The Evolution of Time (My Talk From Oregon Eclipse) // MG + Singularity Bros // Future Fossils Galore // Apocalyptic Painting Sale

“I’m just some squawking monkey standing on a wooden box. I’m not going to pretend I have a handle on the situation.”

– Tony Vigorito 
(Happy Birthday, Tony!)

The Evolution of Time: Biology, Mythology, and Consciousness

- My talk from Oregon Eclipse -

Hey friends! As I settle in for a season of writing and patient, introspective work – and grapple with travel withdrawal - I'm looking forward to unpacking several of this year's best live recordings for you.

This one from the Global Eclipse Gathering in Big Summit Prairie, Oregon was for the biggest audience I've ever had. I feel like everybody's awesome energy gave me some extra focus and enthusiasm for a very all-encompassing riff, on how we can navigate time as a landscape, using our attention...

360º Video Playlist | Free MP3 Download

I mention plenty of this year's pet topics: flowers as a planet-wide catastrophe; how everything's a remix (and has always been a remix); how mastery is not enough and we can set our sights beyond, on transformation.

But some really marvelous NEW stuff came up in this one, also – just a testament to how inspiring it can be to share some space-time with you, up there, and how I'm convinced original ideas emerge through GROUPS of people (even if one person does most of the talking).

Anyway, here is the whole thing in a 360º video playlist I shot from stage, or the unedited audio from that video for listening while operating heavy machinery or performing surgery or what-have-you.

If you get something out of this talk, share it with a friend!  I'd love to help as many people as I can with navigating these insane-o rushing waters in between one age and the next...

360º Video Playlist | Free MP3 Download

- Apocalyptic Painting Sale -

Available Paintings | More Info at FB Event Page

Speaking of transitioning from one age to the next:

I'm selling all of my original artwork! It's time for me to write my debut book on evolution and psychedelic futurism, "How To Live In The Future" – and to do that I need to take a long break from painting and hustling my art.

(Not a FOREVER break...I'm still taking commissions for new work, I just won't be painting live at shows for some time.)

Here are some of the paintings still available – head over to this page for a complete list and ignore the listed prices!  Discounts of 50% are totally fair game and I'll be willing to consider more. We can set up monthly payments if you like, and I'll still ship the piece to you before it's fully paid.

I also accept cryptocurrency payments, if that's your thing.  Thanks for taking the time to check out my work and I hope your next adventure is a good one!

- New Podcast Episodes -

Future Fossils is on a roll right now!  Starting with a special two-part interview with one of my greatest inspirations, the historian and mythographer William Irwin Thompson – and then moving on to explore the relationship of time, art, and the body with tattoo artist Christopher Sheehan – and then indulging in an electric dialogue with astrologer Adam Sommer about the dance of Mars and Venus, masculine and feminine, iron and copper, over history and through our lives...

Subscribe on iTunes (iOS) or Stitcher or Google Play (Android)

 

 

I also recently appeared on The Singularity Bros Podcast, which I assure you is as cheekily self-aware and wonderful as the name might have you think.  We talked about how technology is empowering us all to become superheroes – OR supervillains – and what it's going to take from each of us to level up responsibly and enter this intense new world with grace, humility, and love.

That means a frank discussion about the dark side of decentralization, the critiques of Universal Basic Income, and other, sillier topics glimmering on the horizon of "the Broosphere" (yes, we went there.)

Stream/Download Singularity Bros Episode 111

- Stuff You Might Have Missed -

This “masterclass” I taught at Moogfest 2016 covers my occult philosophy of loop-based music, walks listeners through the construction of layered live compositions, and drills into some tech specifics for performance.  Dig it here.

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...

Unfold into the atmospheric grooves on Bandcamp or Spotify.

- UPCOMING SHOWS - 

14 October – Austin, TX – SquareRüt Kava Bar

Cosmic Americana & Cyberballadry Singer-Songwriter Set

Free All Ages Show

2 - 5 November – Austin, TX – Vortex Repository Theater

Original Music & Sound Design for P3M5:

Plurality of Privacy Project in 5-Minute Plays

3 November – Austin, TX – Guan Yin Tea House

Cyberacoustic Guitar Instrumental Set

2 1/2 hours of live music for Gong Fu Tea Service

Breaking The Narrative Barrier // Applied Technoshamanism // Keyhistoric Life // Apocalyptic Art Sale

“Human culture has broken the narrative barrier as change driven by technological transformation creates conditions that change faster than our ability to narrate them. There is an essential mismatch between our stories about the world and the world, the ideas we have of ourselves and ourselves – this mismatch is now unavoidable. Good News: This evolutionary shift will be easy to survive and flourish through. Quite simply, we must cease depending upon something that isn’t there: a coherent narrative that stitches together our social world.”

– Richard Doyle

Hi friends.  :)  It's been a crazy summer, full of revelations and initiations, difficult as hell, and dotted with surprise reprieves and glorious fulfillments.  Hopefully it's been as powerfully good for you as it has been for me...I think...shit's still in motion.  Hard to say for sure.  Uncertainty's the lesson, maybe.

Anyway, I'm sure about SOME things – foremost among them that I am "supposed to" help relieve our species of narrative and share techniques I've learned to play more fully in the magical rotating gem of all perspectives.  To navigate time-as-a-landscape with attention poured into the outcomes we agree we want.  To ease the pain of everybody growing up too fast at once.

And urgency abounds: we're in the process of transforming evolution, from a thing we didn't even know we do, to a technology we'll use to totally reshape the planet.  Kind of a big deal.  It's time for all of us to level up as wizards, witches, or whatever so we're IN IT and engaged with, not resistant to, a world in which ideas become shared (virtual) realities more rapidly than ever.  We must rise to the occasion so that we don't accidentally create more monsters than we absolutely must.  We must raise whatever comes next right.

AND SO!  

I'm writing a collection of short pieces (some of which are here on Medium) that ties science fiction and creative non-fiction together, then sets them on fire with mystic poetry.  I'm selling all the paintings that I've kept around to fund the writing of this book.  It's time.  It's going to TAKE time – time that I will take away from travel and commissions, limiting what little "flow" I've surfed on for the last few years.

If you would like a 50% discount on my art, it's yours.  Here is the link to all of my available originals.  Here is the event page with more info.

   

(And since of course we're mostly skating by, perhaps the sacred economics of our mutualist gifting might appeal to you more, anyway.  That's why I use Patreon: for people who GET what I'm trying to say on everyone's behalf, and want to help me weave more people into it, ground and expand it, make it relevant and real.)

So anyway.  I love you.  Thank you.  Here are things.

Live Looping As Applied Technoshamanism at Moogfest 2016

Download Here

This masterclass I taught at Moogfest 2016 covers my occult philosophy of loop-based music and drills into my tech specifics for performance. Drawing from twelve years of looping at festivals and concerts worldwide, there's plenty here to fascinate you – whether you're a looping artist or just interested in the intersection between the esoteric and technology.

FREE to my silver-level Patreon supporters or available for a one-time donation of $5 (which also grants you access to extensive archives of my music).

Also included in the download is a transcript of my full pedalboard teardown and looping process.  As Reggie Watts said, "Don't 'tech-no' from a shaman for an answer..."

Topics covered include:
• How to be your own whole "Citadel of Ricks"
• Recursion, reiteration, and live looping as the Crucifixion of what is and what could be
• The emergence of order from chaos – inviting randomness into the matrix
• An alchemy of elemental energies in improvised live composition
• Technical considerations and gear suggestions
• Hacking the audience’s attention
• Multichannel live production as the blending of different sonic spaces
• Pedalboard vs. Ableton Live for Looping - opinions

For more direct and personal instruction, I’m available for private lessons over Skype – just write me if you’re interested!

New Future Fossils Episodes!

Hunter Maats – host of the Mixed Mental Arts Podcast and co-author of The Straight-A Conspiracy. We talk about the future of education and human collaboration – moving past a world of routine factory-worker indoctrination and the “insane cargo cult” of the academic system, and into a new model for the transmission of knowledge that suits a truly planetary culture.

Andrew J. O’Keefe II – documentarian, archivist for Singularity University, devoted recordist of the emergent planetary culture, and a dear old friend I met back in the Dawn of Time when he was working as the personal assistant to Android Jones. We talk about the motivations for preserving and reliving the significant (AND insignificant) moments of our lives.

Hannah Yata – visionary painter whose riotous, ecstatic work explores and celebrates natural biodiversity, and exalts the repressed feminine – the beautiful and the grotesque, death and life in vivid color all at once.

Sketchbook:  "Keyhistoric Life"

Just for fun.  This is how my brain works.  Get a better look on Instagram.

Coming Up: UTOPiAfest!

I'm playing the festival's first-ever sunrise set (and last ever at Four Sisters Ranch, where it has been held for the last nine years).  Come if you're in Texas – I hear that it's the best-in-class!

Just a reminder that I have a ton of work on Spotify for all your playlist pleasures – and also on Bandcamp for free download (or paid, if you are feeling frisky).  Go listen to it now and reap the sweetness!

"Yes, this planet is a terrible mess. But it has always been a mess. 

 There have never been any 'Good Old Days,' there have just been days."

– Kurt Vonnegut

I'm Going To Get A Little Vulnerable With You, New Electric Guitar Tunes from Sonic Bloom 2016, Kishi Bashi Interview, New VR and Robotics Essay for the Body Hacking Blog, More Technoshamanism Goodness

“We are at the end of an era in which lies can be used to steal from the public and the commons. We are at the beginning of an era in which truth in public service can restore us all to a state of grace."

– Former CIA agent Robert David Steele

(My latest live painting in progress at Green Beer Fest, alongside a piece by my friend Martin Cash.)

I'm writing a book and recording a new studio album, both projects I've been promising my friends and fans for years.  It isn't easy but it IS exciting, and inspiring to share this process with you.

Here's the climax of a recent exercise in vulnerable and transparent writing:

------

If you are anything like me, the last ten or eleven years have not been easy. You were probably, like me, sold on the dream that your involvement in the pyramid-building of somebody else's vision would reap you rewards you haven't seen. You sought outside yourself authorities to help make sense of all the change, and wondered where you fit in all of it, and wondered if our parents had it easier, without the crushing daily in-your-face reminders that it isn't simple anymore.

But hopefully, then you are also like me in that you have recently decided to stop waiting for the aliens to land and give us Cosmic Christmas, you've stopped buying into party lines and flawed but visionary projects that devour your power and convert it into someone else's profits. You have made the change and now you hope that you can live as an example of the new model of the interdependent human being, motivated by your own relationship to intuition and the loving intelligence that speaks through it. You've given up on gurus, leaders, priests, your parents, bosses, and the future, and you're dedicated to the work of simply being true and clear to what you are and what you're called to do.

If you're like me, you aren't an "independent artist" - you're the intersection of colliding infinities, the universe unfolding as a human life, the product of an ecosystem. You are not "self-employed," because you are employed by that intelligence that lives distributed between all species and their interactions, what cybernetics calls the "Mind at Large." You are employed by everything to serve no less than everyone.

You can stop looking for a home. You have no home. The world is your home.

You can stop looking for a job. You know what you have to do right now. Go do it.

And now for as much music, art, and writing as I can create and share with you for free:

New Electric Guitar Track from Sonic Bloom Festival

I played my first electric set in years for the SolPurpose Visionary Art Academy at Sonic Bloom this June – the soundtrack to a live art session with instructors Martina Hoffmann, Randal Roberts, and Morgan Mandala.  Here is a clip from that performance – the whole show is a perk for all my Patreon and Bandcamp subscribers.

Honestly this one is kind of scary. It has pretty passages but they’re all in between a lot of roaring, black hole grooves and deadly space. There are some clearings of real beauty in there, sentimental lovely lead guitar lines. There are also plenty of unpleasant noises, hatching dragons, flying metal crumpling in a firestorm - even so, they’re interesting, raw and vivid like a heart attack or car crash filtered through slow motion overload, like music from the mothership that feels like maybe it’s just peaceful inquiry…but also could be reprogramming your brain with sound. Some parts of it are distinctly sexy. Not on purpose and it kind of spooks me. I don’t know where any of this comes from, so it’s listen at your own risk, guys. Thanks!

Listen to "Redisintegration – Final Breakdown" here.

Kishi Bashi Interview for Performer Mag

I recently interviewed one of my favorite musicians, Kishi Bashi, for Performer Magazine.  We had a totally bizarre and wonderful discussion on the past, present, and future of music and human connection.  Here's a tiny piece:

"I also had this thought the other day that in the future there may not be any music. Neuroscience will be at such a point where, I feel like within my generation, we’ll be able to recreate the effect of hearing a great song in our head. That little dose of that Dylan song you love and gives you goosebumps? That feeling will probably be able to be recreated, and there’s going to be people who will be able to map out the emotion of a great song, or a great movie, or a great book. Some of them will probably be more complicated than others, but I think people will start combining THAT with new visual and physical experiences. It’ll be a weird world by the time I’m dead."

– Kishi Bashi

Read the whole thing here.

New Writing on the Future of Virtual Reality and Robotics

A huge part of the book I'm working on right now is inquiry into the future of the human species and how it will feel to be alive once everything has stopped exploding quite so much – or, once we're used to it, at any rate.  Here is the latest, on the Body Hacking Conference Blog:

"It took less than a decade for the smartphone to insinuate its way into our sense of self. In some important senses, most of us are now dual-platform beings, living in at least two parts: the flesh and the machine. We don’t all think this way, yet – it takes time to steer the paradigm – but five billion people live with some device connecting them at all times to the sum of human knowledge, incredible machine intelligence, and the mediated life experiences of those other cyborgs. That phone is kept at all times inside the envelope of the magnetic fields projected by our hearts and brains, and someday soon we’ll think of human being-ness as slightly more about these organizing fields than what continuously cycling meat exists within them. So we’re each a binary: a person and a cellular device, a wizard and its owl familiar…if you don’t mind reviving the archaic to explain what modern language can’t sufficiently address."

Read the whole thing here.

Moogfest Technoshamanism Lecture Audio on Bandcamp

When Dennis McKenna and Bruce Damer weren't available to speak, Moogfest gave me the opportunity to present on "technoshamanism" at this year's event.

Consequence of Sound called it "Easily the most mind-opening presentation at Moogfest 2016" which is CRAZY TALK, but I'll take it.

You may have heard it already on the Psychedelic Salon Podcast – but for my own upload, I edited about 5 minutes of "uh" "like" "you know" out of the recording. Enjoy!

Listen to the whole thing here.

Catch Me Live

An intimate show with the amazing musical talents of Daniel Hansen aka RootFlute, who makes his own sacred instruments; and Johannes Rath, the only "guitalimba" player in the world. Both of these guys are experts in weaving trance-inducing, magical music out of their virtuosic playing – and we're going to mix solo sets with a group jam for maximum effect. Plus we get a double cherry on top: live painting by two of my favorite Boulder artists, Martin Cash and Joshua Wine Morriston. This is my only public concert on the entire Front Range until 2017!

Details and tickets here.

FINALLY! I'm teaching a class AND playing an instrumental cyberguitar set at the global epicenter for visionary art, Alex & Allyon Grey's Chapel of Sacred Mirrors. My three hour afternoon workshop will focus on focusing – that is, how to gather and apply attention – yours AND your audience's – for the benefit of all beings.

Details and tickets here.

For anyone in the New York area, I'm playing music for this amazing event with Alex & Allyson Grey, Luis Eduardo Luna, Ralph Metzner, Daniel Pinchbeck, Allan Badiner, Steven White, Esthela Calderón, and my friend Skytree.

"Join leading authorities on ethnobotany, ayahuasca, anthropology, visionary art as we explore the cultural history, traditional and neo-shamanic practices, artistic and literary inspirations, and the scientific, therapeutic and ecological dimensions of the sacred Vine of the Amazon."

Details and tickets here.

Thanks for reading. :)

Now on Patreon, Live at Boom Festival, New Live Painting, Technoshamanism at Moogfest, New Future Fossils Episodes, How To Resolve A Paradox

Hello, friends!  A note about creativity and courage:

If you're reading this it's probably because we met while I was painting and I inspired you to stay in touch.  The funny thing is that I've been an emblem of this "daring artistic lifestyle" for several years, but visual art was something I stumbled into as a way of making ends meet. It wasn't a courageous swan dive into the creative life; it was the path of least resistance for someone who'd grown up doodling in class. I've always liked painting but being called a "painter" is like getting stabbed a little.

Now I'm at the point where I either put the emphasis back on my writing and my music, where my soul really is, or I die a little inside. And I'm standing at the edge where I've seen so many people falter, on the cusp of taking that leap of faith and embracing the thing I can't imagine actually paying for itself, and pissing off most of my supporters in the process. And wow, it really IS scary here!

Selling art was never going to buy the life I wanted for myself and for my imaginary future family. (At least, not without my heart in it.) But NOT constantly producing pretty flash for people to consume means stepping out across a chasm with no bridge in sight.

I've set up a Patreon account for anyone who cares about the work I offer and who'd like to see me emerge victorious from this transition with an album and a book and lots of extra podcast episodes.

If I've inspired you at any point I hope that you will join me for this ride, and that I can be – more authentically and deeply than ever – a living example and a catalyst for anyone who's scared to follow what they love beyond the point of sense and into wondrous things...

And now onto the offerings I'm proud and grateful to share with you today:

Live in 360º at Boom Festival’s Chillout Gardens

Audio Recording Here (Name-Your-Price Download)

My concert at Boom Festival's Chillout Gardens was the most amazing gig I've had so far: playing to an audience of thousands in an eighty-foot-tall psychedelic stupa ringed with a six-point Funktion One sound array, stretched fabric and cushioned red carpet flooring on the beach of Idanha-A-Nova, a glorious and glistening lake that literally shimmers with flecks of golden mica.

I played the first set (after a short break) following an epic five-hour dance party by Gaudi – can't ask for a better energy than that – and improvised an hour of music that was alternately spacious, spooky, lively, trancey, woodsy, futuristic, and serene (and sometimes all at once).  For the first time I read some excerpts from a favorite book to deepen and intensify the space of my performance – in this case, William Irwin Thompson's book-length essay, The American Replacement of Nature.

Also for the first time, I included software piano – and recorded the first 25 minutes of the set as a 360º videosphere.  Check this out – you can scroll around and watch everything I'm doing with my pedals, gaze up at the amazing stretched fabric roof of the stage, and look out into the sultry deliciousness of the Chillout Gardens audience:

PS – You can see all of my 360º photospheres from Boom Festival and Portugal here.

New Painting: Eclipse Flower

Buy 11"x17" Prints

Astrologically speaking, I have a Pisces Moon.  That means I'm an intuitive, moody, empathetic, emotionally slippery kind of person.  This is true.  And at no time did it seem MORE true than in the final stretch of working on this painting, when a Lunar Eclipse on the exact degree of my natal Moon (24º) cast me into a Persephonic pit of oozing darkness known to the Internet as "THE FEELS."

In every medium, I find myself trying to express the dark-bright beauty of life's messy emotional paradoxes.  Like, for example, the closing track off my first album, "It Hurts So We're Not Dead."  And here we have the visual representation of that:  is it one plant blossoming riotously in the moonlight, or is it two plants fighting one another for supremacy?  Do these distinctions even make sense when it comes to the inherently conflicted inner landscape of emotion?

This piece is for anyone who has ever felt like an alien cactus possibly attacking itself.

Original piece painted live on 40"x30" canvas with oil & acrylic paint pens at the Denison Cultural Arts Festival, SPRATX, and at home from 16-20 September over the Lunar Eclipse.

New Future Fossils Podcast Episodes

Subscribe / Rate / Review Future Fossils Podcast at iTunes

My podcast with cohost Evan Snyder, in which we take the perspective of future archeologists digging through the digital remains of modern culture.  What messages of value can we send posterity?  Explore the nature of time and our place in it through the conversations of the unconventional, bizarre, free-roaming, fun, irreverent, and thoughtful kind...an auditory psychedelic to get you prepared for living in a wilder future than we can imagine. Our latest episodes:

Author Kingsley Dennis on the emergence of planetary "new monasticism."

Author Ashley Dawson on the relationship between capitalism and mass extinction.

Both conversations were amazing.  Check them out on iTunes and leave us a review!

Video + Audio: "Technoshamanism" at Moogfest 2016

Stream/Download Audio

My talk from Moogfest 2016 was a highlight of my career as a public speaker – Consequence of Sound called it "Easily the most mind-opening presentation Moogfest 2016 had to offer," which is no small statement on a lineup that included virtual reality inventor Jaron Lanier and gender-bending transhumanist Martine Rothblatt.

I think part of what made it so effective was the audioreactive visualization software Synesthesia, transforming my words into flowing imagery behind me while I spoke. You may have already heard this talk as Episode 508 of Notes from the Psychedelic Salon, but seeing it is a very different thing. It was like having a cybernetic collaborator, early AI offering the digital ground to the figure of my presentation.

I've also made the talk's audio available in my own archives as a free download, for which I thoroughly edited most of the "ums" and "likes" so that you can listen to me wax visionary without having to suffer my atrocious Valley Girl dialect. ;)

Time-Lapse Mural Video: "How To Resolve A Paradox"

I had a little fun with the time-lapse app on my phone to capture most of the process while I threw this paint pen mural up in my friend's camper van.  Unfortunately he moved before I could finish it!  But here you are.  Voiceover from my talk at Sonic Bloom 2015, music from my latest album. 

 Hopefully this helps somebody you know that's confused about an either/or dilemma.

Catch Me Live

An intimate show with the amazing musical talents of Daniel Hansen aka RootFlute, who makes his own sacred instruments; and Johannes Rath, the only "guitalimba" player in the world.  Both of these guys are experts in weaving trance-inducing, magical music out of their virtuosic playing – and we're going to mix solo sets with a group jam for maximum effect.  Plus we get a double cherry on top:  live painting by two of my favorite Boulder artists, Martin Cash and Joshua Wine Morriston.  This is my only public concert on the entire Front Range until 2017!  Details and RSVP here.

FINALLY!  I'm teaching a class AND playing an instrumental cyberguitar set at the global epicenter for visionary art, Alex & Allyon Grey's Chapel of Sacred Mirrors.  My three hour afternoon workshop will focus on focusing – that is, how to gather and apply attention – yours AND your audience's – for the benefit of all beings.  Details and tickets here.

For anyone in the New York area who can't make it out for the COSM gig (and also those who can), I'm also playing music for this amazing event with Alex & Allyson Grey, Luis Eduardo Luna, Ralph Metzner, Daniel Pinchbeck, Allan Badiner, Steven White, Esthela Calderón, and my friend Skytree.

"Join leading authorities on ethnobotany, ayahuasca, anthropology, visionary art as we explore the cultural history, traditional and neo-shamanic practices, artistic and literary inspirations, and the scientific, therapeutic and ecological dimensions of the sacred Vine of the Amazon."  Details and tickets here.

Big Summer Update (Part 1): New Music Video, New Live Paintings from Sonic Bloom, Moogfest Technoshamanism Talk

Part 1 of my Big Summer Update!

Hello, friends!  Summer is always the craziest, most productive time of year for me – a time of festivals, wide rambling, big plans, and major changes.  A lot of new readers, too!  Whether this is your first time getting one of my updates, or you've been getting them for years, thank you SO MUCH for taking in all that I have to offer.  I don't think the muse would speak to me so frequently if I had no one to sing to, or to paint for...

So here goes.  In this update: I rededicate myself to music; share two sweet paintings from Sonic Bloom Festival; and link you to the most important and high-profile talk I've ever given...

New Press Reel / Subscribe to me on Bandcamp!

Check out my new press reel featuring previously unreleased footage from my history-making 2013 concert with Google Glass and my full-band experiment with the AI music visualizer Synesthesia!  This video is my love letter to the music career that I've neglected for the last few years, and my battle cry for getting back in there to serenade and rock you, my friends, as hard as possible.

To support the soul-work of my music, I'm now offering folks the opportunity to join a small group of backstage subscribers who get early access to new albums, as well as exclusive tracks and live sets.

Subscribe to me and you'll help fund a constant stream of anthems, ballads, instrumental voyages, inspired collaborations, local residencies, visionary ventures, and extensive touring that began for me in high school, and will hopefully continue until death.

With your support, I'll get creative in my giving. I'll send you special treats throughout the year reserved for this community, and you'll get to bask in satisfaction knowing you're a patron for a true and dedicated artist, helping me inspire people without worrying about how I'll sustain myself.

Thank you for listening, for sharing, for subscribing, and for anything you do to help me share the music in my soul!

Learn More & Stream/DL or Subscribe.

––––– • • • –––––

New Live Paintings From Sonic Bloom Festival

"End of the World Party" (Tyrannosaurus rex)

(Order Prints.)

A moment of surprise, a burst of color, dinner interrupted by – what? Tyrannosaurus turns to see the unexpected, just off frame. Is it the UFOs that haunt the background of this ancient scene? Or were they always there, and something even stranger lurks just out of sight?

Alternatively, our protagonist has waited long and hard for his ET compatriots to land and save the last few dinosaurs by lifting them off-world. The Earth has suffered for two million years' of asteroid impacts, volcanic eruptions, mass disease, and other catastrophic changes. Those who still survive will find a new home somewhere else, another planet orbiting a distant star – and possibly return, one day...

Painted live with oil and acrylic paint on a 3'x4' canvas at Sonic Bloom Festival 2016, to the music of Seied, Cloud D, Milky.Wav, Space Jesus, Insightful, Giraffage, Louis The Child, Living Light, Prophet Massive, Quixotic, Kalya Scintilla & Eve Olution, Phadroid, Tipper, Clozee, Phaeleh, Govinda, Djunya, SoDown, Fort Knox Five Feat. QDup, The Cat's Pajamas.

"Media Res"

(Order Prints.)

Painted at the SolPurpose Visionary Art Academy at Sonic Bloom Festival 2016 with oil and acrylic paint, spray bottle, and paper towels on a 24"x18" canvas, under the tutelage of Martina Hoffmann, Randal Roberts, and Morgan Mandala.

I already knew they were great people, but it turns out they're all amazing teachers, also, and I was inspired to FINALLY see this kind of learning space facilitated in the festival community, which has in ways assumed the burden of the University without actually living up to it. To start the week with intimate, hands-on initiatory craftwork - Music, Visionary Art, Flow Arts, and Permaculture sections, running parallel - transformed the whole event and I am now excited for the prospects of real lineage transmission in that venue. I have hope for festivals as a rhetorical device to lure our culture's pollinators into curious communion, in a way I haven't had for years.

That's not to say that it was easy or one-sided. Lots of people worked through major darkness in that class and in the festival that followed. I was one of them - and while hurling paint at this dark emblem of my transformation, Martina chatted with me on the balance of the light and darkness of the artist's vision, Giger's fear that he would die to learn his afterlife is like his paintings, my conviction that creators have responsibility to those with less imagination to communicate the best of future possibilities (as agents of reconnaissance - for all of us, like Jews in Exodus, wander through the landscape wondering, and benefit from climbers in our tribe whose bodies love to see the view from nearby hills). This set the tone for hours of profound discussion later with the future-minded Adam Psybe and Robert Jacob Max, both of whom declare the need for, and embody, critics, jesters, and contrarians in the festival world's all-too-often cultish, caste-divided, and escapist attitudes.

This is the start of something beautiful - or, the maturation of a thing that desperately needs to find a master's stance and bear the weight of its identity in culture. The festival is more than just a party, people. We are seeing the emergence of a novel structure that transcends while still including both the city and nomadic people.

––––– • • • –––––

My Moogfest 2016 Talk on "Technoshamanism"

"Technoshamanism: A Very Psychedelic Century!"
at Moogfest 2016

"Easily the most mind-opening presentation Moogfest 2016 had to offer – a multidisciplinary monologue that rivaled Brian Eno’s Moogfest 2011 keynote for all the unexpected twists and turns it took. This one-man show saw artist-musician Michael Garfield take a captive audience on a vision-quest through the lands where metaphysics and emerging technology meet. Make no mistake – it was a ramble, but an insightful and fascinating one from start to finish that traveled from the ancient dragon god Tiamat to the Victorians laying the transatlantic telegraph cable to the Manhattan Project giving birth to a new age of fear and awareness. The 'psychedelic century'? That’s the here and now that’s just beginning, and the more our technology graduates us to the alchemical act of creation, the closer humanity comes to confronting 'the cosmic mystery that we are.' Heavy and heady stuff, and a pleasant counterpoint to the doom and gloom of the average transhumanist cybergrumps whose future-thinking seems improbably grounded in the limited perceptions of the present."

– Consequence of Sound, "Moogfest Review: 25 Best Performances"

Listen to this talk on the Psychedelic Salon Podcast.

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UPCOMING EVENTS

(Full Calendar Here)

"Our responses to psychedelic experience represent a case study in our response to a transhuman, transpersonal, or posthuman condition...a signature of these varied and incessantly ineffable experiences has been what I will call the 'ecodelic' insight: the sudden and absolute conviction that the psychonaut is involved in a densely interconnected ecosystem for which contemporary tactics of human identity are insufficient."

- Richard Doyle, Darwin's Pharmacy, pp19-20

New Time-Lapse & Live Music Videos • Collab with Tourmaline Todd • Mural in Progress • Festival Announcements

“Technology reflects who we are. If we want to have better technology, we must be better people.”

– Nikola Danaylov
(Review the Future Podcast, Episode 57)

Thank you for reading this...you are the one for whom this work is made.

If you have any questions, say hello.  I'm always glad to hear from you!

love,
Michael

– Music – Paintings – Writing – Talks –

Beyond Duality - POV Live Painting Time Lapse

Watch on YouTube
Free Downloads: Narration | Music
Buy a print of "New Age Cleopatra"

What happens when we cease identifying Nature as something outside of us?  What will our culture look like when we see our cities and our songs as something Earth is doing?  This video features my Google Glass first-person footage while live painting my own vision of a future in which "made" and "born" are not two separate categories, narrated by an excerpt from one of my talks on human evolution and transpersonal psychology, and scored by music improvised on acoustic guitar and looping pedals as a performance of this new cybernetic nondual paradigm.

"Really" featuring Jenuine Cello

Watch on Youtube

Download music (pay what you like)

I've been waiting years to grab a solid video of this song, one of my favorites – it goes deep, says a lot in few words, and has a lovely funky little break in the bridge that opens up this modest number into something truly groovy.  Superb accompaniment by my friend and frequent co-conspirator, Jenuine Cello.

Recorded live on Febuary 4th at the monthly live looping residency Jen and I have held at Strange Brew Loungeside, Austin's finest listening room, for 14 months now.  (Incidentally, you can now like the Loopers' Night fan page on Facebook or join our Facebook group for more direct participation.)

Lyrics:

Nothing ever goes away, really

It only ever changes shape.

Innumerable masks and shades peeling

off your only lover's face.

We grieve and overcome the late

weeping, stranded in an elder age

but everything has been exchanged

sealing the gone in all that still remains...

We have traded blood and even if you die

no flood can wash away the sky.

In the cold and mud we're left asking why

but love will only answer, "I AM"

We lean on battered hearts and faint

weakened, wounded for the want of taste

but nothing ever leaves or stays, here

cuz Heaven permeates all space...

"Living Ships"
New Small Studio Collaboration with Tourmaline Todd

12"x16" – studio – oil and acrylic paints on canvas
Buy a print of "Living Ships"

Really getting into more collaboration paintings this year (check my Instagram for more on that) – this one, my homie Tourmaline Todd let me take home and finish.  I really like the opportunity to catch the pass and bring it home across those last few yards, to use an awkward football metaphor for art...the markers lend themselves quite well to finishing and detail work.

This piece is one of several in a new "best of" collaborations section in my store.

Mural in Progress

Not much to say about this one except I'm having a blast working on something bigger!  This painting is on the curved ceiling of a friend's camper here in Austin – about seven feet wide or so.

 I've taken little clips of time-lapse video on my phone using Lapse It Pro for Android and a magnetic-footed Joby Gorillapod, which I'll be sharing soon.  That's a gift you can expect to keep on giving – expect 1080p time-lapse videos to be a thing, now.  :)

Upcoming Events

All that hard work's finally beginning to pay off – the quality of festivals inviting me to join them this year is amazing, and I now curate not one but TWO monthly gigs in Austin (Loopers' Night and Paint Jam) that are each unique and excellent in their own right.

Highlights:  I'm presenting on technoshamanism and teaching an interactive live looping workshop at this year's Moogfest in Durham, North Carolina.  And I'm playing music at Boom Festival's Chillout Gardens in Portugal this August!  Hot damn, folks – if you'll be at either of these, hit me up...

I'd love to know where YOU think I should be this year – check out my calendar and let me know if you think anything is missing!