Behold! All At Once, A New EP, Tutorial Video, Two Paintings, & A Hat

Greetings, friends!  I'm trying to put these things out frequently and keep these updates shorter, but Good Lord.  It's been a very busy and productive, gratefully engaged, enthusiastic, driven year so far.  I hope you're feeling some of that ignition in your life as well!  Here's what I've got for you:

My Newest Tunes, Your Next Adventure

Download Here

"Five minutes in and I've forgotten every bad dream I've ever had."

– Ivan Marko

(And how exactly am I supposed to remain impervious to reviews when I hear stuff like that?)

This music is a gift, and medicine* (*this statement not evaluated by the FDA).  So take it.  You can read more about it on the download page if you like knowing about records before you listen to them.

(It's also a solid starting point for diving into the 69 releases I have captured live and shared for free since I began to loop guitar.  Intuitively, I would also recommend this one and this one.)

In related news, here is the annotated video I made of the performance.  I have waited years for footage I could use to show folks how I build my sound on stage, and here it is: a "how to" on how one mic and guitar become these intricate, expansive, braided, glitchy, burning grooves...

Watch in HD with Annotations on Youtube

New Studio Painting: 
"Many Beginnings & No Ending"

Buy Poster Prints • Share on Facebook • Original Available

I don't ordinarily paint like this at home (unless it's custom hats).  But when I do, I'm also listening to documentaries.  Awesome nonfiction videos I watched while working on this painting:

Fresh Dressed // What Are Animals Thinking and Feeling? // How Stories Last

Why Ordinary People Need To Understand Power // Blue Planet // Cosmos

New Live Painting: "Lucky Fish"

Buy Poster Prints • Share on Facebook • Original Available

I was born with the Moon in Pisces ("the fish") – according to astrology, a recipe for moody artists and dreamers. We evolved from fish, and the fish lives on in all of us; our hands modified fins, our fishy brainstem still at the base of our instinctive action and intuition. (You can read all about this stuff in science journalist Neil Shubin's awesome evolutionary biology book, Your Inner Fish.)

Fish are also a sign of luck in many cultures – whether as the decorations in a Japanese garden pond, or as a symbol of plenty and abundance (eg, Jesus's loaves and fishes in the Gospels of Mark and Matthew). They take on mystical significance in the life-changing synchronicities that inspired the visionary science fiction of Philip K. Dick, and even look valuable – all those shiny scales! So it felt right as rain to paint one, finally.

Original piece painted live in Austin, Texas with oil, acrylic, and aerosol paint on masonite (24"x32") on 22 January 2016 at Flamingo Cantina to the music of Irie Samurai, Dosage, Sharkweek, and Bonus Junk; and on 24 January 2016 at the HOPE Outdoor Farmer's Market to the music of The Mismatch and SEFO.

Custom Painted Hat #182

You can now use this page to learn more about, and order, a lovingly detailed, one-of-a-kind hand-painted, waterproof, and awesome custom hat.  Thanks for your business!

You May Have Missed: Hummingbird Blankets!

Look Closer, Learn More, Maybe Buy

Yep, these are a real thing now.  They're real!  And they're even more soft and comfortable than I'd hoped they'd be.  The first to order just got theirs and folks have sent me lots of happy pictures of their new throw blankets (you can see a few on Instagram).  They're huge, they're made in the USA from cotton grown in the USA (60% recycled), and they're woven on some kind of crazy robot loom that reads my painting and turns it into some crazy robot language in order for this to be.

Really, when you think about it that way, they're a bargain.  I totally agree and I'm super grateful to finally have something so nice available so affordably.  And they're freakin' practical!

Upcoming Gigs – Full Calendar Here

Parting Thought

"Why do almost no films ever show civilization functioning, institutions doing their jobs, democracy working? The answer is simple: laziness. A storyteller’s job is to keep his or her characters in pulse-pounding jeopardy for 90 minutes of film, or 600 pages of a novel. It’s hard to do that if they can dial 911 and get skilled professionals to come to their aid... It takes real writing to come up with a way of keeping your characters in jeopardy, despite there being skilled professionals who want to help them."

– David Brin

• Prints & Original Paintings • Music Downloads •

New Studio Tracks | Hyperspace Language | Phone Cases | New Hat | More Futurism & Visionary Culture at Globalish

“Perhaps musicophilia is a form of biophilia, since music itself feels almost like a living thing.”

– Oliver Sacks

This week I am proud to present my first studio recordings in six years.  I actually started these two tracks in 2009 as a follow-up to the Double-Edged Sword EP (still the closest I've come to realizing my full vision for integrating grace and grit in electronic folk music)...but life and time had other plans for me, and I went off on a great adventure in avant-garde guitar (highlights here, here, here, and here).

The Cyclist/Throwing Sparks is just an appetizer.  This fall I'm doubling down on my production study, committing myself (finally!) to recording my new compositions, and preparing to create the greatest thing I've made to date.  It's time.

Meanwhile, enjoy this sweet seven-minute token of my love for space and song.  It's a gift, for the time being.  If you like it, I hope you'll share it with someone.

Free (Pay-What-You-Like) Download Here

You taught me to own my love 

but I cannot quite pin down that bug. 

Neither of us lives all that we say 

and lovely ideas spill out and vapor away. 

I'll take what I can get, give what you'll accept... 

I no longer fear there will be nothing left. 

Evolving Hyperspatial Language
(A Clip From February's Aya Awakenings Panel)

Another shining moment from my wonderful discussion with directors Rak Razam and Mitch Schultz following the screening of Rak's ayahuasca documentary in Austin.  (You can listen to our whole talk here.)  This bit's on my conviction that there are no sensory experiences fully past our languaging – just over the horizon, maybe, for this time and place:

"Most of what we talk about today was 'trans-linguistic' a hundred years ago...I don't think it's categorically 'beyond words,' I just think that the words grow to fill the space of our consciousness."

I Made A Lot of Cool New Merchandise This Week

Browse More Sweet Junk Than You Can Manage

Look...I'm not trying to hide my mercantilism, here.  I'm a freakin' artist for a living.  It's not advised.  I need all the help I can get.  Hopefully you just bought a new phone that could use a case, or want to pimp your laptop with some cool adhesive flair.  I get 20% on every sale.  That translates into tacos.  And I need tacos to live.  So let's be symbiotic.  

Custom Painted Hat #175

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I have nothing fancy to say about this...but man do I love painting hats.  Hit me up if you'd like one of your own.  (You can see pics of the other 174 hats here.)

New Articles on Globalish

My new appointment on the writing team at Globalish.com gives me a fantastic opportunity to wax poetic about all of my favorite artists and to comment on the most amazing new developments in futuristic tech.  

After years of not writing very much, I'm now on a daily schedule – and have a new vehicle for sharing some incredibly inspiring videos.  Here are my most recent posts:

Visionary Culture

• Take A Dive Into Collin Elder's Timeless Visionary Paintings

• Go Deep With Ben Ridgway's Cosmic Flowers & Cellular Circuitry

• Sacred Dance Reimagined By Australian Kalya Scintilla's Aboriginal Bass

• William Close's Earth Harp Turns Buildings Into Instruments
• Supaman – Native American Prayer x Beatboxing DJ Looper What?

• Sound & Sight Combine In These Animated Birdsongs From Australia

• Listen To Lady Gaga Speak About Her Religion of Loving-Kindness

Current Future

• Forget Dams, Welcome The World's First Man-Made Tidal Lagoon

• Get Ready For The First Human Head Transplant

• Close The Blinds: Sound Reconstructed From Silent Video

• Harvard's Swarming Robots Form Programmable Shapes

• To Hell With Makeup – Mapping Video Projection To The Human Face

• Conquering Physics – Disney's Seemingly Impossible 3D-Printed Tops

New Art Galore from Wakarusa, Desert Rocks, Impulse, & Sonic Bloom

First, A Message From The Future

Uploading yourself into a computer will NOT grant you immortality. There is no such thing as a stable medium. Servers crash, solar storms wipe hard drives and knock out satellites, and noisy electronic infrastructure degrades any signal over time.

Even if a million copies of yourself proliferate into the "un-erase-able" personal version of a viral youtube video, they won't remain static, unchanging objects, but will probably – and very swiftly – decide that their body memories are no longer relevant in the digital environment, and transform into something unrecognizable as "you."

The acceleration is just that: a quickening of the change that characterizes reality. The faster our world changes, the faster WE change. Our religious conviction about persistent identity is getting lost in the wash. "Shapeshifter" is the new "human." Immortality requires that we die to ourselves – not just once, but over, and over, and over...

Our age is when Science-as-exploration-of-transcendent-mystery and Religion-as-meaning-making-in-a-complex-world approach and kiss one another at the asymptote. Paradigms become transparently provisional. Self-concepts become art-forms offered hypothetically into the blossoming ecology of mind – worn like clothes, and changed just as easily.

Visit my facebook profile to read and join in the inspired group discussion this riff provoked...

Next, Help Yourself To Some Free Tunes!

Download at Noisetrade (192 kbps mp3) or Bandcamp (most audio formats)

I'm supremely grateful to be able to live by people's support of my art and music, but it's only really just started to happen.  My coyote heart is still animated by the spirit of street musicians and festival renegade sets, and I still get excited by handing off demos to artists I admire...

To that end, I created this compilation of my favorite concert recordings from the last twelve months.  I needed a "get to know you" mix to share with new friends and colleagues, so here it is:  forty-three minutes of the shimmering, fleet, and organic murmurations that have come to characterize my sound as an improvisational acoustic-electronic looping guitarist.

It won't be long before I drop the follow-up to Golden Hour: A Cyberacoustic Summer Daydream – recordings culled from all of the amazing festival sets I've played this year – but in the meantime, enjoy!

And Now, The Paintings

I am pleased and honored to share with you the fruits of my busiest June so far.  I have so much more to share from this summer – videos, musical recordings, new essays – but for now it can wait, so we can give these paintings their due.  I decided to focus on only one piece per festival this summer, and the extra time investment really shows.  Click on any picture for a closer look...

(In addition to my poster prints, I've decided to start making new pieces available as skins and cases in my Artsprojekt design shop to glam out everyone's proliferating electronic toy-scape – I make about 10% on each sale, which is small but worth it.  If you have some contraption-plus-artwork combo idea you don't see available, let me know and I'll be happy to post it for you.)

I Know It Means Something...

(Kingfisher & Code)

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40"x30", paint markers on stretched canvas

Original painting available (email for price)

11"x17" poster prints – $20 or 2 for $30 (+ $5 s/h) – email me

Decals: iPhone 4/4S Skin | iPad 3 Skin | Laptop Skin (most sizes)

Painted live at Wakarusa Festival 2012 during:

Bob Weir Acoustic Trio, Pretty Lights, Monophonics, Edward Sharpe and the Magnetic Zeros, The Avett Brothers, Umphrey's McGee, Primus, Big Gigantic, Toubab Krewe, Tinariwen, Matisyahu, EOTO, The Floozies

"Words can be communicative only between those who share similar experiences."

– Alan Watts

"Love and courtship call forth poetry and song because of the importance of ambiguity as well as communication in creating a relationship."

– Rich Doyle (amazing interview link)

Petroglyphs

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40"x30", paint markers on stretched canvas

Original painting available (email for price)

11"x17" poster prints – $20 or 2 for $30 (+ $5 s/h) – email me

Decals: iPhone 4/4S Skin | iPad 3 Skin | Laptop Skin (most sizes)

Painted live at Desert Rocks Festival 2012 during:

Bird of Prey, SORNE, Phadroid, Octopus Nebula, Beats Antique, Lucent Dossier, The Wailers, Hot Buttered Rum

"A thing, until it is everything, is noise, and once it is everything it is silence."

– Antonio Porchia

"A billion stars go spinning through the night,

Blazing high above your head.

But in you is the presence that

Will be, when all the stars are dead."

– Ranier Maria Rilke 

Biomechanical Tide

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36"x24", paint markers on stretched canvas

Original painting available (email for price)

11"x17" poster prints – $20 or 2 for $30 (+ $5 s/h) – email me

Decals: iPhone 4/4S Skin | iPad 3 Skin | Laptop Skin (most sizes)

Painted live at Impulse Festival 2012 during:

Govinda, Boombox, Papadosio, Zoogma, Minnesota, Emancipator, EOTO

"Most microscopists have a streak of artist in them. It's hard not to. You're looking at things through a microscope that most people don't see. The nascent artist in you sort of peeks its head up."

– James Hayden (cool NYTimes article link)

"Let the mind be enlarged...to the grandeur of the mysteries, and not the mysteries contracted to the narrowness of the mind."
– Francis Bacon

Going Backward To Go Forward

(As Awesome As Three Unicorns)

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36"x24", paint markers on stretched canvas

Original painting sold to the father of a four year old dino-maniac

11"x17" poster prints – $20 or 2 for $30 (+ $5 s/h) – email me

Decals: iPhone 4/4S Skin | >iPad 3 Skin | Laptop Skin (most sizes)

Painted live at Sonic Bloom Festival 2012 during:

ESKMO, Papadosio, Ana Sia, PANTyRAID, Zilla, Emancipator, ProJect Aspect, Tipper (uptempo), Octopus Nebula, Ilya From Russia, Tipper (downtempo), Phadroid, Sonic Bloom Orchestra, EOTO

"Trying to determine what is going on in the world by reading newspapers is like trying to tell the time by watching the second hand of a clock."

– Ben Hecht

“At last I look to the moon; it hangs fixed and full in the east, enormously scrubbed and simple. It must have been a wonderful sight from there, when the olive continents cracked and spread, and the white ice rolled down and up like a window blind.”

– Annie Dillard (great author website)

"No human thing is of serious importance."

– Plato

Upcoming Gigs

It's great to get a little downtime, but this summer's not over yet!  I'll be playing music and painting live at all of these lovely events, as well as more intimate shows in Colorado, New Mexico, Arizona, Texas, North Carolina, Indiana, and more soon to be announced.  You can find the complete calendar on my website and on facebook, updated every few days...

Thank you so much for your time, interest, and ongoing support.  Have a magnificent day!

My Best Album & Finest Painting Yet

"Music is so powerful, it needs to be used for some kind of redeeming work. To lift people's spirits, to lift their souls."

– Bobby McFerrin

Summer is upon us!  I know most of you are still in spring buds and blossoms, but my festival season started last week with the Sonic Bloom preparties in Denver and an amazing evening at the Dallas Museum of Nature & Science for The Manifestation Celebration...

This coming summer feels especially potent, rippling with both peaceful energy (long afternoons, buzzing cicadas, lazy rivers) and a burgeoning intensity (economic collapse, social network activism, ecological catastrophe, solar flares) that seems to presage a truly bizarre new world coming into being.

It's maybe even a little passe to say this now, but I get a strong sense that something beautiful is rising from the ashes as all of our familiar structures – religion, country, relationships, even the self – dissolve in the flow of these evolutionary rapids.  Here is the soundtrack I offer for these changes:

Golden Hour: A Cyberacoustic Summer Daydream

Improvised on solo acoustic guitar and hardware pedal effects at various inspiring Austin events this March, Golden Hour is my finest instrumental acoustic electronica to date – spacious, evocative, and wise.  Shimmering beat-sliced harmonics and filtered eBow basslines, sprawling slide riffs and soaring leads sing out on this hour of music created and offered as a score to your summer roadtrips, outdoor lovemaking, and days at the pool...a testament to the sacred beauty of this season:

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

– Jason White, aka Zympht

"Your sound is totally sunkissed Cali psych mysticism. That sound is classic and cannot be faked."

– Andy Rantzen of Pelican Daughters

Two of my personal favorites from this record, "Golden Hour" and "You're In My Self-Portrait," are free downloads – and you get three gorgeous cover art options courtesy of my man David Titterington when you buy the album.  You can stream the whole record free whenever you like.  Enjoy!

Why We Gotta Be Fightin'?

2012 04 12 The Parish (MiHKAL, Knowa Knowone, Soundshaman)

2012 04 13 Ruta Maya (ONE4ALL, Soundshaman, Matthew Ian Blagg, Miss Zap)

2012 04 16 Ruta Maya (Esoteric Mondays)

30" x 40" – paint markers on stretched canvas

11"x17" signed poster prints – $20 each or two for $30

Original painting available for sale – email me to inquire

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This one was named inadvertently by my friend Chris Morphis, who came up to me at a show and captioned, "I thought we were dancin'; why we gotta be fightin'?"  That pretty much sums up the emotional energy behind this piece – the dyad, the dance, the lovers, tangled, polar, divided but united, evoking each other even when apart, the boundaries tidal, orbital, co-imbricated.

One of the most important things I learned in school for evolutionary biology is that what we call competition is equally true as cooperation from a different angle.  Predator and prey, host and parasite, victim and abuser, artist and audience – these are timeless pairings that require both partners as poles of a dynamic that transcends them.  You and I co-arise as opposite ends of the same event.  Even in our differences, we share the pearl of original awareness.  I am You.

Or, from Erik Davis's fantastic book, TechGnosis (Synchronicity alert: I read this while taking a break from typing):

"Alchemy places a tremendous emphasis on polarity, on the dynamic, erotic, and highly combustible interaction – or conjuctio – of contrary elements and states of being.  This propulsive ambiguity is also reflected in the question all alchemical scholars must confront as they investigate the history of the art:  What were these fellows actually doing?  Was the Great Work physical or spiritual, sexual or imaginal, grubby or contemplative?"

The complete answer is, as it frequently is, "both."

Click on these pictures for a closer look at the process and details of this piece:

I'll keep this email brief.  But here are just a couple of the brightest stars in an ever-growing line-up of luscious summer events where I'll be playing music, painting, and giving talks.  (My full calendar is here.)  

I hope to see you there!  Regardless, stay in touch and have a beautiful day...

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...