MG on Comedy Central / The Garden of Unearthly Delights / Martian Arts EP / H.R. Giger Tribute Poetry / New Episodes of Future Fossils Podcast

“As if there were an opening, an opening which would be an assembling, which would be a world, which would be that something might happen, that many things might happen, that there is a crowd, a swarming of what is possible, that all the possibilities are seized with pricklings…” 

– Henri Michaux on mescaline, 2001

Hey friends!  I hope this message finds you well – it's been an inspiring and productive spring this year, deciding I'd take time away from festivals to focus on my writing, music, podcast, partnership, all of the things that constant travel means I've left neglected.

But behold!  Some great new things to share in every medium – and big announcements!

(And if you are a cable TV viewer, check out my debut on Comedy Central, interviewed by comedian Moshe Kasher for his show Problematic's coverage of the MAPS Psychedelic Science Conference.  Admittedly, it's only like 10 seconds – and they cut up my responses beyond recognition – but I think it's an accurate depiction of Moshe's ADHD point of view, based on our conversation.  Anyone who thinks that I'm "TL;DR" will laugh at this.  :))

Enjoy and stay in touch,

Michael

• New Art •

"The Garden of Unearthly Delights"

• Signed Paper Prints are on 100 lb. 17"x11" cardstock.

• Canvas Prints are limited series of 25 full-size 36"x24" giclee reproductions on UV-sealed archival canvas with 3/4" stretchers, signed and numbered on reverse.

My latest collaboration with "Tourmaline" Todd Shepherd, started at a legendary underground party in Austin, Texas during South By Southwest and passed back and forth for over two months of intensive, detailed studio work. The palette and depth reminded me of Hieronymous Bosch so much it swerved into the territory of a tribute to his famous painting, "The Garden of Earthly Delights" – although, instead, a vision of the future, otherworldly surreal – not beastly combinations of terrestrial life, but ineffably familiar vegetation, massive structures in the distance, strange habitats and intersecting vectors of mysterious activity.

• New Music •

Martian Arts EP

Stream or Download at Bandcamp
(Available for free to Bandcamp & Patreon subscribers.)

This set at Martian Arts Festival in San Marcos, Texas was a doozy. I did not expect to see a UFO that night – but who does, really? It was my first sighting in ten years. Things shifted. Something opened. I admitted to myself that I have been in Chapel Perilous since then, the place where everything syncs up and all of it unfolds as a conspiracy in which we're implicated and the shapes begin to come together and we notice what they point to. 

It all seems ridiculous. That is my rationality rebelling when I KNOW that something magical occurred that night. A portal opened. Call it what you will. All this music's just an overture to what came next. We never saw it coming. Now it's all that I can do to not grab onto what remains of that extraordinary mystery, to let it be. How does a person live like this, and make of glimpses of perfection, transcendental truth, a way of life, an everyday reality? 

Edited for time and mastered on a laptop. Otherwise, exactly as it was performed, all live, one take, no post-production mixing.  Guitar, Voice, Pedals.  On the eve of mystery.

Thank You...

Download Martian Arts EP at Bandcamp.

• New Writing •

An ode to H.R. Giger inspired by the recent premiere of Alien: Covenant and a recent episode of the Stuff To Blow Your Mind podcast. I've had a thing for the erotic biomechanical horror of Giger's work since I was nine years old, and a significant sub-basement of my psyche is devoted to the xenomorph. Enjoy!

Reading Necronomicon at New York Comic Con:
So wrong, my clothes are tight
like Han in Carbonite,
might get a callus tonight,
metallic phalluses bite
vestigial human in scenes
of pumping stillbirth machines,
I jump into the regimes
of ancient alien queens
and clumping organs between
the shiny carapaces
and their mute and chrome-toothed faces,
plugged into a Hell so hot it's issuing steam...

Read (or listen to me read aloud) the whole thing on Patreon.

• New Podcasts •

“Empowerment comes down to your awareness of the upgrade that you want.”
– Sara Huntley

This week's awesome conversation is with multidimensional artist-futurist Sara Huntley, on the future of performance art and the ethics of our relationships to sentient digital beings.

Listen to this episode on iTunes, Stitcher, Google Play, or Patreon.

Check out the show notes, quotes, and cited books at MindPodNetwork.

“You cannot change the present system. This thing is dying, it’s structurally unsustainable. And so to try to somehow fix the present system is just a waste of time. Don’t waste your time on the present system. We have to start working on building the new world.”

– John Petersen

This week we welcome futurist John Petersen of The Arlington Institute into the digital archives, for a challenging and visionary chat about how wrong we’re guaranteed to be about the future – and what we CAN expect about the new paradigm (which is coming sooner than you might suspect).

Listen to this episode on iTunes, Stitcher, Google Play, or Patreon.

Check out the show notes, quotes, and cited books at MindPodNetwork.

• Upcoming Gigs •

Speaking on time, technology, and evolution at the all-star festival to end all festivals.

17 - 23 August in Big Summit Prairie, Oregon.

Playing UtopiaFest's first-ever sunrise set for their last year at the glorious Four Sisters Ranch.

22 - 24 September in Utopia, Texas.

• Thank You For Reading! •

New Album! Pavo: Music For Mystery + Future Fossils on Psychedelics, Sleep, VR, and Flow States + Interviews with Tony Vigorito & Void Denizen + MG on Third Eye Drops, Astral Hustle, Chasing Bodhi

When did I become a magazine?  Please bookmark this, as there's too much good stuff in here to soak up all at once.

(And yet, no paintings – but that is because I'm working on an absolutely epic few, and they are coming soon!  In the meantime, you can scope my Instagram for progress shots of those.)

Let's start with the biggest and most exciting news:

New Live Album from Australia Tour!
Stream/Download Pavo: Music For Mystery

Stream/Download Pavo: Music for Mystery on Bandcamp.

Stream/Save Pavo: Music for Mystery on Spotify.

Free to Bandcamp & Patreon Subscribers.

Hi Friends,

This 74 minutes of dreamy, intoxicating, lush, compelling instrumental music captures one of the most inspired evenings of my life.  It was recorded n Valentine's Day 2017, a live set I donated to my friend Adam Scott Miller's immersive art class in Byron Bay, Australia (so it's only fitting that his gorgeous painting "Feathered Pearl" is the cover image for these tunes).

I've been exploring this guitar technique for over a decade and finally hit my stride with it two years ago...this single-take, no-studio-overdubs sound journey is the anticipatory score to countless evenings drenched in candlelight and contemplation, lovemaking under stars and arabesques of incense smoke.

Inspired by the deep mystery of the Australian coast and dreamtime, Pavo oozes with the atmosphere of wonder and transcendent weirdness of The Land Down Under – but it also opened up into a set of synchronistic correspondences I can't explain.  This album has initiated something in me that has yet to run its course, an invitation into something numinous and terrifying in its splendor.

To attempt an exposition:  I'm a Capricorn, born on 8 January under the fixed star Delta Pavonis in the contellation of the peacock. Only after this was all recorded and the track art chosen did I realize that the persecuted Yezidi people link their "peacock angel" Melek Taus with Enki, the Sumerian sea goat, and with St. George (the more human, earthly form of Michael the Archangel), and the Pleiades (a constellation that for some strange reason I have always felt a deep affinity).

Enki was responsible for the decay of the original one language into all the modern tongues – the god of entropy and babble – which is weird, because the peacock angel also plays a major role in one of my most cherished books – Darwin's Pharmacy: Sex, Plants, and the Evolution of the Noosphere by Richard Doyle – in which he makes the case that by an involution of attention on itself, the psychoactive plants created the diversity of human languages as well as our aesthetic sense. Doyle argues Melek Taus is an irruption into history of a transcendental telos, guiding evolution through trans-species intercourse and boundary-dissolving peak experiences. (Read this book, if you can handle it.)

Discovering this web of correspondences has shaken my reality. Why did I become obsessed with the evolution of language and consciousness in college? Why have I always identified with peacocks? Why do I emphasize the breakdown of a signal into noise in all my music? Who are we, and who is rigging this?

Downloads include a set of links you can pursue to dive much deeper into this exquisite set of strange coincidences.  Feel free to write to me or comment with your thoughts and feelings upon listening, or if you have more insights into this extraordinary mystery...

I hope that you enjoy it. Thanks for listening. :)

More Links:
Watch the 360º time-lapse video for "Delta Pavonis."

Stream "Delta Pavonis" on Soundcloud.

Buy a print of this cover art from painter Adam Scott Miller.

This Month in "Awesome Conversations Galore" News...

I recently appeared on three great podcasts: Third Eye Drops with Michael Phillip, Chasing Bodhi with Doug Noble, and The Astral Hustle with Cory Allen. These conversations are about as different as can be, but if you're interested in the nexus where transcendent beauty meets existential terror – or how I make sense of love and art – or how to live a brighter, bolder, funnier, more mindful life – you can't go wrong by checking out all three.  These gentlemen all put a lot of work into their shows and I'm delighted that I get to share these with you.

#0027 with Rak Razam & Niles Heckman
(5-MeO DMT & Consciousness)

This week I sit down with Rak Razam and Niles Heckman – psychonauts, journalists, provocateurs, and the film-makers responsible for Shamans of the Global Village.

In a conversation too full of awesome neologisms, delightful turns of phrase, one-liners, and weird genius for me to convey it all, we talk about the role of creative media in helping usher in new modes of human consciousness – and what we’re learning those new modes might be. We finally get into WHAT those unborn archeologists listening to Future Fossils might be like…and our conjecture’s going to surprise you.  Listen to it here.

#0026 with Jessa Gamble

(Circadian Rhythms & The Science of Sleep)

This week we chat with science journalist Jessa Gamble, author of The Siesta and The Midnight Sun: How Our Bodies Experience Time, about time in the body, circadian rhythms, lunar cycles, and the science of sleep. Listen to it here.

#0025 with DADARA 
(Art, Virtual Realities, & Flow States)

This week we're joined by Daniel Rozenberg aka DADARA for a thoughtful discussion about Art in Virtual Realities, Information Overload, and Flow States.

The creator of Exchangibition Bank, Like4Real, and the upcoming Solipmission installation at Burning Man, as well as countless concert posters and album covers, DADARA has been one of my favorite artists for a while - in no small part because of how his works combine deep, challenging investigations with light-hearted play. Listen to it here.

Future Fossils Live at Psychedelic Science 2017
with Matt Xian, Rak Razam, & Terra Celeste

Link to Facebook Live Recording

A spontaneous, wide-ranging, fairly bonkers conversation that roams everywhere in service to the vast emerging third-wave psychedelic culture and its destination: inevitable, structural, and permanent transformation of the human being and our understanding of the living world.  With three of my favorite psychedelic weirdos, Rak Razam of Shamans of the Global Village, Matt Xian of TIMEWHEEL, and Terra Celeste (whose affiliations are myriad).

Necromancing The Philosopher's Stone:
Interviewing "The Ungoogleable Michaelangelo"

Michaelangelo is a Los Angeles based transmedia artist whose latest work as Scottish Necromancer-Rapper “Void Denizen” pushes almost every boundary imaginable in the service of both depth and humor.  This conversation surfs the violet psychofluid across space, time, and identity.  Read it here.

Love and Other Pranks:
Interviewing Author Tony Vigorito

How is love a form of piracy? Find out in this delightful interview I just held with Tony Vigorito on his new book, which Tom Robbins called "the single wildest novel I have ever read."  We discuss the archetypal feathered serpent, Tony's awesome real-life pranks, and why so many villains have a skin disorder, among other things.  Read it here.

“I’ve seen enough around the corner to know what I need to do next. And it’s a deep transformation of my habits, my rituals, my relationship with life, with myself, my family, my loved ones, my community…and I think it’s the deepening of the spiritual path. And it makes it very tangible, whether I like it or not. I can hide from it, it doesn’t go away. The awareness of awareness of that thing is with me every day. That’s what it [5 Meo-DMT] has done for me.”

- Rak Razam

Spotify Playlist: Music for MDMA Therapy + "How to Live in the Future" at Boom Festival + Bless The Water + Daniel Zen & Australian Psychedelic Society on Future Fossils

“The important thing is that each man possess...a wilderness and that he consider
what marvels are to be observed there.”
– Loren Eiseley, The Incredible Journey, p.9

April...what a crazy month!  I hope you gave permission to the permanently permutating purring purpose at the transcendental core of Spring and trusted it, and it transported us across the boundary from Known to Unknown/Better...if, like me, you're still a Jacob wrestling angels as they make long-overdue improvements, here's to exercising your strategic patience, feminine compassion, sacred space, and curious delight in letting all this novelty adapt you to a better world and life.

I just got back from the MAPS Psychedelic Science Conference in Oakland, California – hanging a gallery of my art, playing music on their donors' cruise, and recording interviews for Future Fossils Podcast.  It was clear to everyone how much the counterculture has grown up...much more to say about that soon.

But for now, here's all the good new stuff I'm honored I can share with you:

Spotify Playlist: Music For MDMA Therapy

Here's a Spotify playlist of the songs I've confirmed they used in the clinical trials.  I'll continue to add songs as I learn more...and if you know anyone doing work like this, feel free to pass it on.  It is one of the greatest honors of my life to know my music's helping people heal.  Enjoy!:

Share this Playlist!

If you like what you hear, you can subscribe to my new music at Patreon or Bandcamp, where I have my entire catalog available as pay-what-you-can downloads.  Thanks for listening!

"How to Live in the Future"

(Professional Boom Festival Staff Shoot!)

Last year I gave my most well-received talk yet to the Liminal Village at Boom Festival – a small contribution to what is easily the most literate, cosmopolitan, visionary, impressive lineup of presenters I have ever seen at what is essentially a "dance party."  (In fact I'm pretty sure that some people go to Boom JUST for the talks.)

It's about psychedelics as training wheels for transhuman existence, and how we can adapt to the dizzying changes we will live through in our lifetimes.  It's a mashup of the scientific, philosophical, contemplative, poetic, and playful, and I hope it helps you feel like all this transformation's going somewhere good.

I recorded my own take in 360º video (part 1, part 2) but their edited multiple camera recording is WAY better.  If you can't sit still for an hour to watch this video, here is a link to the audio only.

This talk became the seed of a book by the same name, which I'm writing in public.  You can read all of the chapters I have finished so far on my page at Medium.

Cameo in Water Is Life by Uplift Connect

A film about one of the most important issues of our time – water access, scarcity, and health.

I give a short riff in this video (at 14:00) about embracing change, honoring our evolutionary origins as fish and moving with courage and curiosity into the flow of our transformational age (instead of clinging to the familiar like clams, and losing our wits in the process).

It's a potent 20 minutes that also features clips from some of the brightest luminaries that I know of – people like Vandana Shiva, Jamaica Stevens, Charles Eisenstein, Dan Schreiber, and Stephan Harding.  Watch the full thing here on Uplift Connect and improve your day.

New Future Fossils Episodes!

We’re switching it up this week to present my recent talk on psychedelic futurism at the first weekly meeting of the Australian Psychedelic Society (Fitzroy Beer Garden, Melbourne, Victoria).

The Chinese have a curse: “May you live in interesting times.” The Irish have a toast: “May you be alive at the end of the world” I’m more Irish than Chinese, and I know this because even though we’re living through total chaos these days, that means unprecedented opportunity for wonder, creativity, discovery, and growth.  (Episode art by Adam Scott Miller.)

Listen to it here.

This week we chat with Daniel Zen, former Google engineer, technology instructor at zen.digital, NYC Regional Coordinator for Burning Man, coordinator for the Angular NYC (spelling?) Meetup, and general high-tech wizard.  We discuss the intersections of surveillance technology, festival culture, virtual reality, class conflict, dreams of the Technological Singularity, and more...

Listen to it here.

Two New Paintings + 360 Video: Symbols of Transformation + Future Fossils Podcast with Aunia Kahn & Simon Yugler

“I think there’s something almost archetypal and profound about leaving your home, country of origin, about leaving your comfort zone and traveling OUT into the world…let’s just start there. Initiation 101.”

– Simon Yugler, Travel Alchemy

On the road to the MAPS Psychedelic Science Conference in Oakland this week! I'll be there to show art in the gallery, record live podcasts on the Psymposia Stage (free to the public), and play music on the Beckley Foundation Bay Cruise, Friday night. All of the recordings I make will be made available to everyone as soon as I can – there's still a ton of music, videos, and more to share from Australia!

And now, the new stuff.  Big projects on the way – enjoy, and stay in touch!

360º Video: What Inspires My Art?

YouTube Permalink

Here's a quickie (12 minute) talk I gave in Byron Bay, New South Wales back in February for Harmonic Temple, an Earth Frequency Festival pre-party.  It was the first time I've ever been asked to speak publicly about the thoughts behind my art – along with my friends, the talented artists Randal Roberts, Morgan Mandala, and Collin Elder, who are admittedly all better painters than I am, but a little less enthusiastic about jumping up there and letting fly with freestyle riffs on evolution, science, technology, the power of symbols, and so on.

This rant earned me the title "Terence McKenna 2.0" from Collin...decide for yourself.

"Submicroscopic Blacklight Party"

48"x36"– acrylic on canvas – studio

Reproductions available here:

https://michaelgarfieldart.com/products/submicroscopic-blacklight-party

A collaboration with two of my favorite artists in Austin, Greg Pettit & Elliot Rogers.  This painting evolved over a week of intense studio work in preparation for our trio show together at the ALTernate Reality Gallery​ in Austin, Texas. All three of us have what you could call "an obsession" with the microcosms of the body – immune cells attacking pathogens, molecular conveyor belts transporting nutrients within the cytoplasm, DNA's translation into RNA – it's truly alien and wonderful "down there," as psychedelic as it possibly could be.

(In fact, in his book The Cosmic Serpent, anthropologist Jeremy Narby argues that the content of the DMT experience, and consequently all the art of medicine traditions worldwide, is of molecular biology – that ayahuasca and its sister visionary plants are showing us what modern humans need a microscope to see. Who knows?)

"Xenoscaping II"

36"x24" – acrylic and oil on two canvases – studio

Reproductions available here:
https://michaelgarfieldart.com/products/xenoscaping-ii

This one is the second in a series dedicated to Randal Roberts, Kaliptus, and Jack Shure - three fantastic painters whose influence is clearly felt in this alien still life, second "xenoscape" in the series, inspired by the ineffable neither-alive-nor-dead extraterrestrial "Hypotheticals" from Robert Charles Wilson's Spin/Axis/Vortex science fiction trilogy. I spend a lot of time thinking about how people are also places are also things and around we go, each one of us a location, an ecosystem, a mostly vegetative bio-intelligence more ancient and bizarre than we let on...

New Future Fossils Podcast Episodes 
with Aunia Kahn & Simon Yugler

This week’s guest is the artist, gallery owner, podcaster, web designer, and musician Aunia Kahn! Among her many notable achievements, she curates Alexi Era Gallery in Oregon, hosted the Create & Inspire Podcast, and survived eleven years housebound with disability to emerge more creative, passionate, and powerful than before.  Listen here.

This week’s guest is travel guide Simon Yugler – named one of Open World Magazine’s “Top 30 Adventurers Under 30,” Simon facilitates initiatory experiences as the leader of experiential education journeys for young adults. We talk the alchemy of travel and how to practice right relationship as a stranger in a strange land.  Listen here.

Available Original Paintings • Music Archive • Print Shop

I Return From Summer Tour Bearing Gifts & Blessings

While I sit here riding the tail of an absolutely epic three-month tour, I hope the sun-baked transformational friction of everyone's summer was as fruitful as my own!  All of the lush multimedia festivals and amazing underground concerts inspired some of the greatest art and music I have ever made, and I'm in the thick of the editing process so I can share it all soon.  Here is the first of two updates celebrating a summer we'll long remember...

"The SACRED (whatever that means) is surely related (somehow) to the BEAUTIFUL (whatever that means)..."

– Gregory Bateson

"Play is our greatest natural resource."

– Laura Seargeant Richardson 

"You Don't Have To Move" | Live at Austin Airport

Watch on Youtube | Free .mp3 Download

Listening music for the rest of this newsletter.  The original recording of this song from 2009 remains my most popular video, and rightly so – it's the most ludicrous braid of avant-guitar techniques I've ever managed to pull off while singing.  Three years of live performance have turned what started as a three-minute pop song into this sprawling acoustic prog opus...

I'm falling out of these open eyes

filling up all of the world outside

I'm seeing more than fits in my mind

spilling the bliss out through bright surprise

If there's one thing I know,

it's that angels appear

when you stop trying to prove them

and the clouds clear

you don't have to move

I'm falling out of these open eyes

challenging all my ideas of size

What was once narrow feels miles wide

all of a sudden, in all of time

If there's one thing I know,

it's that angels appear

when you stop trying to prove them

and the clouds clear

you don't have to move

You can stream or download this entire album, An Aria for ABIA: Live at Austin Airport, for free.

I'll Meet You There

 Like/Comment/Share on FB
24"x48" – paint marker on 1/4" masonite panel
(Click to enlarge.) 

Painted Live At:
2011 12 09, 10 Cartographie Psychedelica, Oakland CA
(Cello Joe, Random Rab, Mochipet, Sugarpill, iLL ESHA, Joe Mousepad, MiHKAL, VNDMG)
2012 04 27, 28 Cervantes Masterpiece Ballroom, Denver CO
(Umconscious, Jamie Janover, Russ Liquid, David Starfire, GRiZ, Human Agency, Sugarpill, Octopus Nebula, Bluetech)
2012 05 05 The Manifestation Celebration, Dallas TX
(Nadis Warriors, EOTO, The Human Experience, Thievery Corporation)

“Out beyond ideas of wrongdoing

and rightdoing there is a field.

I'll meet you there.

When the soul lies down in that grass

the world is too full to talk about.”

– Rumi

11" x 17" signed poster prints  | iPhone cases | lapstop stickers | iPad & laptop sleeves

 

Custom-Painted Hats

Here are a few new ones available for sale, as well as several recent commissioned designs on some interesting hats.  You know how to get ahold of me if you'd like one of your own – just hit me up with your budget and design specs and we can take it from there!  (Here's the full gallery of my adventures in hat painting.)

Click on each pic to get a better view:

Available – Like/Comment/Share on FB

Available – Like/Comment/Share on FB

 

Available – Like/Comment/Share on FB

Available – Like/Comment/Share on FB

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Burning Man: Taking The Year Off!

Also, I meant to get this out earlier:  I didn't make it out to Burning Man this year, but my friends put together some amazing lecture series at Palenque Norte, Fractal Nation, and Area 51.  If you didn't make it out there, stay tuned because I know at least some of the recordings will be online for free soon, and really cool!  I designed the 5' banner they printed to use as a schedule board out in the dusty expanse – click on it to get a better view:

Off-playa, I've been giving a lot of talks as well. While I'm getting the new stuff online, you might find some inspiration listening to the archives...

While I'm getting the next newsletter together, feel welcome to write me personally with your feedback, suggestions, questions, or great ideas. I deeply appreciate you taking the time to read this blog and wish you the best!

...in which I organize a benefit for Sasha Shulgin, paint with Alex Grey, talk to NASA, and rock the Nelson Ledges

"We are all completely dependent on everyone else. The point is to live freely, in the present, freely giving and freely taking, which is the way of nature. The idea is to give up control of credit and debt, and just trust the cycle of nature."

- David Suelo

"We have been hypnotized into this scarcity-based thinking. At every corner of our society, there is a conversation revolving around how much there is not enough to go around. If you can, not in a cheesy and unauthentic way, but in a truly heartfelt way embrace the world, and engage the world with that faith, and that conviction of the ultimate abundance of life, you will change the world. You will, and you will not be trying to change it, and you'll be having fun."

- John Marshall Roberts

Hi everyone. ♥ I am still love-drunk from organizing Wakarusa Festival's first-ever Live Art Team & Gallery, but it'll be a little while before I can get all of that online. Besides, there's still a lot to catch up on! Firstly, and most proudly, I coordinated this:

L.A.B. Tracks: A Benefit Compilation For Sasha Shulgin

In Partnership With MAPS, Reality Sandwich, SSDP, & The Chapel of Sacred Mirrors...

Alexander "Sasha" Shulgin is probably the most important chemist alive. In addition to rediscovering MDMA and popularizing its therapeutic use, he also synthesized hundreds of new psychoactive chemicals and – with his wife and companion Ann – chronicled their effects in the extraordinary detail of two legendary volumes, PIKHAL & TIKHAL.

At the age of 85, Sasha recently suffered a stroke and now requires full-time medical care. This benefit compilation is the response from an international network of musicians whose work and lives have been enriched and inspired by the work of these two pioneers and their courageous exploration of nonordinary consciousness.

The L.A.B., or "Large Animal Bioassay," was the pet name given to visionary chemist Sasha Shulgin's small group of friend-volunteers who spent years exploring the effects of his newly-discovered molecules on their consciousness. This heroic team of psychonauts were the first to experience hundreds of novel states of consciousness, and it is in their honor that we name this compilation of eclectic tracks.

Just as their own journeys took them into realms of both the profound and profane, pleasure and anxiety, these two hours of music – spread over two discs, one danceable and one ambient – are the perfect accompaniment for an adventure to the human mind's furthest horizons...

Support the Shulgins in their hour of need by purchasing this epic 27-track album for at least $5!

"Can't Shut Us Down" by McDonough, Garfield, Uzzardi

Watch this in full HD - Download this track for free

A couple of weeks ago Jeremy McDonough, Renee Uzzardi, and I burned across country from Denver to eastern Ohio to play at the legendary Nelson Ledges Quarry Park. We rocked the festival's closing set, facing an enormous lake made from a filled-in forest gravel quarry...beautiful red pebbles everywhere, bats flying around, the woods full of revelers... Visuals provided by my nearly completed painting (see below) and Jeremy's glow-in-the-dark laser-reactive shirt. This improvised number was the festival's final moment.

Simmer on that for a while until I'm done readying the next album of acoustic-electronic guitar loops...

River To The Source

2011 04 29, 30 Cervantes (Nadis Warriors, Octopus Nebula, ESKMO)

2011 05 20, 21 Nelson Ledges Quarry Park

(Elemental Groove Theory, Boogie Matrix Mechanism, UV Hippo, The Werks, Broccoli Samurai)

2011 05 22 The Church (Jazzam)

32"x24" - opaque pens on masonite

signed 11"x17" poster prints - $20 or two for $30 (plus $5 s/h)

(click to view in hi-res)

Well, I'm in it. You are too. I'm not always proposing we view time as linear and goal-oriented, but even in an endless field there are divots - in an endless ocean there are whirlpools - and we are rolling into one. And as we whip around the margin of this strange attractor, the feeling of inevitably increases, but it's important to remember that there's no such thing as capital The capital End...

I started this piece at the Denver Alex & Allyson Grey shows in April, but was so busy body painting that weekend I had to wait around until my trip to Ohio and Pennsylvania to complete it. The final touches were laid on during an overnight in Pittsburg when my bandmate, lunatic keyboardist Jeremy McDonough, lost his keys after a reunion gig with his old band Jazzam back home. (Turns out the keys accidentally made it home with someone else in order that the universe might keep him around an extra night with his friends. Sneaky freakin' universe!)

While at the Nelson Ledges (and big thanks to The Werks for throwing that one and inviting us!), I managed to body paint a few people...it turned out pretty well. Check out pictures in my ongoing gallery:

Body Art @ Mayflowers Springdance Festival 2011!

Also, lastly – until next week, when I'll share all of the awesomeness that came out of our art team's work at Wakarusa – here's a video made by NASA, interviewing me at Yuri's Night 2010 at Moffett Air Force Base during one of the more unlikely concerts I've ever painted. To this day, I'm still the only person ever allowed to paint in an Air Force hanger. I had just driven nineteen straight hours to make it there on time to set up and then painted for twelve straight hours, so please excuse my rambling for being slightly more incoherent than ordinary. This might be the most honest NASA video you ever see:

More soon, with love.

On Encountering The Shadow, More Process Pics, & Transglobal Arts

"I work on myself because I realize that the only thing you have to offer another human being ever is your own state of being."

- Ram Dass

“Your task is not to seek for love, but merely to seek and find all the barriers within yourself that you have built against it.”

- Rumi

"...And that is when life really started to pick up its skirt and show

us its beauty."

- Deborah Leigh Givens

• Video: On Encountering The Shadow

Charles Shaw and I just entered the last week of our national Light & Shadow Tour, hosting conversations across the country on the role of the shadow in personal and cultural transformation. We've been on the road for over a month, now, and between the high-speed tire blowouts, run-ins with border patrol, debilitating sicknesses, missing keys, missing equipment, missing friends, and other wonderfully unpredictable encounters with divinely-ordained chaos...it's been utterly amazing, a life-changing voyage that has sharpened my social awareness and impassioned me to serve the best potential of a new world already shaping itself from the wreckage of our current crisis. To anchor here and now the sanity and love of the wiser society we can be, and might yet be.

Consequently, this video – footage from my end of our show at San Francisco's Jellyfish Gallery – is my most transparent, personal, and honest public statement so far. In it, I discuss the best methods I've learned to recognize when something "out there" is really "in here," and to defuse the destructive energies of a denial-splintered mind (and of course, I manage to get a song in there). I hope my reflections are useful to you in your quest for wholeness and self-understanding!

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• More Process Pics!

While I'm waiting to finish the painting I started at Big Gigantic & Alex B at The Parish in Austin, TX and the Art Outside Festival, here are some series of earlier paintings in successive states of completion. I love to keep these records because they allow me to share and reflect on the thought process behind each piece, and the evolution of my technique in general.

Click on each image to get a look at the full-sized, hi-resolution version:

• Paintings For Sale At Transglobal Arts

I recently arranged with Transglobal Arts to put some of my work on sale through their website, which is designed to market inexpensive hand-made folk artwork from around the world. Net proceeds support the Multidisciplinary Association For Psychedelic Studies and their tireless work to revive the practice of safe, legal, clinical psychedelic therapy.

I'm hardly one to unselfconsciously jump on the whole holiday-commercializing bandwagon, but here I am anyway encouraging you to consider gifting someone you love with one of these, or any of my numerous available paintings – all of which have been favorably re-priced...

2008 12 30 Cervantes

(Panjea, Kyle Hollingsworth, Lynx & Janover)

Buy at Transglobal Arts

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2009 06 25, 26 B Side Lounge & Mishawaka Amphitheatre

(Jacob Fred Jazz Odyssey, Fareed Haque, Lynx & Janover, Ana Sia, EOTO w/ Michael Kang & Kyle Hollingsworth)

Buy at Transglobal Arts

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2009 09 11 Trinumeral Festival

(The Sun Ra Arkestra, Béla Fleck & Zakir Hussain & Edgar Meyer, The Glitch Mob)

Buy at Transglobal Arts

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More art and music soon...thanks for your time and have a beautiful day!