New Paintings From Sonic Bloom & Custom Hat Frenzy

"I have been possessed by a great yearning to go and find, far from men and far from toil the place where dwell the vast forces that cradle us and possess us, where my overtense activity might indefinitely become more relaxed...To me in turn, as to all the sons of man, it was speaking as every generation hears it speak; it was begging me to surrender myself unreservedly to it,

and to worship it."

– Pierre Teilhard de Chardin

(paleontologist-theologian & my patron saint)

While you're browsing my recent live paintings from my now-annual stint as Sonic Bloom Festival's live art gallery coordinator, enjoy this dinosaur-skeleton-inspired number from my recent gig at the Dallas Natural History Museum.  It's free track on my new album, A Million Anniversaries: CyberAcoustic Guitar For Lovemaking – a 94-minute voyage through America's sacred landscapes and the hyperspace of improvised acoustic-electronic music...

Watch it in HD on Youtube / Vimeo!

Next week, I'll have the memory reel from this year's awesome twelve-person live art lineup at Sonic Bloom (because I had so much fun making the video for the Wakarusa live art team).  But for now, here is the latest harvest of psychedelic art – you can click on each image to view it full-size:

Sigil Egg

2011 06 10, 11 Tribal Convergence (SunDragon, Manoj, Mazeguider, Solus, Cohen)

& 2011 06 26 Sonic Bloom Festival (Tipper, Signal Path, Future Simple, An-Ten-Nae)

opaque pens on tempered hardboard – 24"x24"

signed 11"x17" posters – $20/each or two for $30 (plus $5 s/h) – email me to order

check availability of the original painting

Starting with the automatic writing (aka "channeled text," aka "light language"): The first layer of seemingly meaningless symbols, the closest I've ever come to direct translation of the grooves and melodic strains of live music, are constantly re-identified by friendly strangers as some kind of angelic script.  To me it's free jazz – honing the razor edge of my intuitive spontaneity until I can move with the music like one wing in flight.

And yeah, ongoing pine cone obsession.  (And yeah, there were pine cones everywhere at TideWater Falls during Tribal Convergence – a remarkable congregation of intentional creatives from across the Western U.S. and a weekend of potent practical idea-sharing as well as celebration...)  And the seven-sided star ties this piece back to my pine cone painting from Wakarusa through the archetype of the Virgin Mother (the number seven is historically associated with indivisibility/purity/virginity).

As cloud chamber tracings of a different kind of wild pure energy laps like waves around the protective sigil, the prayer of the scribbled glossolalia blanket and illumine the sleeping cone/egg...

Erosion

2011 06 24 Sonic Bloom Festival (Zilla, MartyParty, Break Science, Prophet Massive)

opaque pens on stretched canvas – 24"30"

signed 11"x17" posters – $20/each or two for $30 (plus $5 s/h) – email me to order

check availability of the original painting

The latest in my ongoing exploration of incompleteness – letting each new layer cover a smaller and smaller area and thus leaving the entire process out in the open.  Must be a holdover from my paleontology years, my fascination with fossilization and sedimentology: how the dead dinosaur is covered by mud layer by layer, then its bones replaced by minerals layer by layer, then the fossil bones eroding back out with wind and time after millions of years...

Expect more of these:

Sound Pond

2011 06 25 Sonic Bloom Festival (Octopus Nebula, David Starfire, Tipper, EOTO, Vibesquad)

opaque pens on tempered hardboard – 24"x32"

signed 11"x17" posters – $20/each or two for $30 (plus $5 s/h) – email me to order

check availability of the original painting

Keywords: topographic map, sound waves, interstitial, canyons, corduroy, myosin, rain, onions, cross-section, terraces.

Special notice to the white highlights on white banding that gives the whole thing a much more sculptural feel:

Custom Hats!

Hand-painted and waterproofed, each hat completed in a state of sensitivity to the buyer's natural energy and personal disposition.  Like with body painting, these hats create a savored opportunity for me to connect with people on a kind of profound and mysterious level.

If you'd like one, write me with your specifications: budget, colors and patterns, and whether you have a hat already or need me to find you a particular size and style.  Got a couple of relatively mellow weeks ahead of me – plenty of time to make you something beautiful.

for Allison

for Caleb

for Sarah

uncommissioned – check availability & details

And that's not even touching on the beautiful work from last week's Electric Forest Festival – where the vivid, swirling nightscape of color-shifting LEDs and blacklights on endless branches seeped into me for some of my most otherworldly art to date.  More on that next week.  :)

The First Of A Busy Summer's Fruit

2009 05 30 & 31 Sail Inn & Rhythm Room (Endoplasmic & Black Moth Super Rainbow)

16x24 - masonite - available

My last painting from Phoenix...a poignant few nights. Endoplasmic is a band of national-level talent mysteriously stuck playing local gigs...going out alone to paint for them at the Sail Inn for probably the last time was a strange, quiet affair amidst all of the jamming. Black Moth Super Rainbow the next night co-headlined a show with School of Seven Bells. The latter made me turn off my lamp during their set (a first-ever for that one...but then again, they'd just come off a European tour, if you know what I mean). But the former were more pleased than anyone ever has been to have me...an adorably nerdy ensemble, very friendly and very real, the frontman sitting cross-legged onstage below crowd eye level and the girl drummer anonymized and androgynized behind a ninja costume. They said they were happy to have something else for people to pay attention to. This painting is the sequel to the painting from Zilla and Glitch Mob's NYE 2008 run at The Fox Theatre in Boulder...another tentacled alien god shimmering into the foreground from some oceanic mindscape.

2009 06 11 & 13 Crosstown Station & Jardine's (The New Mastersounds & Jacob Fred Jazz Odyssey)
20x20 - canvas - available

After checking out both The New Mastersounds and JFJO at Wakarusa, to paint for them both again in Kansas City the week after was a summer-synchronous treat. Jardine's - the Odyssey's favorite KC jazz club haunt, tucked away over the green shoulders of the Country Club Plaza - is the classiest spot I've seen in this town...although I'm sure they're playing had something to do with how much I reveled in the find. This is the last in a trilogy of twenty-inch circular canvases...it falls somewhere between the first's crystal structure and the second's leafiness. An integration.

2009 06 17 & 23 501 Club & Quixotes (Brad Senne, Luke Redfield & Zuvuya)
16x24 - masonite - available

After extensive preparatory background work, I started this one on my first night touring my music through Minneapolis. I'd just set up the easel to paint during the other two acts (my friend Luke, a fine folk musician, had hooked up the gig) when I realized I'd locked my keys in the car. Luckily one of the friendly locals let me use her AAA membership to call a locksmith...but only after I'd broken off a cocktail stirrer in the door trying to break in with the power of sheer dumb chance. Until I was able to dig the plastic piece out later that week, I had to walk around the car to unlock it every time. Mildly tragicomic. Minneapolis is BEAUTIFUL. A garden city, lakes and trees and footpaths and bohemia and strange elegant sweeping architecture. Most of this painting, however, was completed in Denver at Quixotes', where I was granted the honor of opening for Zuvuya (Michael Travis and Jamie Janover's acoustic dance jam band with Xander Greene on nylon string guitar and guest Garrett Sayers of The Motet on delicious bass). There were five painters crowding the venue's entire south wall that night...I'll have much more to say about that show in the next entry when I'll finally have finished mixing the recordings of my show that night. For now, suffice it to say that I'm not sure if that jellyfish has more to do with my friend and fellow live painter Kayla Andreano's jellyfish obsession (I'd been staying with her that week, talking jellyfish A LOT) or that these beautiful stinging beasts are the unofficial mascot of Michael Travis' home team, The String Cheese Incident (who were playing a private rehearsal for their forthcoming reunion at Rothbury Festival the next night, and cheesy anticipation was in the air).

2009 06 25 B Side Lounge (Jacob Fred Jazz Odyssey feat Fareed Haque) - collab with Todd Shepherd and Kayla Andreano
30x30 - canvas - available
I loved the look on the faces of JFJO when they saw me show up to paint for them for the third time in three weeks in three different states. :) Half the show I spent preparing the painting below for further work at Sonic Bloom Festival the next day, but the other half of the show I spent in pure artistic bliss on my first live collaboration with Kayla and "Tourmaline" Todd Shepherd. We were all so stupified by what emerged from between the three of us that we stared at this painting for over an hour after the show, mumbling dumbfounded partial sentences. Also, this is the only painting I've ever stepped on. We (mostly Todd and Kayla) spent a good chunk of the afternoon preparing the canvas with layer after layer of paint, and at one point Kayla and I painted our feet and walked a few circles around it...unfortunately all that remains visible of that are a few stray toeprints.

2009 06 25 & 26 B Side Lounge & Sonic Bloom Festival (Jacob Fred Jazz Odyssey feat. Fareed Haque & Lynx and Janover, Anasia, EOTO + Kang + Kyle)
20x30 - canvas panel - available

Fareed Haque's guitars and equipment were put on the wrong plane and ended up in Wichita the night of this Boulder gig, so he had the audience clap along instead of laying down live loops. Of course they were all a bunch of musical laypeople with a few drinks down, so the rhythm was dubious...I took the initiative and clapped and danced as cheerleader to help everyone keep the beat. Later Fareed let me know how much he appreciated the energy I helped bring to the evening (both as cheerleader and painter) and ok'ed me to paint for his band Garaj Mahal at 10,000 Lakes Festival in a few weeks. Yay! As for the night I completed this painting, what can I say about this year's (and my first) Sonic Bloom Festival except that Mishawaka Amphitheatre is one of my favorite venues in the world, and you should go there. I'm sure the canyon river right behind the stage and the beautiful blue skies had a direct influence on the "vibration" of my paintings. And of course I feel I produce better work when painting for world-class musicians.

2009 06 27 Sonic Bloom Festival (Boombox, Big Gigantic, Sasha Rose, Zilla)
20x30 - canvas panel - available

Krystle Smith and I were responsible for assembling a visionary art gallery at this year's Sonic Bloom, which we put together (with lots of help) on the indoor stage at Mishawaka. We moved all of the lounge's couches up onto the stage and made it a sweet elevated chill spot with art sprouting from every direction – including the diagonal ceiling, where I had a row of my own paintings attached with velcro (making the gallery kind of a danger zone...a few times they fell off and nearly beaned somebody...but because of weak adhesive, not the velcro itself). Anyway, this painting is about the closest I've ever come to making a "Krystle Smith" painting. Lots of layers, lots of blue, lots of simple floating elements and hexagonal geometry. At one point I accidentally smeared the green paint on one of those fronds, but ended up smearing the other fronds as well and it acquired a very painterly effect that was previously impossible for me to attain with markers. I'll probably do more "destructive" smearing like this in the future. And DEFINITELY more painting on gradients.

2009 06 27 Sonic Bloom Festival (Random Rab, Bassnectar, Mochipet)
20x30 - canvas panel - available

Each of these bubbles was painted in advance with Wildfire brand UV ultra-white paint, the kind they use for film backdrops (apparently). When you hit this one with a blacklight everything inverts and the bubbles all glow a profound luminous blue. It's totally sweet...I picked up a 9 UV LED flashlight while living in Arizona (at the Walgreens, billed as a "scorpion finder" because the chitin in their shells is UV-reactive) and would occasionally dip out of "normal light mode" and into "UV light mode" while working on this one as an additional layer of strangeness for the audience. I hope whomever ends up with this painting puts it in the same room as a lava lamp.

2009 06 28 Sonic Bloom Festival (Tipper, David Starfire, Beats Antique, Heyoka)
20x30 - canvas panel - available

Harkening back to simpler days, this one. It kind of reminds me of a logging mill, eating away at the fabric of spacetime itself. By this point in the weekend I'd worked myself pretty raw, so I consider this painting an example of what happens when I'm "frame-dragging" (the computing term...although had this been framed at the time, I'd probably have been so tired I'd have been dragging it around).

2009 07 02 Rothbury Festival (Toubab Krewe, Keller Williams, Lotus)
18x24 - canvas panel - available

Rothbury was a very different live painting experience from my residencies at Wakarusa and Sonic Bloom. I was working from the crowd the entire weekend – and even then, only out of a sense of artistic duty, because I was first and foremost there to spend time with a rarely-assembled group of friends. But I still managed to squeeze in some learning, especially as regards preparing panels with various paints and sprays (thanks to Tourmaline Todd for suggesting I use silver spray paint for stars). I'm not normally a big Keller Williams fan (he's too glib for my tastes) but he put on a killer trance party that day. And Toubab Krewe jammed out on "Billie Jean." All was well in the world.

2009 07 03 Rothbury Festival (String Cheese Incident)
18x24 - canvas panel

This one was painted from the hill above The Odeum, Rothbury's main stage (capacity somewhere around 50,000 people?), where my friends and I squatted for the headliners each night right in front of the giant wicker-and-Christmas-lights Rothbury sign (each letter in the word was about eight feet tall...an excellent landmark, and right next to the water refill station). I can't express how difficult it was for me to make this...the first String Cheese Incident show I'd ever legitimately attended (if you don't count the time my girlfriend and I scaled the mountain behind Red Rocks to catch their last show in 2007 for free), and all I wanted to do was dance, my feet were dancing out from underneath me, I wanted to throw myself down the hill and into the heaving costumed flesh festival but I'd pre-sold this painting to some friends weeks before the festival and had to be responsible in the most inopportune moment. Somehow I think the tension helped with a graceful execution, and in person the silver spraypaint gives the whole piece a luminous quality, as if looking up through the waves to the rippling sunlight above. I'm happy with the results, but finally had to admit that calling my live art blog "Painting While Dancing" is a bit of a misnomer, because it was impossible for me to really get down and work on this at the same time. It was an evening of five minute breaks and intense yearning.

Album Review: Lynx's Grain of Sand

My first album review is for a friend, Boulder golden child and multi-talented sweetheart Caitlin DeMuth, aka Lynx. At twenty two, Lynx demonstrates a savvy that is utterly beyond my understanding - she stands at the nexus of the suave and endearingly dorky, the clever and the sincere, and has a fireball career to show for it. She's a minor legend in the Western States - a status she earned through numerous choice guest appearances with acts such as Zilla, Matisyahu, Kid Beyond, and The String Cheese Incident. With her new debut independent album, Grain of Sand, she seems ready to meet a new cohort of admirers with her characteristic cool, warmth, authenticity, and wit.

For those of you unfamiliar with Lynx, Grain of Sand might seem a bit weird: it's simultaneously slack and precise, humble and innovative. Her invented genre, "folktronica," seems to capture this specific fondness for holding opposing perspectives. Many of these songs might be standard girl-on-guitar fare, until she breaks into slam poetry and beatboxing, or until her skillful producers (Live PA heads G.S.P.) screw in some haunting synthesizers or fragments of glitchy percussion, embedding her café numbers into something suddenly danceable.

This slight twist is enough to warrant a closer listening - and for someone like me who usually doesn't get around to the words until the second or third spin, this is a blessing, because her lyrics are often subtle, intelligent, and inspiring. Grain of Sand is full of tricky little bits, delivered with trained cadence: "Above us and below us there is only sky," "Half full and she's nearly empty," "There's no such thing as forbidden anything," "It never has been us versus them."

She coopts "Generation Yes" from the Christian ministries to describe a "Movement Underground" that is "bigger than the scene," and reminds us that if you want to see a better world, you can't sit around dreaming but "gotta get your hands dirty, gotta dig for your purpose." Elsewhere, she muses favorably on causing "a riot - or better yet, change" - making a distinction that betrays her post-adolescent, post-summer-of-love sensibility (rare among those so similarly idealistic). And to my glee, she drops a mention of the constellation Pleiades - the "Seven Sisters," a celestial homebase for various watery myths of hens, maids, and aquatic aliens - into her song "Waters Rising."

The music itself is simple but solid. Her precise, choirgirl beatboxing hovers in just the right vocal range for the DJ noises she emulates, and her alternately thick-tongued and airy intonation is fabulously endearing. She raps a lot harder than she sings, and the occasional abrupt change of pace from wispy verse to outspoken bridge took me some getting used to. But one look at artist sAne's cover art for this album and it makes more sense.

His portrait is stargazing and wistful, rendered in earthtones with an urban sensibility, the right colors but a slightly strange shape, wreathed in viney and elaborate scrawls. It's all a part of her high-contrast musical persona.

G.S.P., as well as Zilla's hammer dulcimer wizard Jamie Janover, do a bang-up job of carrying her into a fuller realization of this paradox. The result sometimes verges on being too hip for its own good, when something slightly less beat-clocked would've driven her authentic and organic message deeper. But it's all made okay with moments like the jam at 2:40 in "Change," when some kind of woodblock/hammer dulcimer/acoustic guitar groove pops in and summons something eerily similar to badass live-looping cellist Eugene Friesen.

Later on, nice jazzy keys, easygoing strings, and luxurious backbeats sprawl "Tangerine" out in its chair, closing the album on a more timeless and traveled sound. And the fingerpicked intro to "Thicker Than Mud" betrays well-developed chops that are teasingly absent in the rest of the album's straightforward backbeat strumming. If Lynx-in-person is anything like Lynx-in-music, it's clear to me that she's playing below her ability - that she'll eventually pass through the low-flying clouds of the slick hip-hop front and into a rich vintage, where the true fire I know she possesses is evident in every song.

To be even-handed, I have to admit that the effortless grace in both her intimacy and bravado doesn't always hold. Her writing occasionally descends into self-conscious song-within-a-song confessionals ("I'm writing on the back of someone's junk mail"). Sometimes the lyrics don't even make sense: When she says that "Tangerine is the color of the moon tonight / It's been raining for at least five days," I have to wonder if this is even possible (an orange moon is caused by atmospheric dust, and rain would pin all of that to the ground).

At the end of my first spin, I was left wishing she would be a little more adventurous with key and tempo. Given how easy it would be to remix any of these tracks with any other, I had to wonder about what guided her decision to place the songs on this album in any particular order. It doesn't seem to carry the listener in any given direction or with a specific intent, but just floats around. Ultimately that might be what this album is best for - relaxing background music - which is kind of a shame, considering that so many of her lyrics deserve more attention than that.

(After listening to it a second time, however, I have to make a disclaimer. The first time I had it playing on the reprehensible speaker system of my car. Later, in a café with headphones, this record makes perfect sense. So many more of G.S.P.'s soft blips and scritches come through in my studio monitor headphones. The synthesizers' lower frequencies kick drum add a dose of much-needed heft, and the sudden appearance of a kick drum suggests real potential for delicious noise complaints.)

Anyway, I am frequently in the mood that suits this album, and expect it to receive regular play on my computer when I'm not too hip on whatever the baristas are playing. Like I said, there's a yearning voice in me for Lynx's music to roar as loud as her message, something that revolts against the thought that some of the most moving and urgent words I've ever read (like the "Miracles" rant that climaxes "Half Full") might got lost in the chill:

Lynx - Half Full

"Miracles are the impossible coming through and everything is possible
This is for the possibility that guides us
and for the possibilities still waiting to sing and spread their wings inside us
cuz tonight, Saturn is on his knees proposing with all of his ten thousand rings
that whatever song we've been singing, we sing even more
The world needs us right now more than it ever has before
Pull all your strings, play every chord
If you're writing letters to the prisoners, start tearing down the bars
If you're handing out flashlights in the dark, start handing out stars
Never go a second hushing the percussion of your heart
Play loud
Play like you know the clouds have left too many people cold and broken
and you're they're last chance for sun
Play like there's no time for hoping brighter days will come
Play like the apocalypse is only four, three, two...
You have a drum in your chest that could save us
You have a song like a breath that could raise us
like the sunrise into a dark sky that cries to be blue
Play like you know we won't survive if you don't, but we will if you do
Play like Saturn is on his knees proposing with all of his ten thousand rings
that we give every single breath
Y'all, this is for saying yes
This is for saying yes"

It's a tough line to swallow when the rest of the album is so subdued. But all things considered (first album, twenty two, produced by friends), Grain of Sand is a pretty astounding statement. I think she'll figure it out.

(Written for iggli.com.)