New Leggings & Cases // Three New Paintings // New Unplugged Music Video // Custom Violins & Flatbills // Essays on the Microbiome, Necromancy // Another Guest Spot on the Midwest Real Podcast

"Sharing, not secrecy, is the means by which we create infinite wealth. The wealth of networks, the wealth of knowledge, revolutionary wealth - all can create a nonzero win-win Earth that works for one hundred percent of humanity."

– Robert David Steele (former CIA agent)

“All changes, even the most longed for, have their melancholy; for what we leave behind us is a part of ourselves; we must die to one life before we can enter another.”

– Anatole France (Nobel Prize-winning poet)

Merry Christmas, everyone!  After six months of experimentation, I've decided to make this a weekly (shorter, easier, more digestible) newsletter starting in 2016.  That way you won't be overwhelmed with an absurd abundance of new music, art, and writing (like you'll see below).  Here's to a smarter generosity, a less demanding way to stay in touch.  

That said, I hope you reap the full rewards of this last monster update.  Thank you so much for letting me give of myself to you in this way – some of you for eight years, now!  We'll keep learning and growing together.

For those of you with less time, here're highlights:  I finally have a complete on-demand merchandise store setup at Society6; I just quietly made all 71 of my musical recordings at Bandcamp entirely free (including several previously unreleased live albums); my sweetest and most poignant song so far is up on Youtube; and three new paintings showing off a more refined technique are now live at my online print store.  All of that and more, below.

I hope you have the greatest Christmas ever, and that you get laid by angels right as everyone is cheering and the clock rolls over to a New Year.  Much love and many blessings!

New Words (Writing Archive)

My second appearance on the Midwest Real Podcast, in which host Michael Phillip and I discuss the shifting nature of "reality" in the Internet Age, and I outline for the first time ever my belief that the 21st Century is best understood as a species-wide collective psychedelic experience.

My second article for the Body Hacking Conference Blog, in which I playfully undermine the idea that our bodies are computers with a visionary jaunt into the future of "hacking" the microbiological ecosystems in our guts.

My latest short blog for Reality Sandwich, in which I introduce you to the awesome artistry of my friend Void Denizen, whose work brilliantly confuses comedy, rap, and necromancy.

New Song (Music Archive)

Watch on Youtube // Watch on Vimeo // Watch on Facebook

A ballad for my friend, fellow songwriter Luke Redfield, in his style, about the silver lining to be found in getting stuck, in losing something beautiful, in having to sit still and wait for life to change:

Heard that you were unwound

know you have found your inspiration

closer to the ground

than you prefer to glide.

But all your pretty sounds

come from a place of desperation

the space between the howl

and the Moon inside...

All that open road is only a reflection

of the freedom that you know is in your mind.

Hard to go there when you know it's a projection.

So much easier to play it out...

I'm sorry about your car.

Sorry about your sweet Australian.

Glad to know that you can play guitar again.

It seems to all come down

at once, confounding explanation.

Feet and wings both bound

right when you need to fly.

But when you're not allowed

to get around, the revelations

come through clear and loud

and the soul grows wide.

All that time out turns you inward for reflection

and confinement makes a diamond in your eye.

You won't find it chasing highway for the legend

so I'm glad you had to sit one out.

I'm sorry about your car.

Sorry about your sweet Australian.

Glad to know that you can play guitar again.

The story of all your scars

deserve the songs you've earned by failing.

Glad to know that you can play guitar again.

New Paintings (Gallery of Available Pieces)

"Diaspora"
24"x32" - oil and acrylic pens on masonite

original painting available – email me with inquiries

Buy 11"x17" signed poster prints for $20 each

Painted at:
2015-12-19 at The Gatsby (Austin, TX) to
The Lagoons, Kindaheart, Muddy Flowers, Caterwaulrus, 365colours

I used to paint one piece a night, back when I started making art at concerts. I enjoyed the looseness, dynamism, energy, and flow of pieces that I knew I had to finish then and there. But somewhere in the last few years, I started hanging out with "real" visionary painters, folks who painted all day every day and logged 150 hours in their average works. How am I supposed to look legit next to these people if I don't start putting way more work into each new live painting? So, I left the "start-and-finish-in-one-evening" pieces on the ground behind me (metaphorically).

Flash forward to this year, and I'm nostalgic for the rapid failure and success that comes with cranking out new pieces fast-as-possible. Plus, I happen to be reading some far-future, totally insane posthuman sci-fi by the great John C. Wright at the moment, and his books have a way of focusing on loooooong-term visionary space migration projects, building spherical space stations around stars, "sophotransmogrifying" all rocks and ice in a solar system into thinking matter...that kind of thing. It really tickles me in the part obsessed with what comes after our imaginary line between machines and living things has been erased once and for all: a minded, living, and responsive world where weapons have opinions, people are technology, the ships that carry us between the stars are ecosystems, more like gods than rockets, and each new invention glorifies what we call "nature" now, instead of being held against it.

Linked thematically to many earlier pieces, this one is another love song to the emptiness of space, which life would fill (indeed, it probably already has) if given any chance to do so. Think of the lusty yearning to explore the vast frontier...now lay that feeling over images of coral spawning under the Full Moon...

"Carnotaurus Wakes Up In A Very Unfamiliar Place"
36"x24" - oil and acrylic pens on canvas

original painting available – email me with inquiries

Buy 11"x17" signed poster prints for $20 each

Painted at:
2015-11-04 Empire Control Room (Austin, TX) to Hullabaloo, Detox Unit, Gaddy, and Fractālà
2015-11-07 Calavera Corazon, 2 GypsyZ Art (Kerrville, TX)
2015-11-11 Home Studio (Austin, TX)
2015-12-02 Empire Control Room to Digital Rust, Somatoast, InertG, Twips
2015-12-11 Empire Control Room to Blockhead, Botany, Bonus Junk, Lefty

The premise: is there is a "bardo" realm between lives for human beings, why not for dinosaurs? The Tibetan Book of the Dead talks about how when your body fades away at the moment of death, you are plunged into a bizarre and turbulent world of mental reactions. I can only imagine the surprise our protagonist must be feeling to discover herself in the whirling kaleidoscopic hyperspace of the after-and-before-life...

"Cosmic Giggle"
24"x24" - oil and acrylic paint pens on four canvases

original painting available – email me with inquiries

Buy 11"x17" signed poster prints for $20 each

A studio painting of what I imagine God's crystalline internal organs must jiggle like when humans do our ordinary silly human things like fall in love and kill each other...

In addition to this month's live paintings, I also painted violins #003 & #004, and hats #180 and #181:

Apparently it is my lot in life to craft or reimagine magic sigils people use to shield and ornament their withered-but-recuperating pineal glands.  If you would like my help re-framing this time-honored gangsta tradition as the PC alternative to wearing indigenous head-dresses to music festivals (or the politically incorrect alternative for anyone attending a funeral), just let me know what's crying to express itself through you...

New Designs (Full Collection)

You asked, I answered: here are seven spankin' new leggings for all of your cyborg Shakti cosplay shenanigans!  Make a memorable exit in these lovely all-over printed, six panel polyester leggings, which will let you move and keep you warm and wick the sweat and turn heads.  If you order a pair, tag me in a Facebook or Instagram post about them and I'll share your picture!

But that's only one facet of the many-sided jewel that is my new Society6 design collection.  You'll also find phone cases, clocks, travel mugs, fleece blankets, t-shirts, and innumerable other made-on-demand items upon which you can blow your lottery winnings, legal settlements, and 401K.  I get 10% of what you spend.  Yay!

Upcoming Events (Full Calendar)

A few of my first major dates in 2016, with plenty more in store!  I hope to see you out there...

New Live Recordings, Custom Hats, Impulse Festival Collab

"For the first time in human evolution, the individual life is long enough, and the cultural transformation swift enough, that the individual mind is now a constituent player in the global transformation of human culture."– William Irwin Thompson

"I would argue that the presence of human civilization on this planet is the strongest evidence we have that matter and organizational processes are about to make some kind of a leap to a new order of being.  What history is, is the 25,000 year transition zone.  Before you enter the zone, you're an animal.  After you leave the zone, you're a god."
– Terence McKenna

This week:  I have not one, but two new live recordings for you, made before I left on this summer's epic tour.  Also, some fresh concert footage; a couple of new painted hats; a cool collaboration from Impulse Festival; and a new essay that goes deeper than ever into last spring's ayahuasca-inspired transpersonal revelations.  Enjoy!

An Aria for ABIA: live at Austin Airport

 

Austin, Texas:  The one place I have ever been with FOUR live music stages in its airport!  Unless you're arriving or departing there on August 3rd, you'll miss my next gig in the terminal – but I recorded the last one, and smuggled it out through the security checkpoint so you could have it for free (or support my tomfoolery with a tour-enabling donation).

There's something ethereal-chrome-military-vacation about the airport that makes it a bizarre place to perform – not to mention the fact that I'm technically there on government contract and was warned I might be "too weird" for the daytime clientele of Ray Benson's Roadhouse Bar & Grill.  (Cue laugh track!)

Luckily, they were wrong.  As I was packing up after the show, a man come up to me and shook my hand.  "I grew up here,' he said, "but now I live in L.A.  I come back as much as I can, and THIS is why."

So enjoy the intricate fingerstyle guitar and melismatic melodies...scroll down for weirder, instrumental fare.

"Flight of Fancy" live at ABIA, 2012.04.17

Watch on Youtube

The first of six live concert footage videos from my show at the airport.  I'll be releasing a new one every week on my youtube channel until they're all online for the world to see...this first one is a "cyberacoustic" guitar loopscape I improvised to the theme of "air travel."  If you get this blog by email and the video doesn't show up, you can watch it here.

Hypnotoad: A Cyberacoustic Midnight Meditation [EP]

After the sweetest coercion from my roommates to throw them a private concert, I finally plugged in all of my gear at a surreal hour one balmy spring night and improvised a twenty-minute instrumental appetizer set to ride out our sleep-deprived strangeness.  Trancier and more hypnotic than my usual fare – and best for late-night listening, obviously...

(Thanks to visual alchemist Chaeli Cardenas for the dope watercolor frog cover art!)

Ode To A Paradigm Shift, Part Five:
Resonance, Connection, Reincarnation

From the latest installment in my serial essay on the changing nature of self and reality in our age of transition:

"I know many people for whom the memory of future events are occurring more and more frequently in dreams. These experiences of foreign places, people, and events are initially ignored; unfamiliar, we have no reason to remember them until a year or two later, when we’re sitting there and suddenly the pieces fit, and we’re hanging out with people we didn’t know a year ago, in a place we hadn’t visited a year ago, and of course we had no reason to recognize this as the memory of something that had yet to occur – but there it is nonetheless."  Read more...

If the spirit moves you, feel free to join the conversation this kindled on my FB profile.

Impulse Festival Collaboration

Like/Comment/Share on FB

Untitled On-Site Live Art Gallery Collaboration, 2012.06.16 – 17

w/ Andy Reed, Stephen Wells, Christian Jaxtheimer, Emily Kell, 

Sarah Tracy, Maddie Moore, AllieSun Azura, Chance Losher,  Rae Vena,

Chapin Mathews, Andrew Wagner, & Thomas Robbertson-Forrest

...or at least I think so.  This tiny piece – only about 20" from top to bottom – got passed around all weekend, so my list of collaborators is an educated guess.  Some of those artists may not have been involved; but we were all there soaking up each other's creative juices all weekend, so it's safe to say there was a tacit collaboration, regardless.

In pieces like this, my niche is to augment and amplify everyone's work with fine details – only to remain invisible.  I was one of the last to work on this, so have fun seeing if you can tell my hand apart from everyone else's!

New Custom-Painted Lids

Like/Share/Comment on FB

My friend Justin Ulrich, a.k.a. psytrance DJ The Psychosis Generator, wanted a hat with his new logo to rock while doing his DJ sets.  I took the 2D example he gave me and turned it into some kind of extraterrestrial marine invertebrate.  :)

Like/Share/Comment on FB

After my recent Bassnectar- and Pretty Lights-themed hat commissions, I've started getting more music-related requests.  I never imagined I'd be painting a Disco Biscuits hat, but here it is, and I like it.

New Shows Announced!

Tonight I'll be playing at Flagstaff Brewing Company with my friends, timeless American troubadour Luke Redfield, desert mystic/guitar wizard Brave Julius, & live painter Chaeli Cardenas – kindred spirits with whom I just dusted up at three great shows along Colorado's Front Range.

If you know anyone in the area, invite them out for a free evening of superb avant-acoustic music...otherwise, maybe I can catch you at one of these!

As always, my deepest gratitude for your time and attention.  Stay in touch and have a fabulous day!

New Paintings & Music From SXSW, Untz Challenge, Festival Dates

"Whenever you are confronted with an opponent, conquer him with love."
– Mahatma Gandhi

This one's a special SXSW-themed newsletter – even though that week was so productive it deserves more than one!

Don't let me give you the idea that the infamous South By Southwest in Austin every March is, like, the coolest party ever. Watching as an entire city mutates into a giant convention-festival (with intricate lanyard hierarchy) swarming with corporate sponsors and starry-eyed out-of-town wannabe rockstars while I was inside it made for one of the more stressful weeks of my life.

But it was also an amazing opportunity to get out there and do it.  So I did.  It looked like this:

Which was super intimidating!  But luckily, I had friends:

That's Chance Roberts and Chaeli Cardenas, two of the badasses who will be joining me on the Wakarusa Live Art Team this year.  With them and my friend, songwriter Luke Redfield, SXSW felt that much more like an insane week-long slumber party.

Anyway, I'll start you off with a couple of videos of my cyberacoustic live electronica - first, the romantic one, then the anthem - from my set with Luke at Hole In The Wall on March 13th.  I was busy rocking out, oblivious to the fact that at that exact moment, I was getting a parking ticket.  They'll make for good reading music while you absorb the rest of this newsletter.  (If you can't watch them from your email, try reading this on my website.)

Okay, so you're grooving on that, hopefully...time to hit you with this:

People, I am ordinarily a give-everything kind of guy.  I really only ask for help when the stakes are nuts.  And right now they are!  So I've made this another opportunity to give...vote for me in The Untz Challenge and then let me know – I'll hook you up with a free copy of my best cyberacoustic guitar album yet:

Help me play at

Summer Camp, Wakarusa, Sonic Bloom, & Electric Forest!

"If you are like us, then [in you] lies a yearning to discover something DIFFERENT and new, something that floors you, something that moves you, something that gets you excited to go home and download everything of theirs available online and to tell all of your friends about it...Michael Garfield could do that for us this summer."

– Sparkleberry Lane (interview link)

I'm now a nailbiting third place out of 100 in this national vote!  There's some stiff competition, but I know I can win this with the support of all of the people I've inspired in some way over the years.  (Hopefully that includes anyone reading this!  If not, please tell me what I can do better.)

You can listen to the track I submitted here.  Thanks in advance to anyone else who is willing to donate a whole minute of their time to help me out.  :)

And to be clear, I'm not just in this for me. I'll use my opportunity to invite hoopers, live painters, and other performers on stage with me. Success is supposed to be shared!  So please, vote.

SXSW Live Art Explosion!

And now, onto two of my favorite live paintings yet.  Because each piece was my constant companion through every waking hour for days, through the madness...

They're huge, so be sure to right-click the pictures for a better look.

Parallel Realities

30"x30" - paint markers on stretched canvas

original painting for sale – comment / declare interest on fb

11"x17" prints for sale – $20 + $5 s/h – email me to order one

Painted at:

2012 03 09 St Elmo's Studio - CODEX, The DMT RMX Party

(Sorne, Birds of Paradise, Something Fiction, Skytree, The Wave Farmers)

03 12 The ND (Eliot Lipp, Robot Koch, B. Bravo w/ Starship Connection)

03 13 Hole in the Wall (Luke Redfield, Rogue Valley)

03 13 Ruta Maya (Ocote Soul Sounds, Afrolicious, Ursula 1000 ft. MS.G, Cilantro Boombox, Hard Proof Afrobeat)

03 14 Stubb's (outside the venue, at the creek) (Fiona Apple)

03 14 Pure Lounge (Various Austin DJs)

03 14 Club DeVille (Tycho, Matthew Dear)

03 11 & 15 Studio

For the DMT RMX party that kicked off my first SXSW, I remixed two earlier paintings – "Many Worlds" & "Sound Pond"  – and ended up with something appropriately evocative of both a rippling pond surface and a cross-section of oceanic jasper, micro-universes captured in each pore.  It was a strange night, on the verge of spring only to be suddenly overwhelmed with torrential winter rains...the streets flooded, my car in amphibious mode on the way to the gig...hence the aqueous vibe of this piece.

For those of you unfamiliar with the DMT RMX project, it's an effort by my friend Mitch Schultz, director of the documentary, DMT: The Spirit Molecule.  He collected over 100 hours of interview footage for a one-hour film, and decided to release the rest of it into the Creative Commons so other film-makers and artists could remix it as they please – into their own docs, or music, or whatever.

It's a total pleasure to have connected to Mitch when I moved to Austin and to have been a part of their amazing launch party – you can find two of the tracks I played at that concert on my latest album.  Should give you an idea of just how intense that party was.

Right-click to view the process:

Right-click to view the detail:

Rainbow Dragons

24"x36" - paint markers on stretched canvas

original painting for sale – comment / declare interest on fb

11"x17" prints for sale – $20 + $5 s/h – email me to order one

Painted at:

2012 03 16 Doc's Motor Works (Black Box Presents – The Hannah Barbarians, ISHI)

03 16 Far X Far Out  (White Ghost Shivers, The Trim, Tea Leaf Green, ToasT)

03 17 Papa Tino's (Luke Redfield)

03 23 Flamingo Cantina (Weston Wimberly, Dak Androyd, ToasT)

It's the year of the dragon over in Asia...and I'm totally feelin' it.  After a week of sleep deprivation and bad traffic, something adrenal was welling up inside me – something fierce – and it erupted in this convergence of my paleontology training and my love for fantasy creatures.  Seeing as I didn't grow up to design movie monsters like I suspected I might, here we are living an alternate-universe approximation.

Not to mention that the Archangel Michael is always depicted slaying The Serpent, frequently depicted in dragon form, and drawing dragons is an integrative act for me, a resolution of my inner conflict between the spiritual and animal dimensions of my being – a marriage of the brain stem and prefrontal cortex.

Here's a bit more reading on dragons, for the magically inclined.

Right-click to view the process:

Right-click to view the detail:

 Other Festival Dates Just Announced

I have the honor of not only painting but also playing music and speaking at all three of these awesome events!  These are some of the most wonderful festivals I know of – overflowing with inspirational speakers and films, in addition to some of the grooviest musical acts I know.

AND they're all small – 3,000 people or less – which always makes for a more intimate environment, a safer space in which the potential transformations can blossom:

More soon, of course.  Onward and upward, friends!  Conquer your opponents with love...

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.

Luke Redfield's Folk Mysticism and Mystic Folk

I've always been ambivalent to folk music, because for so many it's a shelter in the comforting conventions of the past – an escape from the buzzing confusion of modern life in the platitudes and tired imagery of yesteryear. Folk is too frequently a narrow answer to broader questions, the musical equivalent of quoting Scripture to someone asking for advice on open relationships.

On the one hand, I too feel in over my head, and admire the urge to return to something simpler, something most of us understand as "behind" us in time. On the other hand, we can't turn this car around – in the words of Winston Churchill, "When you're going through Hell, keep going." The way out isn't back, it's through. The big questions deserve equally big answers – or, at least, an honest admission of their tremendous and terrifying unansweredness. The mystery of life isn't going away...and more and more, I find deeper solace in acknowledging this than by burying my head in familiar sand.

Broadly speaking, folk music's recent evolutions haven't brought the genre any closer – neo-folk and anti-folk drape themselves in old clothes but either indulge in absurd over-the-top romanticism, wooly pagan freakishness, or insensible deconstructed hipster chic.

Anyway, folk music, like every other genre, is merely a vehicle. If Matisyahu can use rap and reggae to preach the principles of his Jewish Orthodoxy, and Ween can write country tunes that spin out into vulgar surrealism, there is no reason why someone can't offer real depth through the idioms of folk music. And every once in a while, I get to rejoice at finding someone who does just that.

Luke Redfield is one such artist. His earnest, half-broken voice and slow-jangling acoustic guitar nestle quite naturally into the crook of folk's timeless and popular constitution. The plodding, mellow roll of a trap kit doesn't exactly herald visionary songwriting. If I hadn't read the words before I'd heard the music, I might have missed it. But there it is: a wonder at the immeasurable grandeur of it all, a blushing laugh at impermanence and the silly expectations of our brief human lives, even a few daring moments when capital-M Mystery gets called out into the street for a staring contest.

Co-author of a guru-themed cookbook, Cooking With Sages – in which vegetarian recipes are paired with paintings and cocktail napkin bios of various 20th Century enlightened masters – Redfield's a committed scholar-practitioner of the world's wisdom traditions. And it shows in the music; as a songwriter, he's has taken folk's humble yearning for transcendence and ridden it to the stars. Fire Mountain, 2008's rehearsal album for this summer's forthcoming LP, opens with the unyielding-yet-empathetic "Silent Afternoon," practically a tract from the missing Folk Sutra, in which listeners are challenged to "strip that which defines you...an illusion, like the setting sun," and asked, "Would the guitar make a sound if I was not here to strum?"

Excuse me, what? Zen koans in a four-chord rambler? I want to take a minute here to reprint the lyrics from this number verbatim, just to be clear:

There’s no finger, there’s no moon
No whale, no harpoon
Can you hear the voices calling on a silent afternoon?
There’s no hand, there’s no gun
No slayer, no slayed one
Would the guitar make a sound if I was not here to strum?
There’s no body, there’s no soul
No candidate, no poll
No presidency, no kingship – for there’s nothing to control
There’s no death, there’s no birth
No countries, no earth
There is no fence around the universe

As you watch your life pass by
With what do you identify?
Can you strip that which defines you?
The attachments that bind you
An illusion, like the setting sun
Somewhere, the day has just begun

There’s no you, there’s no me
No two, no three
There is no one, but none, for eternity
There’s no time, there’s no space
No Original Face
No mathematical answer and no point of grace
There’s no wine, there’s no glass
No prayer, no fast
There is no religion and all of them will pass
No success, no fame
No winners, no game
The rat race exists only in your brain
There’s no mind, there’s no thought
No self, no want
There’s nothing that you need you haven’t already got

He manages to tear down the icons of just about every other folk song in five minutes – country, religion, desire, death, even music. I'd probably prickle if Redfield were just horny for turning folk music's innate rebelliousness on its own sacred cows, but he's clearly affectionate, even reverent, for the horse he's riding in on. Elsewhere on the album, he revels in a mysticism of the road that stands on the shoulders of masterpieces like Zen And The Art Of Motorcycle Maintenance, relishing the transparent sameness of the world that only a thousand diners and endless stretches of asphalt can instill. No self but the appearance of self, no wandering but the appearance of wandering.

Luke Redfield is speaking a language that anyone weaned on the mythos of the American Highway can understand...but crafts with it a bigger story, one beyond smaller and more recognizable concerns. In "Grateful Man," he leads us through the usual:

You came from down the road, you came right off the train
You have nowhere to go, ‘cause everywhere is the same
If I were a hobo, I’d roam this world with you
If I were a hobo, that’s what I’d do

Heard it before – until all of a sudden, he's nailing us with cowboy cosmology:

You came from the cosmos, you came from emptiness
You came from the bang that made this big ol’ mess
If I were a mystic, I’d be just passing thru
If I were a mystic, that’s what I’d do

One whole song is a reminder that "we've all got to lose this flesh." Another speaks of "how darkness came from light," and invites Muslims, Christians, Buddhists, Jews, Taoists, and Hindus to a common table at which "Truth is a pathless land."

This is the kind of music I'd expect Conor Oberst to write, if he could ever get his head out of the bottle – comfortable in its limits, but what limits? After all, "Life...is just a bed to dream away what's in your head." This is the kind of music I wish I'd found in high school, when I was more impressionable and sensitive to simple wisdom. This is the kind of music I want played in bars and folk festivals, where – God willing – it might enlighten a few people by osmosis. It makes me reconsider my opinions about folk music, maybe even want to go back and give a few dismissed artists a second listen. It kindles my inner vagabond mystic, burning to live the adventure of synchronous Spirit's wandering whim.

After all, if folk music is about tradition (both keeping it and bucking it), then Luke Redfield has upped the ante: next to the perennial knowledge of ancient societies the world over, acoustic guitars and road anthems look baby fresh. Dropping folk's clichés into a far bigger context, he's cast new light on music that I long considered stale, reminding me that soul takes any – and every – form.

(Written for Colorado Music Board.)