No point in pretending otherwise: these are dark times. So I hope the treasures that I have to share with you help carve a bright, warm haven in the fear and loathing, and restore a sense of peace and beauty to this otherwise benighted Autumn.
NEW ACOUSTIC GUITAR EP
Let's start with some music: twelve minutes of guitar that an executive at my all-time favorite label told me was "a perfect soundtrack for an autumn morning."
Mudras, my new EP of solo fingerstyle guitar tunes, is now live on major streaming platforms. Reviews have been entirely positive; one of my friends, a fabulous guitarist, told me that it made him cry. Maybe 12-minutes of your attention doesn't make even free music exactly "free", but I hope it's the kind of listening that benefits you:
I'm also hard at work on The Age of Reunion, the insanely ambitious singer-songwriter album I've been teasing on this blog for over a decade. It's now halfway done (!) and the latest finished track, "You Don't Have To Move", is up on Patreon. Four other songs are up on Bandcamp, where you can listen to them all and pre-order the LP.
NEW LOOP LIBRARY
And for fellow musicians and sound artists, I just released a library of over 300 loops from some of my most inspired improvisations, recorded on tour across three years and three continents. This archive is organized into 65 tempo-matched scenes in a ready-to-jam Ableton Live set, but fans of other audio software can easily lift the WAV files as-is for use in Logic, ProTools, or whatever floats your boat:
NEW PODCAST EPISODES
I've been chipping away at a couple of paintings; you can follow their progress (as well as the drawings I've made in my daughter's first sketchbook and a colorful bouquet of other visual miscellany) on Instagram. But lately, much more of my time has been going into Future Fossils Podcast, which has become a totally reliable font of inspiring conversations with amazing people:
In episode 151 I talk with Jon Marro, one of the purest creative souls I’ve ever had the luck to encounter, about his relationship to time, identity, and purpose, his commitment to service and the creative life, and where he thinks we are in the Big Picture amidst all the chaos and possibility of 02020.
I speak with the ultra-talented, immediately relatable, and immensely likable Colin Frangicetto about what we’ve learned from our high-dose psychedelic experiences, from our extended and potentially crazy periods of constant synchronicity, and from traveling the world playing music and making art.
I talk with Burning Man’s resident philosopher Caveat Magister, anarchist community organizer Naomi Most, and playa trickster historian Mitch Mignano about the festival’s uneasy but remarkable transition into virtuality. We cover everything from complex systems and the evolution of the city, to the unquantifiable value of culture, to the strange ontologies emerging in our screen-bound era.
An excerpt of this conversation's transcript made it up on Lucid News, one of my favorite psychedelic culture mags, as "Can Burning Man Be Replicated Virtually?" Quick and illuminating read.
NEW WRITING & ANIMATION ON "SLEEPING BEAUTIES"
My first long-form article for Long Now, "Sleeping Beauties of Prehistory and the Present Day," explores five new discoveries, in the fossil record and in living organisms, that interrogate the boundary between the living and the dead...
...and, poetically, at the same time I was writing that I was assigned to produce a new animation for the Santa Fe Institute about what Sidney Redner learned from his survey of 110 years of physics papers — and why some scientific discoveries (what Redner calls "sleeping beauties") take so long to get noticed:
I'll part with the friendly reminder to help keep everybody safe with proper face masks. If somehow you've made it all the way to Autumn 02020 without one of these — or you just want to level up your style — check out the four designs I have up at Idea Fab Labs. You can select from head straps (which I like) or ear loops (if that's more your kind of thing) and each contains a pocket for a fancy filter, if you want to take your safety measures all the way:
Hello, friends and friendly strangers. Life has been very full...it's been a while, but I hope you agree this is a substantial and nutritious mind-meal for you to connect to the sublime and wonderful amidst the hardship and confusion of our blip in history. May it enrich you! Write back any time...
First off, I got a new gig (on top of my job at the Santa Fe Institute) working as Community Manager for The Long Now Foundation, an organization devoted to the cultivation of deep time thinking. Long Now was one of the main inspirations for Future Fossils Podcast. I'm so excited that they have decided to take some of my short writing from their members-only Facebook group and use it to help revive their blog! It's one of the oldest on the Web and features copious contributions from heavyweights like Stewart Brand, Kevin Kelly, and Brian Eno, so I'm once again a hummingbird flitting amidst majestic goliaths.
Here are the first few links I've curated and framed for their readership, and for you:
Speaking of time and movement, next week I'll release my first EP of avant-fingerstyle guitar—a journey through 17 years of intermittent composition and my deep practice with what Philip Toshio Sudo called, in one of the most influential books I've ever read, Zen Guitar.
Mudras is twelve minutes long but unfathomably deep. In it the fans of Michael Hedges, Kaki King, Tim Reynolds, and the Candyrat Records school will find familiar purchase—and everybody else will find surprise and novelty and feeling and precise dynamic passage.
In the same spirit but at far greater length and with far greater intimacy, I just drafted the fourth (and final?) installment in my essay series on The Evolution of Surveillance, tracing sensory and cognitive arms races back half a billion years and forward into our very weird future.
"The Evolution of Surveillance, Part Four: Augments & Amputees" is about how I started thinking about deep time in the first place, how my time as a Google Glass Explorer came to an end, what it was like to detox from a dinosaur-hunting augmented reality game, and why we have to be careful about letting corporations control our prosthetic extensions. It's a Patreon exclusive, for now.
Meanwhile at SFI, I occasionally get to have some fun with making "whiteboard" style animations for new science publications (like this one on the math of parking or this one on animal communication and information theory).
The latest was an animated rap by visionary architect Ann Pendleton-Jullian on the layers of complex networks that make up a city, all of which we'll have to consider when we start making permanent habitats on other worlds. This was a totally delightful project. Watch it here:
Here are all of the new Future Fossils Podcasts since the last update, including some of the very best this show has had in its 150 episodes so far — including author-read audio of the first four parts of my book-in-progress, How To Live in The Future; a soulful conversation about leadership in times of uncertainty with Sahana Chattopadyay; a totally mind-boggling and truly profound four-way on cultural somatics with Tada Hozumi, Dare Sohei, and Naomi Most; and a deep dive into a rigorous and promising new meta-theory for UFOs and other weird phenomena with Sean Esbjörn-Hargens:
Lastly, we just had two wonderful discussions in the Future Fossils Book Club on the Lilith's Brood trilogy by Octavia E. Butler — conversations that could not be more timeless, and more timely. I hope that you will join us for more deep and meaningful discourse like these two calls:
