telling me I draw deep-sea stuff, this is the first one to put representational and nonrepresentational elements together in the same painting in a way that unequivocally shouts "aquarium!" Expect more stuff like this, probably integrated with the ribbons and helices, in the months to come.

Album Review: Lynx's Grain of Sand

My first album review is for a friend, Boulder golden child and multi-talented sweetheart Caitlin DeMuth, aka Lynx. At twenty two, Lynx demonstrates a savvy that is utterly beyond my understanding - she stands at the nexus of the suave and endearingly dorky, the clever and the sincere, and has a fireball career to show for it. She's a minor legend in the Western States - a status she earned through numerous choice guest appearances with acts such as Zilla, Matisyahu, Kid Beyond, and The String Cheese Incident. With her new debut independent album, Grain of Sand, she seems ready to meet a new cohort of admirers with her characteristic cool, warmth, authenticity, and wit.

For those of you unfamiliar with Lynx, Grain of Sand might seem a bit weird: it's simultaneously slack and precise, humble and innovative. Her invented genre, "folktronica," seems to capture this specific fondness for holding opposing perspectives. Many of these songs might be standard girl-on-guitar fare, until she breaks into slam poetry and beatboxing, or until her skillful producers (Live PA heads G.S.P.) screw in some haunting synthesizers or fragments of glitchy percussion, embedding her café numbers into something suddenly danceable.

This slight twist is enough to warrant a closer listening - and for someone like me who usually doesn't get around to the words until the second or third spin, this is a blessing, because her lyrics are often subtle, intelligent, and inspiring. Grain of Sand is full of tricky little bits, delivered with trained cadence: "Above us and below us there is only sky," "Half full and she's nearly empty," "There's no such thing as forbidden anything," "It never has been us versus them."

She coopts "Generation Yes" from the Christian ministries to describe a "Movement Underground" that is "bigger than the scene," and reminds us that if you want to see a better world, you can't sit around dreaming but "gotta get your hands dirty, gotta dig for your purpose." Elsewhere, she muses favorably on causing "a riot - or better yet, change" - making a distinction that betrays her post-adolescent, post-summer-of-love sensibility (rare among those so similarly idealistic). And to my glee, she drops a mention of the constellation Pleiades - the "Seven Sisters," a celestial homebase for various watery myths of hens, maids, and aquatic aliens - into her song "Waters Rising."

The music itself is simple but solid. Her precise, choirgirl beatboxing hovers in just the right vocal range for the DJ noises she emulates, and her alternately thick-tongued and airy intonation is fabulously endearing. She raps a lot harder than she sings, and the occasional abrupt change of pace from wispy verse to outspoken bridge took me some getting used to. But one look at artist sAne's cover art for this album and it makes more sense.

His portrait is stargazing and wistful, rendered in earthtones with an urban sensibility, the right colors but a slightly strange shape, wreathed in viney and elaborate scrawls. It's all a part of her high-contrast musical persona.

G.S.P., as well as Zilla's hammer dulcimer wizard Jamie Janover, do a bang-up job of carrying her into a fuller realization of this paradox. The result sometimes verges on being too hip for its own good, when something slightly less beat-clocked would've driven her authentic and organic message deeper. But it's all made okay with moments like the jam at 2:40 in "Change," when some kind of woodblock/hammer dulcimer/acoustic guitar groove pops in and summons something eerily similar to badass live-looping cellist Eugene Friesen.

Later on, nice jazzy keys, easygoing strings, and luxurious backbeats sprawl "Tangerine" out in its chair, closing the album on a more timeless and traveled sound. And the fingerpicked intro to "Thicker Than Mud" betrays well-developed chops that are teasingly absent in the rest of the album's straightforward backbeat strumming. If Lynx-in-person is anything like Lynx-in-music, it's clear to me that she's playing below her ability - that she'll eventually pass through the low-flying clouds of the slick hip-hop front and into a rich vintage, where the true fire I know she possesses is evident in every song.

To be even-handed, I have to admit that the effortless grace in both her intimacy and bravado doesn't always hold. Her writing occasionally descends into self-conscious song-within-a-song confessionals ("I'm writing on the back of someone's junk mail"). Sometimes the lyrics don't even make sense: When she says that "Tangerine is the color of the moon tonight / It's been raining for at least five days," I have to wonder if this is even possible (an orange moon is caused by atmospheric dust, and rain would pin all of that to the ground).

At the end of my first spin, I was left wishing she would be a little more adventurous with key and tempo. Given how easy it would be to remix any of these tracks with any other, I had to wonder about what guided her decision to place the songs on this album in any particular order. It doesn't seem to carry the listener in any given direction or with a specific intent, but just floats around. Ultimately that might be what this album is best for - relaxing background music - which is kind of a shame, considering that so many of her lyrics deserve more attention than that.

(After listening to it a second time, however, I have to make a disclaimer. The first time I had it playing on the reprehensible speaker system of my car. Later, in a café with headphones, this record makes perfect sense. So many more of G.S.P.'s soft blips and scritches come through in my studio monitor headphones. The synthesizers' lower frequencies kick drum add a dose of much-needed heft, and the sudden appearance of a kick drum suggests real potential for delicious noise complaints.)

Anyway, I am frequently in the mood that suits this album, and expect it to receive regular play on my computer when I'm not too hip on whatever the baristas are playing. Like I said, there's a yearning voice in me for Lynx's music to roar as loud as her message, something that revolts against the thought that some of the most moving and urgent words I've ever read (like the "Miracles" rant that climaxes "Half Full") might got lost in the chill:

Lynx - Half Full

"Miracles are the impossible coming through and everything is possible
This is for the possibility that guides us
and for the possibilities still waiting to sing and spread their wings inside us
cuz tonight, Saturn is on his knees proposing with all of his ten thousand rings
that whatever song we've been singing, we sing even more
The world needs us right now more than it ever has before
Pull all your strings, play every chord
If you're writing letters to the prisoners, start tearing down the bars
If you're handing out flashlights in the dark, start handing out stars
Never go a second hushing the percussion of your heart
Play loud
Play like you know the clouds have left too many people cold and broken
and you're they're last chance for sun
Play like there's no time for hoping brighter days will come
Play like the apocalypse is only four, three, two...
You have a drum in your chest that could save us
You have a song like a breath that could raise us
like the sunrise into a dark sky that cries to be blue
Play like you know we won't survive if you don't, but we will if you do
Play like Saturn is on his knees proposing with all of his ten thousand rings
that we give every single breath
Y'all, this is for saying yes
This is for saying yes"

It's a tough line to swallow when the rest of the album is so subdued. But all things considered (first album, twenty two, produced by friends), Grain of Sand is a pretty astounding statement. I think she'll figure it out.

(Written for iggli.com.)