New Prog Folk Single "Indecision" • Live Notes from #IPFest 2019 • Upcoming Shows • New Archaeopteryx Painting • Secret Future Fossils Episodes

Happy summer, everybody!  We're well into the hot months, and insofar as life is the spontaneous formation of order for the dissipation of excess energy, I've been an actively engaged in the metabolism of our cosmos – making more art and music, I fear, than you can actually absorb.

So be it.  May this love's labor find you on a good day, when you're looking for some fresh and interesting stuff.  We seem to have less time for taking in new art and music than we did when this blog started in 2009, but I'm convinced the work just keeps on getting better, and I'm honored that I get to share it with you.

In this newsletter:  new (and very different) music; new live art (both analog and digital); two Future Fossils Podcast episodes (on time loops and on driverless hotel rooms); and a secret stash of never-to-be-aired recordings.

Enjoy, and write back any time,

Michael

New Song: "Indecision"

"Mars Volta meets what Dave Matthews might hear after trying DMT? I love it."

- James Boswell (Ming Dynazty)

"Fantastic. Like a The Books track with extremely creative vocals."
- Anthony Thogmartin (Papadosio, Earthcry)

"It's like TOOL and Herbie Hancock had a baby."
- Matthew Foglia

"A great sonic achievement! Reminds me a lot of Peter Gabriel's best stuff."
- Norman "Dr. Blue" Katz

Free Download

In the moment before acting lies a void

where every future gleams, reflecting every other
every moment a uniquely blooming world.
In the space between two thoughts
where every other instant grows
expanding now into infinity
and every possibility unfurls...
How do you choose your next life?

I'm finally back in the saddle with the project I began way back in 1998: to join the Great Parade of visionary and alchemical songwriters, marrying acoustic and electric elements for tunes that gesture toward the singularity we live within in every moment.

Whatever else I do, the songs I've offered to this world in a handful of rare studio efforts (2006, 2008, 2014) are the sharpest and most polished work, the closest to my soul and sense of what is truly meaningful.

"Indecision," paintstakingly produced by my partner in crime Mitch Mignano, is the fruit of an epic co-creative pregnancy.  Read all about it on my Patreon account...

(Special thanks to Randal Roberts for the perfect cover art!)

Upcoming Concerts:

27 July – Santa Fe – Oxygen Bar Apothecary Restaurant

28 July – Albuquerque – House Concert in Albuquerque with Seth Hoffman

8 August – Santa Fe – Tumbleroot Distillery with Josh Glenn Experiment

New Painting: "Our Lady of the Late Jurassic"

Signed Canvas & Cardstock Prints

Here is my latest painting, "Our Lady of the Late Jurassic" - a tribute to the amazing Archaeopteryx, my spirit animal and one of history's most legendary fossil creatures – painted live at Meow Wolf for my first Santa Fe gallery show at Eye on The Mountain.  (Acrylic and oil pens on 20"x20" panel.)

Read the whole story at michaelgarfieldart.com.

Notes from InterPlanetary Festival 2019

Signed Canvas & Cardstock Prints

Last year, Santa Fe Institute's InterPlanetary Festival changed my life: this confluence of luminaries celebrating complex systems thinking and space exploration inspired me to move to Santa Fe. (Here's the free live album of my concert from last year's event.)

This year, on staff at SFI, I got to sit on stage and take live notes on a huge LED wall for some epic panels on synthetic biology, science fiction, and visionary architecture:

Check out this Google Photos album for all of the notes I took this year (both final images and time-lapse videos), plus the painting that I made on stage alongside Santa Fe's Tone Ranger:

Notes from #IPFest 2019

I highly recommend you watch the full-length videos of each discussion, with my notes unfolding in real-time behind the panelists, because those conversations rocked.  But if you aren't that curious, here's a fun 360º time-lapse of the UFO piece you can groove to in less than one minute:

Watch on YouTube

New Podcast Episodes

The latest episodes of Future Fossils cover both ends of the spectrum this show seems to span:  on one hand, Eric Wargo's brilliant take on how the future co-determines history; and on the other, Nathan Water's genius mashup of self-driving cars, technomadism, and the blockchain.

And lastly, I have finally made good on promises to drop a cornucopia of secret episodes on Patreon supporters with more than eight hours of never-to-be-aired recordings – including a totally bizarre panel discussion on the nature of time from my 2017 Australia tour, chats with a tantric instructor and a standup comic, and three other would-be episodes too weird to live, too rare to die:

Subscribe on Patreon for Secret Fossils

"If the truth is so important, then why am I in trouble for trying to find it?"
- Shane Mauss

...So Begins Another Epic Festival Summer! Live in SF, New Mindfolds, & The Lost Painting

"I think of mythology as a function of biology, a statement of the impulse system of the body and the organs. Not something that’s made up in the head. What’s made up in the head is fiction. What comes out of the heart is myth."
– Joseph Campbell

"The history of the song is based on the ballad, and the ballad is based on the narrative, and the narrative is based on the epic, and the epic is based on the anecdote.  It's all very interrelated."

– Sufjan Stevens

We start with the dissolution of boundaries, and a new complex space opens up between us...

When The Orbit Curtain Falls

Watch in 720 HD on Youtube
Download this song

My ode to the day we meet our extraterrestrial neighbors and learn to sit at the galactic Adult's Table.  Inspired by half a dozen UFO sightings at Clinton Lake, just outside of Lawrence, Kansas, in 2006 - 2007. What's not to love about our initiation into a vaster cosmic understanding than we currently imagine?

Live at The Center SF

Download this live set

Like/Comment/Share

So, I played this amazingly fun show during the solar eclipse at The Center SF on Fillmore with Cello Joe and eitch.  We were blessed with live painting by Randal Roberts and Dela and Scott Ferguson, and dancing by Cressie Mae.  If you weren't there you can download this and pretend like you were – and if you were, you can get all sentimental while we're waiting on the next one.

Also, I found out that someone recorded my entire set opening for Papadosio in Lawrence on May 1st!  (Not a bad set, either...see video above.)

And the love is still going strong for my latest EP, Yellow Leaves.  Go grab yourself a free copy of that one if you haven't already; definitely one of the most inspired instrumental sets I've ever played.

If you're curious about what inspires me:

From my recent interview on UniTiger:

"The reason I call it 'cyberacoustic' music, and the reason I understand it as a performance of a Unity paradigm, is because of how this music is inspired by my study of cybernetics, nondual spirituality, and the evolution of consciousness. Cybernetics is all about feedback loops and understanding a living organism more as a pattern of relationships with the environment – a dynamic nexus of energies – than as a discrete individual living 'in' and acting 'on' the world. By using a live microphone and a magnetic soundhole pickup my musical inputs are open to the sound coming through the speakers, so there is a chaotic sensitivity to the environment that weaves all of these unplanned variables into the creative act. Just as 99% of our decisions are not made by the conscious mind and the pursuit of a deeper-lived Unity calls us to integrate what we consider self with what we consider other, I invite the unexpected and the audience and the mechanical and architectural context of the performance into its actual musical expression as much as possible.

It’s also a way of saying that we have no clear boundary between organic/born and artificial/made, the analog and the digital, producers and consumers, past/present/future…it’s a way of preserving these distinctions while still pointing to the arch-reality in which you and I and all of this equipment are here together, now, participating as polarities within one phenomenal event. Looking at us as interpenetrating fields of influence that are also harmonics within a greater unified field. Nature and Culture, Inner and Outer worlds in an alchemical wedding."

Read the whole interview here.

The Lost Painting:

Tunnel of Glass & Ferns

Like/Comment/Share

Buy 11"x17" Prints

Started in Deerfields, North Carolina at Trinumeral 888 (and made of 8s, if you look) for EOTO and Conspirator on the day that Beijing opened the Olympics; compounded and layered in Denver, Colorado in a DIY gallery weekend throwdown in 2010; rounded out in spring of 2011 in New Orleans, where I was on a streak of working over old pieces.  Lost in New Orleans for a while.  Rediscovered.  Gifted away.

Custom Mind Folds

I'm pleased with this development, let me tell you.  Email me if you'd like to order one and I'll send you the details.  (Hats are still an option, of course.  As is pretty much anything else.)

Like/Comment/Share

Like/Comment/Share

Wow, That Happened Fast...

The festivals I'm delighted to be romping with, this summer – including a few promising upstarts:

(View my full calendar on the left sidebar here.)

Thank you for your time and your support.  We nourish each other!