Evolver Mixtape, The Untz Challenge, & 420 Painted Flatbill

"Until one is committed, there is hesitancy, the chance to draw back...the moment one definitely commits oneself, then Providence moves too. A whole stream of events issues from the decision, raising in one's favor all manner of unforeseen incidents and meetings and material assistance, which no man could have dreamed would have come his way. Whatever you can do, or dream you can do, begin it. Boldness has genius, power, and magic in it. Begin it now."

– Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

I have some huge things to share this week – but first of all:  D'oh!  I forgot to make a list of all the shows I painted at during South By Southwest before I left for tour – so before I can share two of my favorite paintings yet, I have to get back and dig through my records for the details.  Hold tight on that – and in the meantime, here's a sneak peak courtesy of my friend Jenna Jasso:

Process pics of both paintings at various stages of completion can be found here and here.

And now onto some great news.  :)

Evolver Social Movement Mixtape Vol. I

Q:  What do Thievery Corporation, Tipper, Phutureprimitive, KiloWatts, The Nadis Warriors, Dynasty Electric, The Portal, Cualli, Greg Howard, and Michael Garfield have in common?

A:  We're all on the new benefit compilation I curated with my friend Annie Philo!

For the last few years, I've been a contributor to Reality Sandwich, an amazing online magazine featuring esoteric perspectives on our changing times.  Recently I was recruited to help them put together a futuristic mix to help support their online social network, Evolver.net.

Check out this lovely new album of music from, and for, the evolutionaries: a planetary mycelium of explorers, artists, and builders...neotribal, technoshamanic, trans-urban grooves for new humans in the next nature.

We believe in the gift economy and want to make this available to everyone...it is also an experiment in sustainably supporting a thriving transformational community, and requires your support, so please make a donation or become a member of the Evolver Social Movement.

"Acoustic instruments and organs, synthesizers and trance beats, guitar riffs and bass props; this mix has it all...
blended together perfectly for the sake of an innate groove."

- The Untz

(FYI, I'm not making any money on this project.  I'm just lucky enough to be involved.)

Please vote for me in The Untz Challenge!

I do my best to live inspired because it's the best way to be an inspiration.  The more I strive to show people the ways in which we are all participating in Something Greater, the more I feel it and live it myself.  The giving and receiving come together to form an endless braid.

So before I say anything else, the opportunity of a lifetime is before me I need your help.  Click the pic or keep reading for full details:

If you'd like to see me play for you and your friends this summer, please vote for my music at The Untz Challenge (or here's the contest page for those of you who aren't on facebook).

If I win, I get to perform at four amazing music festivals: Summer Camp, Wakarusa, Sonic Bloom, and Electric Forest. It'd be the culmination of over a decade of tireless effort to bring my music to a new audience of appreciators – and it'll be a great counterbalance, to offer my improvised instrumental prayerformances as a glen of peace amidst the raging grimy beats.

"Golden Hour," the track I entered in this competition, is one of my finer moments – you can listen to it here.

Not only will I give everyone who votes for me a copy of the entire unreleased hour-long "Ratatat & Sigur Ros in bed" set featuring "Golden Hour"...if I win, I'll also improvise a completely unique set at each festival, record it, and make that available for free to everyone as well.

"[Michael] is leading the charge in bringing a more human and soulful aspect back to electronic music."

– Jason White, aka Zympht

(I'll also give discounts on my prints to anyone who helps me spread the word.)

And I'm not just in this for me.  I'll use my opportunity to invite hoopers, live painters, and other performers on stage to collaborate.  Success is supposed to be shared and I want a circus up there with me if I win!

For example, here's a pic of me playing at the DMT RMX party during SXSW with Teresa Cantu doing live painting ballet (Listen to this on the Evolver Mix, if you're curious.):

I want to spend my life doing this.  Your help is HUGELY appreciated.  Like, "I'll never forget this" appreciated.  So please vote, and get your friends to vote...and let me know about it, so I can hook everyone up with those unreleased tracks!

Another "Dope" Hat

Like/Comment on FB

I guess it was only a matter of time before this got literal.  Click on the picture for a closer view of all the sticky details...it's not like I really want to keep making these, but I really won't mind if you want me to do an encore in your favorite colors.  Just shoot me an email...

...and of course, there is still time to preorder the embroidered flatbill I did in collaboration with Grassroots California.  Details on that here.

Thanks again for your time. Don't hesitate to write, and have a beautiful day!

Announcing "The Body Electric" & My Most Ambitious Painting Yet

"If you're really listening, if you're awake to the poignant beauty of the world, your heart breaks regularly. In fact, your heart is made to break; its purpose is to burst open again and again so that it can hold evermore wonders."

- Andrew Harvey

"The essence of all beautiful art, all great art, is gratitude."

- Friedrich Nietzsche

I'm immensely grateful for the nearly 3,900 people that have signed up for this newsletter over the last three years – for your time and attention, for your encouragement – but most of all, for being blessed with the chance to enrich your lives with my work, to give you something in which you can find meaning and inspiration.

But look, guys. I'm having a hard time balancing "listen" and "express." I don't know how to fill this void, this speakerbox, this opportunity to say – but only what you need to hear. So what do you need to hear? Tell me this and I will do my best.

I'm ready to put the days of unfocused explosive creativity behind me and start channeling this energy into something that will truly serve the needs of the people with whom I have connected. To find the sweet spot that will illuminate and exalt us all the most. To do what only I can do in a way that sets your life on fire like only you can burn.

Because it's time for that. From here on out, this newsletter isn't just my rant box; it's my platform for putting my understanding and ability to work for you in the most ambitious, crazy, brave-hearted way we can conspire to achieve.

And with that, I have some things to share with you that I hope will turn you on and get this started.

..:: Visual Art ::..

The first is the most ambitious live painting I have ever attempted...you'll want to click on this one for a full view so you can appreciate all of the detail:

Going Somewhere (Tree of Flowing Jewels)

2011 01 23 Quixote's (Praang)
2011 02 03 Hodi's Half Note (Invisible Allies, Bluetech, KiloWatts)
2011 02 15 The Aquarium (O Fo Sho, Heavy Is The Head)
2011 02 17 The Whole (William Within, Luke Redfield, Noah Earle)
2011 02 26 Cervantes (Papadosio, Heyoka, Larva Ink)
24"x48" – opaque pens, acrylic, & spray paint on masonite
original painting for sale – email me to inquire
11"x17" poster prints $25 each (two for $35) – order by email
full-size stretched canvas giclée poster prints (series of ten):

$400 – order by email

This painting came with me from Denver to Fort Collins, out to Fargo and Minneapolis, and then back to Denver over the course of a month in which I worked on nothing else (artwise). It's the largest piece I've ever done, and because my markers have three-millimeter tips that set a boundary on detail, it's the first live painting in which I've managed to actually accomplish the multiple levels of fractal self-similarity that I allude to in the rest of my work. There's a quality to it that I've only experienced in states when even solid objects seem fluid and selfhood streams like tattering clouds through the gusty sky of the Great Imagination. I can almost hear this painting. It whines and whirs, whispering insect secrets into auroral night. Everything else, every zipping thought and mammalian contraction, shuts off when I look at it, and there is nothing left but the ancient and infinite truth of life, mind, and time...an open secret in which all of our human splendor and dignity, story and drama recedes into unnoticeability, empty as I stare at a foreign sky in silence.

(click to enlarge)

On a slightly less epic note, I've added several new images to my online sketchbook archive on Facebook. If you're not already a friend of my art page there, you might want to be – you'll get updated about my new work a lot faster that way.

..:: Music ::..

As I've gotten more well-connected in the dance music scene through my live art, I've co-evolved to make my music more suitable for the venues and audiences that ordinarily support music made on laptops and synthesizers. Those of you who've been following me for a while have watched as it has mutated, branching off into both intricate percussive fretboard magic built for festival stages and elaborate acoustic-electronic soundscapes at home in chill-out tents and other dusky liminal spaces.

Now, I'm pleased to announce that the transformation is complete. My newest album drops this Sunday – the Spring Equinox, March 20th – morning after the closest Full Moon in years, and a perfect time for the advent of a new age in which the carbon-based past of rosewood and human flesh meets the silicon-based future of blinking lights and loving machines. The Body Electric is my ode to the marriage of the animal and mineral, tradition and novelty.

Recorded live over two weeks at shows in Colorado and North Dakota (while I was working on the painting above...what an epic month!), it's my latest and greatest effort to redefine the guitar so thoroughly that the music shines through unimpeded by instrument. This is acoustic music liberated into an entirely new sonic landscape and philosophical vista. And it comes complete with a lush, poster-sized hi-res file of the hybrid ink-and-digital cover art I designed as a visual counterpart to the music, for your psychedelic eyeball pleasure:

The Body Electric (2011)

The link goes live on March 20th and then it's a free download for you and everyone else...but anyone who donates more will receive a download code for the unreleased recording of my concert in Sinai, Costa Rica at the Geoparadise Festival on New Year's Day 2011. It's a performance I'm proud of, including my best-to-date live take of fan favorite "You Don't Have To Move" as well as a collaborative loopscape with shamanistic throat-singer Matthew Kocel and some of the more unguardedly silly between-song interludes that have ever flowed through me.

In the meantime, you can listen to and download two tracks from The Body Electric – "Tunnel Run" and "Touring The Body Electric (SHORT)" – on my Soundcloud page. And you can watch the video for "Tunnel Run" – stitched together from a year's worth of going over bridges – right here, right now:

(If you can't see it here, you can watch it on Vimeo, Youtube, or my Facebook music page.)

Again, thank you from the bottom of your heart for following me down these corridors of the imagination and into the ornamented chambers I find there. If I've managed to open you up even a little bit to the vast wild isness of our lives, mission fucking accomplished. Goodnight, you guys.

Cosmic Consciousness & A Custom Hat

> Imagery

2009 10 17 City Hall (KiloWatts, Big Gigantic, Emancipator, Heyoka)
20"x30" - opaque pens on masonite
11"x17" signed prints - $15; full-size signed & numbered (x/30) prints - $50

I recently had the honor of painting alongside Alex & Allyson Grey, Mars-1, and J Garcia at one of the most epic parties I've ever attended, thrown by my friends at Boogie Down Productions in Denver last weekend. It took place at City Hall – not the actual civic building, but Denver's most promising new venue, three floors and a majestic outdoor balcony/lounge area that, all together, make for a ridiculously awesome event space. Plenty of corners and corridors, four stages, a fashion show, two floors of live painting, a hefty and delicious array of vendors, and some of the most lovely electronic music I've ever heard. Alex started the evening off with a sweeping survey of his work since the age of five, showing how his psychological development was reflected in a growing capacity for perspective-taking. I don't think anyone there, myself included, had ever seen such a glorious presentation initiate what ten years ago would have been called a "rave"...the otherwise insane, crowded, sweaty, intoxicated evening was still somehow activated, lucid, and open-hearted. And no doubt Alex's excellent primer on visionary art was largely responsible.

That was just one reason that this evening was one of the highlights of my entire artistic existence. Ten minutes after I started, I damn near had a panic attack about my sloppy first layer, the evidence of that day's anxiousness and confusion. But I stuck with it, and the painting ultimately took on an edgy, urban quality I've never managed to capture...and a ghostly inner glow that half captivates me and half gives me the creeps. The crowd was thick, and since I wasn't granted my own riser that night, I was getting bumped and jammed all evening. But momentum is conserved, and all of that energy traveled up my spine, down my arm, and into the piece. You're looking at the vector space of some 2,500 exultant partiers.

I should also mention that this painting was fueled by the excellent cuisine of my dear friend Araminta David, whose pre-show catering for the artists and production team was definitely on par with the quality of all other art that evening. I can't believe she got a "Guest" lanyard instead of an "Artist" lanyard. If you ever have a chance to eat her food, you had better take it. Just might change your life.

2009 10 14 Studio - Owl & Ice

In more modest news, I finally got to do my first custom hat! This was a surprise birthday present for one of my friend's boyfriend. He likes owls, and she suggested cubes...minor constraints like that really helped "narrow the search space" and focus the vision, and the hat she sent me to work on had just enough texture that it opened up new expressive possibilities with my pens. The "feather" of ice cubes on the left side was just silly enough to work, and I love being asked to do characters, which I normally don't have the nerve to attempt in a large format live context. Not to mention, someone is wearing my art ON HIS HEAD, now! Point being, I LOVED working on this hat. If anyone else wants some custom headwear, email me about it. I'd be honored and delighted.