New Live Tracks & Feature by The Untz | New Jellyfish Painting & Collab with Tourmaline Todd | Podcasts & Interviews Galore! | New Articles for Globalish

Photo by Clay Collins at Firefly Gathering 2015

Wow.  

This summer has already been so powerful and awesome!  Things are really moving, settling into new configurations.  Just when I thought I was done with festivals, two of my old steadies – Firefly and Sonic Bloom – restored my faith in the power and potential of small, intentional celebrations and in my ability to meaningfully contribute to them.

And having a job I really believe in – my work writing for Globalish.com – liberates the art and music from the hustle that have kept them down for years.  All of my work has been transformed by the focused creativity-as-spiritual-practice that Globalish provides, and puts it all within a greater context of serving everybody-all-at-once by pointing past our stories to the peace within which everything exists.

I'll have much, much more to share about them both in the next newsletter.  But while I'm getting photos taken of the latest paintings, rendering my talks and concerts, and catching my breath at home in Austin, here is plenty to enjoy.  Take care and stay in touch!

New Live Tracks & Feature by TheUntz.com

Videos from my Loopers' Night residency at the acclaimed Strange Brew Lounge in Austin, Texas – featuring visuals by the audioreactive Synesthesia software, and a guest performance by my beloved Nicole Taylor on viola.  Download these tracks for free here.

"Haunting, introspective electroacoustic magic...These spacey compositions take on new life as [Michael] rearranges, builds, and deconstructs them on-stage."

– The Untz

Watch in HD on Youtube

Watch in HD on Youtube

New Live Painting:
"Watermelon Tourmaline Medusa"

Share on FB | Buy Prints

Oil & Acrylic pens on canvas (18"x24")
Available – email with inquiries

Painted live at Kerrville Folk Festival 2015 during Rj Cowdery, Joe Crookston / Milagrito Records, Ellis Delaney, The Don Juans, & Amy Speace and at Parish Austin for Art Seen Alliance Presents FKJ, BRANX, Diamond Cuts, & Lefty

Read about this painting and view it through a magnifying lens.

New Collab w/ Todd Shepherd (Available)

New Painted Hat (Sold)

New Writing for Globalish

Hip Hop's Latest Psychedelic Turn: Dig A$AP Rocky's Hopeful, Romantic "L$D"
There’s always going to be a niche for guns and hos and other adolescent bluster, but it’s looking more and more ridiculous with every passing day. When we’re confronted with the Mystery of Being and open our lives to make more room for it – as seems to be the case for A$AP Rocky – we’re forced to recognize how little nourishment there is in our old games of separation...

Lampooning The Global Addiction to Self: Open Mike Eagle's "Celebrity Reduction Prayer"

More of us are waking up to how we’re squandering our lives on self-obsession. Learning this does not mean turning victim’s rage upon the few who manage to exploit the many’s pride and avarice, in adolescent bids for power. The market only follows the demand, and all we have to do to slay the dragon at the other end of this perceived conspiracy is stop investing so much energy and money on a “self-and-other” story that is dubious at best...

Time, Space, Ego: Is "Change Gonna Come" Because That's What I Am?

Self and world change together as a matter of necessity, since self and world are only separated as an artifact of our perception, tuned to keep one part of our experience consistent for as long as possible. Wisdom is in knowing this, and seeing past the revelation that the self and world both change to notice what unchanging deeper mystery contains them...

Sex & Psychedelics: Are We Ready To See Through Separation For Good?

What psychedelics teach us – and what we continue to mistranslate in our bid to “bring the world together” – is that nothing’s separate, never was, and all this back-and-forth is sheer creative play: a universe that can, and so it must, explore the sense of being selves and others...

Challenging The Nature/City Boundary With "Urban Geodes"

Something’s changed in recent years as scientific understanding of our planet’s systems deepened to the point where we can not pretend that we are, or have ever been, a separate phenomenon from everything that we romanticize as “Nature.” We define an epoch of the planet’s life in which the actions of technology and city-dwelling Homo sapiens are actions of geology...

Soul Mates or Cell Mates?: The Blessing & The Curse of "Other" People

If boundaries are ideas, not absolute realities, then we can take them up when necessary, drop them when appropriate, arbitrate together the complexities of sharing space, and celebrate our unity more frequently than we would ever have been able to when we assumed our separation as the basis for our interactions...

Podcasts & Interviews Galore!

"This week we talk psychedelics, philosophy, and discuss whether or not evolution has a defined trajectory."

Shane Mauss is a rare bird and a blessing to the world of stand-up comedy: his jokes are informed by an abiding interest in evolutionary psychology and psychedelic philosophy. He teaches you things while you're laughing, all the while pulling off this "I had a funny thought" vibe reminiscent of late-night dorm room conversations. His podcast, Here We Are, is an awesome series of interviews with scientists and philosophers which he claims helps him research new material for his comedy routine, but also just happens to be a fantastic journey through knowledge and the open horizons of the human experience.

After some mutual friends introduced me as someone who could hold an engaging chat with him about DMT (facepalm) we met up, hit it off, and had a damn-near-three-hour conversation that takes his podcast in some pretty strange directions.

Listen to our conversation here.

I also revisited the lovely folks at Project Bring Me To Life for an hour-long video podcast, and had an accidentally super-intense interviews with Electronic Colorado and Sparkleberry Lane about my participation in this year's Sonic Bloom Festival.  All three of those were fun and offered some interesting space for surprising depth, if you find time enough to venture into them...

Some Upcoming Shows

(Full Calendar Here)

"In the late 20th century, the formative issues in digital media art were about connectivity and interaction. In this century, our post-digital objectives will increasingly be technoetic and syncretic. Formerly, there was much ado about e pluribus unum (out of many, one) – a unified culture, unified self, unified mind, unity of time and space. Now the reverse applies: ex uno plures (out of one, many) – many selves, many presences, many locations, many levels of consciousness."

– Roy Ascott, "Syncretic Art and The Technology of Consciousness"

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Help me play at

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

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

– Sparkleberry Lane (interview link)

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

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

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

SXSW Live Art Explosion!

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

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

Parallel Realities

30"x30" - paint markers on stretched canvas

original painting for sale – comment / declare interest on fb

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

Painted at:

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

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

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

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

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

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

03 14 Pure Lounge (Various Austin DJs)

03 14 Club DeVille (Tycho, Matthew Dear)

03 11 & 15 Studio

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

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

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

Right-click to view the process:

Right-click to view the detail:

Rainbow Dragons

24"x36" - paint markers on stretched canvas

original painting for sale – comment / declare interest on fb

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

Painted at:

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

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

03 17 Papa Tino's (Luke Redfield)

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

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

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

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

Right-click to view the process:

Right-click to view the detail:

 Other Festival Dates Just Announced

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

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

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

Evolver Mixtape, The Untz Challenge, & 420 Painted Flatbill

"Until one is committed, there is hesitancy, the chance to draw back...the moment one definitely commits oneself, then Providence moves too. A whole stream of events issues from the decision, raising in one's favor all manner of unforeseen incidents and meetings and material assistance, which no man could have dreamed would have come his way. Whatever you can do, or dream you can do, begin it. Boldness has genius, power, and magic in it. Begin it now."

– Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

I have some huge things to share this week – but first of all:  D'oh!  I forgot to make a list of all the shows I painted at during South By Southwest before I left for tour – so before I can share two of my favorite paintings yet, I have to get back and dig through my records for the details.  Hold tight on that – and in the meantime, here's a sneak peak courtesy of my friend Jenna Jasso:

Process pics of both paintings at various stages of completion can be found here and here.

And now onto some great news.  :)

Evolver Social Movement Mixtape Vol. I

Q:  What do Thievery Corporation, Tipper, Phutureprimitive, KiloWatts, The Nadis Warriors, Dynasty Electric, The Portal, Cualli, Greg Howard, and Michael Garfield have in common?

A:  We're all on the new benefit compilation I curated with my friend Annie Philo!

For the last few years, I've been a contributor to Reality Sandwich, an amazing online magazine featuring esoteric perspectives on our changing times.  Recently I was recruited to help them put together a futuristic mix to help support their online social network, Evolver.net.

Check out this lovely new album of music from, and for, the evolutionaries: a planetary mycelium of explorers, artists, and builders...neotribal, technoshamanic, trans-urban grooves for new humans in the next nature.

We believe in the gift economy and want to make this available to everyone...it is also an experiment in sustainably supporting a thriving transformational community, and requires your support, so please make a donation or become a member of the Evolver Social Movement.

"Acoustic instruments and organs, synthesizers and trance beats, guitar riffs and bass props; this mix has it all...
blended together perfectly for the sake of an innate groove."

- The Untz

(FYI, I'm not making any money on this project.  I'm just lucky enough to be involved.)

Please vote for me in The Untz Challenge!

I do my best to live inspired because it's the best way to be an inspiration.  The more I strive to show people the ways in which we are all participating in Something Greater, the more I feel it and live it myself.  The giving and receiving come together to form an endless braid.

So before I say anything else, the opportunity of a lifetime is before me I need your help.  Click the pic or keep reading for full details:

If you'd like to see me play for you and your friends this summer, please vote for my music at The Untz Challenge (or here's the contest page for those of you who aren't on facebook).

If I win, I get to perform at four amazing music festivals: Summer Camp, Wakarusa, Sonic Bloom, and Electric Forest. It'd be the culmination of over a decade of tireless effort to bring my music to a new audience of appreciators – and it'll be a great counterbalance, to offer my improvised instrumental prayerformances as a glen of peace amidst the raging grimy beats.

"Golden Hour," the track I entered in this competition, is one of my finer moments – you can listen to it here.

Not only will I give everyone who votes for me a copy of the entire unreleased hour-long "Ratatat & Sigur Ros in bed" set featuring "Golden Hour"...if I win, I'll also improvise a completely unique set at each festival, record it, and make that available for free to everyone as well.

"[Michael] is leading the charge in bringing a more human and soulful aspect back to electronic music."

– Jason White, aka Zympht

(I'll also give discounts on my prints to anyone who helps me spread the word.)

And I'm not just in this for me.  I'll use my opportunity to invite hoopers, live painters, and other performers on stage to collaborate.  Success is supposed to be shared and I want a circus up there with me if I win!

For example, here's a pic of me playing at the DMT RMX party during SXSW with Teresa Cantu doing live painting ballet (Listen to this on the Evolver Mix, if you're curious.):

I want to spend my life doing this.  Your help is HUGELY appreciated.  Like, "I'll never forget this" appreciated.  So please vote, and get your friends to vote...and let me know about it, so I can hook everyone up with those unreleased tracks!

Another "Dope" Hat

Like/Comment on FB

I guess it was only a matter of time before this got literal.  Click on the picture for a closer view of all the sticky details...it's not like I really want to keep making these, but I really won't mind if you want me to do an encore in your favorite colors.  Just shoot me an email...

...and of course, there is still time to preorder the embroidered flatbill I did in collaboration with Grassroots California.  Details on that here.

Thanks again for your time. Don't hesitate to write, and have a beautiful day!

New Paintings from Papadosio, Burning Man, STS9 – and Vinyl Stickers!

"One doesn't discover new lands without consenting to lose sight of the shore for a very long time."

- André Gide

"In their daily life, all are braver than they know."

- Henry David Thoreau

My adventure at Burning Man 2011 was a success.  I played five concerts in an inhospitable desert environment, including one as "opening act" for living legend John Perry Barlow and one improvising the score for an aerial dance showcase; spoke to a packed house at Red Lightning Camp and sat in on a now-annual panel discussion with my friends Daniel Pinchbeck and Mitch Mignano; and helped hold it down at the kick-ass new visionary art camp, Fractal Nation Village in my own modest way.  More importantly, however, I helped friends new and old navigate their own rites of passage, and they helped me through my own.  I wrote a short note about it you can read here, if you like.

The music and talks will all be ready to share in time for the next newsletter...

In the meantime, here are the latest offerings from my visual universe.  Click any image to enlarge:

New Vinyl Stickers!

2"x6" die-cut vinyl indoor/outdoor stickers

$3 each or $10 for five (shipping included)

(to order, use the "donate" link at my blog – leave your address

and the name of the prints in a note when you check out)

This is the closest thing I have to a slogan – I came up with it in 2008 as a retort to the argument that capitalism could not continue to grow unchecked, because obviously if we trade in ideas we can have a closed-loop material infrastructure and continue to expand exponentially into the imagination.  Or maybe I'm wrong.  But insofar as the invisible environment of one age becomes the conscious canvas of the next, I do think it's time we took a lead from Terence McKenna and Bucky Fuller, and started treating our planetary problems as shortages of imagination.  There's always an overlooked perspective that solves even the most impossible paradoxes...and now you can share that insight with anyone who sees the back of your laptop.  Maybe – just maybe – this will help us reach critical mass.

River Dragon

2011 08 24 Hodi's Half Note & 2011 08 26 The Fox

(Papadosio, Damn Right)

24"x36" - paint markers on stretched canvas

signed 11"x17" poster prints $20/1 $30/2 plus $5 s/h

(to order, use the "donate" link at my blog – leave your address

and the name of the prints in a note when you check out)

original painting negotiable – serious inquiries, email me

I just finished reading David Wade's excellent Crystal and Dragon: The Cosmic Dance of Symmetry and Chaos in Art, Nature, and Consciousness – basically, a thorough overview of the ways that crystalline and fluid patterns have alternately dominated human art, religion, and philosophy.  Wade contrasts the intensely crystalline tradition of Islam, with its emphasis on extraordinarily precise geometries as a way of pointing to the ultimate reality of divine perfection, and the chaotic tradition of Taoism, with its emphasis on the light and motion of water, gnarled pines, and other ephemeral natural phenomena as a way of pointing to the ultimate reality of the ever-changing Tao.

He turned me on to an an awesome new term:  "shang shui," or "mountain-water," the name for an entire school of Chinese painting that praises the fluid forms of nature.  To the shang shui tradition of painters, it's less important that you capture the exact shape of a thing than its motion, life, and essence...and by that criterion, I identify with this tradition.  "River Dragons" is an attempt to connect with the vitality of this lineage and their higher truth.

Fiestaraptor

2011 09 01 Burning Man - Fractal Nation Village

(Imagika Om, Janover, Ganga Giri, Future Simple Project, Sub Swara, FreQ Nasty, Opiuo, LowRIDERz, PussyMonster, Heyoka)

24"x36" - paint markers on stretched canvas

signed 11"x17" poster prints $20/1 $30/2 plus $5 s/h

(to order, use the "donate" link at my blog – leave your address

and the name of the prints in a note when you check out)

original painting negotiable – serious inquiries, email me

Most of y'all know I was trained as a paleontologist and scientific illustrator, and every once in a while I try to bring my old life into my new life.  I get the feeling, after working on paintings like this one, that I'm not doing it frequently enough.  Somewhere between festival culture and museum culture lives "Fiestaraptor," the painting I made during Fractal Nation's opening night of all-star programming at Burning Man.

(For the record, I'm still kind of ambivalent about the idea of a big-budget production theme camp at what is supposed to be a radically-participatory event...putting on huge concerts out there seems to support spectator culture and ends up being a weird badge of pride for the producers, when what I really love about Burning Man is the emergent, collaborative, collective, personal, intimate, and weird experiences everyone creates together that cannot be reproduced anywhere else.  That said, this was basically a party put on by my friends, and it was an honor to contribute to it.)

While I was working on this piece, I was also responsible for keeping people out of the backstage area – so there was a lot of "bouncer" energy that went into it.  Sometimes I had to use my longer-than-Tyrannosaurus arms and actually grab people and pull them while they were jumping over the gate.  I can't help but think it influenced this intense, roaring, guardian vibe this one radiates.  Maybe, also, the fact that Tribe 13's unprecedentedly awesome sixty-foot dome visionary art gallery was just two hundred feet away had something to do with it.  I didn't see any ayahuasca-sauruses when I was down in Peru last March, but Lord knows Tyrannosaurus is one of my spirit animals...

STS9 Red Rocks 2011 (Guerrilla Poster)

signed 11"x17" poster prints $20/1 $30/2 plus $5 s/h

(to order, use the "donate" link at my blog – leave your address

and the name of the prints in a note when you check out)

My latest foray into hybridizing the hand-painted work with basic digital layering techniques to create something that shines with the best of both worlds, this piece alloys work from The Manifestation Celebration, Bear Creek Festival, and Electric Forest Festival.  It wasn't quite a full moon when STS9 showed up to rock Colorado's most legendary sandstone slabs, but close...so I worked to make something that conveyed what a lot of people were probably feeling (maybe even seeing) that weekend, crowded between the rocks and gazing into the extraordinary fullness of theater and the sky beyond.

This is a signed and numbered series of 75 prints and I have a few left, if anyone would like one.

Press

First, here's an entertaining short interview with me about my crazy path from biologist to vagabond-artist by precocious and inspirational video blogger Kevin May (aka Phil Osophical). I had the pleasure of meeting Kevin last month at Papadosio's Rootwire Festival and was happy to talk while we ran to the bathrooms in the crescendo of anticipation right before they burned the Man...the excitement is palpable all around us as Kevin and I run from my panel discussion to the bathrooms:

In music news, taste-making electronic dance music site TheUntz.com just gave my latest album, A Million Anniversaries, a sterling review – especially cool, given it's not really EDM:

"It takes creativity to make the next step in a newer, more shocking direction, but it takes a visionary to go beyond the breaking point and meet music on the other end of the spectrum. That’s what Michael Garfield does."

(read the whole review here)

Musician and blogger Skinny Hendrix also gave me a feature on his site and had some kind things to say about that same album.  It's always a special pleasure to find approval from a fellow artist:

"Beautiful soundscapes....Garfield has a dynamic ability to express himself on the acoustic guitar and to allow the listener to climb inside of his head and connect with him on a deep level."

(read the whole review here)

...and while it's not exactly a review, this lovely poem by my friend Sofia was inspired by the album and is a kind of tribute:  "The Dripping Place"

Enjoy!  Thanks to everyone for your time, attention, and support.  It takes a planetary village to raise the emergent starchild of the human "superorganism."  We're all in this together.