There is no path. The path is made by walking.

Traveller, there is no path

The path is made by walking.

Traveller, there is no road

Only wakes in the sea.

– Antonio Machado

Hey, everyone (weary smile). It's Spring, finally, and beautifully so. Some things are starting to feel like The Old Ways again and some never will. I hope this new work finds you well. I talk so much these days, I'll let the work speak for itself this time.

You can watch the time-lapse of my latest digital art explorations on Instagram, where I have also been playing the wonderful Chapman Stick almost every day, writing new short pieces that will fit the narrow format. It's an amazing instrument. It's kind of saving my sanity, lately. Speaking of which:

My most recent article to share with you, the first stabs at an essay for a compilation on the topic:

As artists, our improvisation with the dehumanizing algorithms of predatory surveillance capitalism is a kind of tango — an exploratory, open-ended, provisional, context-dependent, time-bound, blindspot-defined process of mutual adaptation. The economy — and the ecology of which it is a subset of dynamic interwoven agencies — is an evolutionary system, and evolution is improvisation via the appropriation of existing forms. The algorithms we design are just the visible tip of the algorithms we enact unwittingly, the action of distributed intelligence in a long, complex arms race with itself. The only way to win is to refuse the rules and act from true and nameless spontaneity.

Read the whole thing here.

My first concert in months! Freestyle explorations from within a tangled bank of musical electronics, far-out ideas, and intertwingled subjectivity, for your journeying pleasure. Live streamed on 2021.04.18 as part of the Mt. Tam Psychedelic Integration Jam, hosted and organized by Daniel Shankin, with a special live painting appearance by visionary artist Amanda Sage.

Download it for for free (or for tips) on Bandcamp or Patreon. Watch it on YouTube:

Also on YouTube: the full recordings from our recent Future Fossils Book Club discussions on Sand Talk by Tyson Yunkaporta and Distress by Greg Egan, two of the coolest books I've ever read. We went deep!  I love the scrappy and profound community that has clustered around the conversations we have on the podcast. 

Subscribe to my YouTube channel to watch future book club recordings or become a Patreon supporter to participate in them yourself! Our next call will be on May 30th to talk about Dark Constellations by Pola Olaixarac, and then in June we're getting the author on the call to talk about Eric Wargo's Precognitive Dreamwork and The Long Self (!).

Meanwhile, excellent Future Fossils episodes continue to trickle out every two weeks:

That's "all" for now. Thank you for reading and for being. Reach out any time. Be well...

Until we meet again, here is where I put all of the cool new music I discover:

And where I sell art prints and original paintings — proceeds go directly to feeding children:

New Album! Pavo: Music For Mystery + Future Fossils on Psychedelics, Sleep, VR, and Flow States + Interviews with Tony Vigorito & Void Denizen + MG on Third Eye Drops, Astral Hustle, Chasing Bodhi

When did I become a magazine?  Please bookmark this, as there's too much good stuff in here to soak up all at once.

(And yet, no paintings – but that is because I'm working on an absolutely epic few, and they are coming soon!  In the meantime, you can scope my Instagram for progress shots of those.)

Let's start with the biggest and most exciting news:

New Live Album from Australia Tour!
Stream/Download Pavo: Music For Mystery

Stream/Download Pavo: Music for Mystery on Bandcamp.

Stream/Save Pavo: Music for Mystery on Spotify.

Free to Bandcamp & Patreon Subscribers.

Hi Friends,

This 74 minutes of dreamy, intoxicating, lush, compelling instrumental music captures one of the most inspired evenings of my life.  It was recorded n Valentine's Day 2017, a live set I donated to my friend Adam Scott Miller's immersive art class in Byron Bay, Australia (so it's only fitting that his gorgeous painting "Feathered Pearl" is the cover image for these tunes).

I've been exploring this guitar technique for over a decade and finally hit my stride with it two years ago...this single-take, no-studio-overdubs sound journey is the anticipatory score to countless evenings drenched in candlelight and contemplation, lovemaking under stars and arabesques of incense smoke.

Inspired by the deep mystery of the Australian coast and dreamtime, Pavo oozes with the atmosphere of wonder and transcendent weirdness of The Land Down Under – but it also opened up into a set of synchronistic correspondences I can't explain.  This album has initiated something in me that has yet to run its course, an invitation into something numinous and terrifying in its splendor.

To attempt an exposition:  I'm a Capricorn, born on 8 January under the fixed star Delta Pavonis in the contellation of the peacock. Only after this was all recorded and the track art chosen did I realize that the persecuted Yezidi people link their "peacock angel" Melek Taus with Enki, the Sumerian sea goat, and with St. George (the more human, earthly form of Michael the Archangel), and the Pleiades (a constellation that for some strange reason I have always felt a deep affinity).

Enki was responsible for the decay of the original one language into all the modern tongues – the god of entropy and babble – which is weird, because the peacock angel also plays a major role in one of my most cherished books – Darwin's Pharmacy: Sex, Plants, and the Evolution of the Noosphere by Richard Doyle – in which he makes the case that by an involution of attention on itself, the psychoactive plants created the diversity of human languages as well as our aesthetic sense. Doyle argues Melek Taus is an irruption into history of a transcendental telos, guiding evolution through trans-species intercourse and boundary-dissolving peak experiences. (Read this book, if you can handle it.)

Discovering this web of correspondences has shaken my reality. Why did I become obsessed with the evolution of language and consciousness in college? Why have I always identified with peacocks? Why do I emphasize the breakdown of a signal into noise in all my music? Who are we, and who is rigging this?

Downloads include a set of links you can pursue to dive much deeper into this exquisite set of strange coincidences.  Feel free to write to me or comment with your thoughts and feelings upon listening, or if you have more insights into this extraordinary mystery...

I hope that you enjoy it. Thanks for listening. :)

More Links:
Watch the 360º time-lapse video for "Delta Pavonis."

Stream "Delta Pavonis" on Soundcloud.

Buy a print of this cover art from painter Adam Scott Miller.

This Month in "Awesome Conversations Galore" News...

I recently appeared on three great podcasts: Third Eye Drops with Michael Phillip, Chasing Bodhi with Doug Noble, and The Astral Hustle with Cory Allen. These conversations are about as different as can be, but if you're interested in the nexus where transcendent beauty meets existential terror – or how I make sense of love and art – or how to live a brighter, bolder, funnier, more mindful life – you can't go wrong by checking out all three.  These gentlemen all put a lot of work into their shows and I'm delighted that I get to share these with you.

#0027 with Rak Razam & Niles Heckman
(5-MeO DMT & Consciousness)

This week I sit down with Rak Razam and Niles Heckman – psychonauts, journalists, provocateurs, and the film-makers responsible for Shamans of the Global Village.

In a conversation too full of awesome neologisms, delightful turns of phrase, one-liners, and weird genius for me to convey it all, we talk about the role of creative media in helping usher in new modes of human consciousness – and what we’re learning those new modes might be. We finally get into WHAT those unborn archeologists listening to Future Fossils might be like…and our conjecture’s going to surprise you.  Listen to it here.

#0026 with Jessa Gamble

(Circadian Rhythms & The Science of Sleep)

This week we chat with science journalist Jessa Gamble, author of The Siesta and The Midnight Sun: How Our Bodies Experience Time, about time in the body, circadian rhythms, lunar cycles, and the science of sleep. Listen to it here.

#0025 with DADARA 
(Art, Virtual Realities, & Flow States)

This week we're joined by Daniel Rozenberg aka DADARA for a thoughtful discussion about Art in Virtual Realities, Information Overload, and Flow States.

The creator of Exchangibition Bank, Like4Real, and the upcoming Solipmission installation at Burning Man, as well as countless concert posters and album covers, DADARA has been one of my favorite artists for a while - in no small part because of how his works combine deep, challenging investigations with light-hearted play. Listen to it here.

Future Fossils Live at Psychedelic Science 2017
with Matt Xian, Rak Razam, & Terra Celeste

Link to Facebook Live Recording

A spontaneous, wide-ranging, fairly bonkers conversation that roams everywhere in service to the vast emerging third-wave psychedelic culture and its destination: inevitable, structural, and permanent transformation of the human being and our understanding of the living world.  With three of my favorite psychedelic weirdos, Rak Razam of Shamans of the Global Village, Matt Xian of TIMEWHEEL, and Terra Celeste (whose affiliations are myriad).

Necromancing The Philosopher's Stone:
Interviewing "The Ungoogleable Michaelangelo"

Michaelangelo is a Los Angeles based transmedia artist whose latest work as Scottish Necromancer-Rapper “Void Denizen” pushes almost every boundary imaginable in the service of both depth and humor.  This conversation surfs the violet psychofluid across space, time, and identity.  Read it here.

Love and Other Pranks:
Interviewing Author Tony Vigorito

How is love a form of piracy? Find out in this delightful interview I just held with Tony Vigorito on his new book, which Tom Robbins called "the single wildest novel I have ever read."  We discuss the archetypal feathered serpent, Tony's awesome real-life pranks, and why so many villains have a skin disorder, among other things.  Read it here.

“I’ve seen enough around the corner to know what I need to do next. And it’s a deep transformation of my habits, my rituals, my relationship with life, with myself, my family, my loved ones, my community…and I think it’s the deepening of the spiritual path. And it makes it very tangible, whether I like it or not. I can hide from it, it doesn’t go away. The awareness of awareness of that thing is with me every day. That’s what it [5 Meo-DMT] has done for me.”

- Rak Razam

21st Century Romance: Digital Music for Analog Love | William Irwin Thompson x Burning Man | John Perry Barlow x Google Glass | New Videos, Merch, & Live Recordings

"They say when you meet the love of your life, time stops, and that's true.  What they don't tell you is when time starts again, it moves extra fast to catch up."

- Ed Bloom, Big Fish

Ideamensch recently quoted my interview with them in their list of "35 Habits That Successful Entrepreneurs Use To Get Things Done."  My contribution is old and taken out of context, but it's a good list in general, if you're looking for ways to be more productive.

But I'm not sure that being productive is most important thing in life – try as they might to convince us all otherwise.  I often feel like it's a bad habit I have to unlearn, that I'm stuck on "show and tell" overdrive – but to what end?  I'm sure I could improve my strategies for saying more with less, inspiring by example with a fuller-yet-more-spacious life, and I'm always open to your insights.

In the meantime, here I am sharing work of which I am extremely proud.  I do this as an offering to others, but I really love this stuff.  I get lost in this music and these patterns for hours every day, and hope that you ultimately benefit from the loving dedication and enjoyment I invest into my work.

And I deeply appreciate all of the help you guys continue to provide to keep it flowing.  When you pick up prints or music, or commission a painting, or hire me for a private party, or whatever – it all goes to paying rent that just doubled; to starting a long-overdue life in Austin with my beloved; and to finishing the most ambitious projects I have ever undertaken.

Whenever you share my work with your friends, or invite me to enjoy your own creative efforts, our every interaction helps reinforce this path of joy and service.  Thank you.

May all of this blossom like red fireworks in your heart.

Michael

21st Century Romance:
Digital Music for Analog Love

Listen/Download

21st Century Romance is a double-disc LP of highlights from my 2013 tour, improvised performances channeling the spirit of places like Rootwire Festival and Austin's Historic Scoot Inn into luminous, deep-chill heroic electro-ballads.

It is a consummate recording of my years honing a new kind of music – freestyle instrumentals that wed past and future, live and studio, the world's most familiar folk instrument with a dazzling array of electronic hardware.

The music is just one part of a multimedia release exploring the ever-more-intimate embrace human and machine through multiple channels, including original digital art, first-person time-lapse live painting videos taken through Google Glass, laser-engraved bamboo jewelry, inspirational performance philosophy, and more – a feast for the senses, articulating a healing transcendental vision for humankind as we stride forward into an age of epochal change.

But what it all comes down to is this:  an hour and a half of music I'm really proud of and can't believe I made live in concert without premeditation.

Two tracks – "Sweat Anthem" and "Green Ranger" – are entirely free downloads and the rest of the album, liner notes and all, is $7.  It's the only record of dozens on my site for which I'm asking anything at all – mostly just to see who still cares about all the time and love and work that goes into the craft of music.

Buying my friends' music is one of the most satisfying things I do and I hope you feel the same...because it sounds so much sweeter when you've made that commitment.  (Remember new CDs?)  If you want a physical souvenir, the album is a free download with this poster:

Ernst Haeckel Tribute Poster

View in Hi-Res/Purchase

Ernst Haeckel is one of my personal heroes – the 19th Century scientific illustrator who single-handedly named, described, and drew thousands of deep sea creatures discovered by the world's first trans-oceanic research expedition.  (If you want to be inspired, watch this documentary about his life.)

He saw evolution as the unfolding mind of God and recognized no boundary between art and science...and his lavish illustrations reflect his sensitivity to natural beauty and geometric perfection.  This signed 11" x 17" poster on glossy cardstock is an homage to his beautiful plates of diatoms, sea stars, and jellyfish – featuring the series of hand-drawn and digitally manipulated fractals I designed for the liner notes of 21st Century Romance as part of its exploration of the analog-digital embrace.

I Made These Videos & They're Super Cool

Cultural historian William Irwin Thompson had no idea when he gave this talk on the circus in 1975 that it would one day go so nicely over Burning Man footage taken thirty-eight years later...

My friend and colleague Topher Sipes threw down some epic visuals with me at the Scottish Rite Theatre in Austin a few weeks ago.  Here's a clip of that super trippy set – full video coming soon...

John Perry Barlow, co-founder of the Electronic Frontier Foundation and author of the Declaration of Independence of Cyberspace, seems surprisingly at odds with Google Glass in this short interview...

I shred eight-finger polyphonic fretboard tapping in this vaguely latin lightning number on the overwhelmingness of modern life, recorded at my 30th birthday show in Austin...

Here's A New Painted Hat!

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Yay!  I had a lot of fun with this "Biomechanical Slurk meets Easter Sunday" snapback – painted on a canvas Grassroots California lid, which offered a better surface and let me render more detail.  Let me know if you'd like one – or custom-painted anything.  (Murals!)

These Pins = Mmm

Two of the prettier things in which I've played a part, these matched "warm" and "cool" double-posted enamel pins are $20 each from my homies at Kolorspun.  This is a banger 2" pin – the kind that would shine like a train headlight on the front of a fedora or flash enough to signal a search plane if you ever got lost in the woods.  Just saying.

New Pay-Whatever Live Recordings

Download for Free/Donation
Buy 11"x17" Prints of the Album Cover

Recorded at my friend Aisha's Valentine's Day 50th Birthday Party in North Austin...we start off with a lengthy melodic psyambient guitar improvisation, then roll through a few of my fan favorite "standards" from the twelve-year MG catalogue. Suffused with dark chocolate and the seductive decor, these performances for a home full of Burners and other delightful weirdos are rife with shimmering, sultry haute technique.

Highights include a best-yet take on the ongoing quasi-improvisation, "Extinct" - building on but significantly different from prior iterations from The Manifestation Celebration 2011 and my birthday party at Whip In 2012.  Also, a pretty tight version of my percussive guitar anthem, "Offering Hands".

Download for Free/Donation

Improvised by strangers on the tail end of an all-night house party, while sampled and remixed on the fly by Michael Garfield. Featuring: Mitch Mignano on Microkorg, Acoustic Guitar, & iPad; Jared Buchsbaum on Melodica, Mellophone, & Clarinet; and Anthony Paul on Human Beatbox.

Recorded live at a private house party in Austin, Texas on New Year's Day, immediately following my solo sunrise set.  Be warned:  this is extremely weird.  Album artwork by the inimitable Kaliptus.

Videos: Cyberguitar at BRC | Talk: Entertainment As Social Action | Consciousness App | New Merch Galore | Upcoming Shows

"A real work of art destroys, in the consciousness of the receiver, 

the separation between himself and the artist."

- Leo Tolstoy, What Is Art?

New Cyberguitar Videos From Burning Man 2013

Watch the whole set in my Burning Man 2013 playlist.

Live at Center Camp Café, 27-8-2013.  I had just unpacked my camp and rolled my sixty pounds of gear a quarter mile across the desert to play this gig after four straight days of driving across country from Austin to Boulder to Black Rock City – two days of which I spent crumpled in a feverish heap in my friend's passenger seat, praying I would be able to play this show.  The fates were smiling on me this night!  As soon as I got in the gate, a wave of YES broke over me and I ended up jamming one of my most inspired improvisational sets to date.  At the end they told me the next act never showed up, so the last video in this series (right before the camera battery died) is of me inviting my many excellent musician friends in the audience to come jam with me on stage.  

These videos feature a whole bouquet of techniques – Ebow, nylon brush percussion, LFOs, multichannel looping, pitch shifting, delay tweaks, and more – as I transform the initial space-radio 6/8 groove into glacial psy-ambient acoustic metal, then a slow-burning instrumental pop anthem.  Just another day at the wheel...  :)

The best parts of this set, and the one I played at Fractal Planet, are available on Bandcamp as a Free/Pay-What-You-Like Download...along with about 30 more hours of lovely acoustic cyberdelia.  Please, go help yourself if you haven't already.  My cup runneth over, and people tell me it's good music for flow arts, making babies, and stuff.

Here are the rest of my way-hella-tons of audio recordings from Burning Man 2013:

Talks: View From The Horizon | Taking A Cosmic Perspective | Life in the Glass Age 

Music: Earth Song For Sky Dance | Looper's Night at Center Camp

Wow!  It's all published.  Sweet Mercy, that took forever.  Enjoy...

Entertainment As Social Action @ Art Outside 2013

Free / Pay-What-You-Like Download

How do narrative and metaphor construct our social reality...and how can we use entertainment media to challenge our limitations, reprogram our minds, and make the world a better place?

On the use of poetry and cinema to shape perception, how we are bound together by our entertainment in the body of something greater, and how the internet's unique topography offers us a profound opportunity to redefine what it means to be human...my latest presentation explores the liberating potential of art and the importance of the artist in each of us.

"Could A 'Consciousness App' Change The World?"

New Article & Live Webcast for Reality Sandwich

Well, it's finally happening:  The work of a crack team of advisors – including prominent members of The Institute of Noetic Sciences & Princeton Engineering Anomalies Research Lab – the app turns your smartphone into a Random Number Generator (RNG), calculates the non-randomness of your bitstream as a measure of your mind's potential influence on matter, and generates real-time maps of coherent psychic phenomena – launching a new crowdsourced psychic meteorology we could use to predict significant cultural events and other "disturbances in the Force."

Read more at Reality Sandwich

Live webcast interview with project director Adam Curry
This Thursday – 23 January, at 6 pm PST / 9 pm EST!

New Mind Folds

I'm back in the game.  I love doing these!  Email me if you'd like one – prices range between $50 – 100, so they're a bit more affordable than the flatbills & fedoras (for which I'm also currently taking orders).

View / Share on FB

View / Share on FB

Upcoming Events

I am mixed up in some AMAZING stuff over the next few weeks – live webcast panel discussions; musical performances with intense live digital animation by Topher Sipes; the first gallery show for Third Coast Visions (our live art collective here in TX); and the return of the wonderful Head For The Hills Festival.  My full calendar is on my website.  

Here are some highlights with links to the event pages:

And in case you missed them...

Thanks to very helpful collaborators and recent good turns in fortune, my slickest merch ever is here.  Follow the links below to adorn yourself with wearable art I'm truly proud of, and help me make up for the other 90% of my time I spend on work that doesn't pay – like my technology, art, and consciousness discussion group, uploading all those videos, and writing poetry about the Moon...

Buy Link on FB

Buy Link on FB

Buy Link on FB

That's all, folks!  Thanks for reading and stay in touch...

New Painting, Music, & Enamel Pins | Message To Your Future Self | Burning Man Schedule

"Any action can be practiced as an art, as a craft, or as drudgery."

– Stephen Nachmanovitch, Free Play (p10)

"From the evidence...it seems that feeling good is not enough. People need meaning to thrive."

– Emily Esfahani Smith

I'm leaving today for Burning Man (schedule below) and will spend the next week collecting interviews and other inspirational content to share with you all...in the meantime, my tireless sharing includes:

• My live painting from Gratifly Music & Arts Festival,

• My deepest, jazziest album of cyberacoustic guitar music to date;

• A new series of crowd-sourced inspirational videos taken through Google Glass;

...as well as some very shiny enamel pins!  I think that's already more than I should try and lay on you at once, but I've always been better at making art than hustling it.  Enjoy, and have a magnificent week!

"Message To Your Future Self" Video Series

I think it's very important to have a conversation about what role Glass (and other vastly more powerful technologies just around the bend) can play in our lives - how to wield these double-edged swords constructively, how to bring the new world into being in ways that maximize its promise and minimize its peril.   I really want us to have a thoughtful conversation about this and welcome your thoughts and feedback by email or publicly on this facebook event page.

My first idea for using Glass to empower and uplift people was to take 10-second videos of everyone who wanted to share their message with the world:

Part 1: Gratifly & Unitus Festivals

Watch in HD on Youtube

Part 2: Rootwire Festival

Watch in HD on Youtube

In the last six years I have given almost all of my work away for free to people out of faith that the most important thing is to help people find meaning and purpose in their lives, not set a price on the value of my time. So please take a moment to check out what I'm doing with Glass and make a contribution to my fundraising campaign if you can.

My New Enamel Pin Collection

Buy the whole set for $50 + s/h or individually: Triceratops | Butterfly | Dragon

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Thanks to The Headspace for their help making this happen!  A little about each design:

"As Awesome As Three Unicorns" (the dinosaur) – Painted at Sonic Bloom in 2012, this piece bridges my two lives as a scientific illustrator and live artist, and ended up in the collection of Mary Jane, the youngest live painter ever, who is also totally awesome. 

"Every Day Is A New Year" (the dragon) – Painted at Rootwire and Art Outside Festivals as well as innumerable other small shows, this piece was my anticipatory portrait of 2013, an homage to the late Terence McKenna, and led to my being selected by Google for their Glass Explorer Program.

"Takes Flight" (the butterfly) – Painted at the MAPS 2010 Psychedelic Science Conference, this piece was inspired by a vision I received in a workshop with Alex & Allyson Grey the day before the event.

A New Album of Oceanic Cyber-Guitar Grooves

Stream/Download it here

Grab "Dance on the Roof" for free on Soundcloud

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I'm rebranding my work as an electroacoustic improvisational instrumentalist to reflect the inherent contradictions in making electronic music on an acoustic guitar – and to tap into the potent relationship I've developed with owl medicine since moving to Austin two years ago.  Here's a little bit about this release and the work to come:

If Michael Garfield can be said to collect anything, it would be great gigs in strange venues – from The Cave Without A Name to the MAPS Psychedelic Science conference, from Black Rock Desert to all four stages in the Austin-Bergstrom International Airport. 

Possessed by a passion for the feeling of spaces and determined to translate "vibe" into sound, Michael's increasingly all-improvised acoustic-electronic sets wed house concert intimacy with ravetastic cyberdelia in magical performances that draw down the spirit of a place into music. 

Capturing both past and future in alchemical alloys where fingerpicking and hardware live PA join in soaring transcendental freestyles, this is music as adventurous as the stages on which it's performed. Half Zen calligrapher and half starship captain, Michael Garfield is building a cathedral of sound for our paradoxical Age of Transition. 

Album artwork by Bonnie Goodson.

New Live Painting From Gratifly Festival

Splash!

11" x 17" Prints For Sale Here

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24"x36" - paint markers on masonite

Original available - email me to inquire/offer

Painted live at Gratifly Music and Arts Festival to the music of:
Thriftworks, Gaudi, Papadosio, Kalya Scintilla, The Werks,
Eskmo, Govinda, Desert Dwellers, Akara DJ, Ployd

My Burning Man Schedule

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• Tuesday ("Monday Night"): Center Camp Café

12:45 - 1:30 am: Cyberacoustic Guitar Improv

• Wednesday: Center Camp Café

4:00 - 5:00 pm: "These are the Good Old Days: Reverse Nostalgia from a Citizen of the Future" (talk)

5:30 - 6:00 pm: Cyberacoustic Guitar for the Aerial Dance Showcase

• Thursday: Fractal Planet Speaker Series

2:30 - 3:45 pm: Taking A Cosmic Perspective (talk)

7:30 - 8:15 pm: Musical Break - Cyberacoustic Guitar 

• Friday: Palenque Norte Speaker Series

2:00 - 3:00 pm: "The Age of Aquarius & The End of the Cargo Cult" (talk)

• Saturday: Sacred Spaces Village

5:00 - 6:00 pm: Cyberacoustic Guitar in the Grand Hall 

Your Summer Soundtrack, New Festivals, & MG on Psychedelic Salon!

"You can kill people with sound. And if you can kill, maybe there is something opposite of killing."

– Arvo Pärt

  "In any field, find the strangest thing and then explore it." 

– John A. Wheeler

Listen to my new album, "City of Jewels"

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Recorded live at AURA Music & Arts Festival at the Tribal Council dome as live musical accompaniment for a yoga class (tracks 1 - 5) and a guided meditation (tracks 6 - 9) on February 16 - 17, 2013.

This 33 minutes of music is my latest gift to you, a musical trace fossil chronicling one of the most buoyant, sunny, optimistic sets I have ever played.  In other words, perfect music for your summer soundtrack.  Download it for free here.  My first review:

"You've got soul my friend; very nice work...you can really feel into the music and spaces as you create. It is beautiful. Some of your final tracks awaken my kundalini without me even sitting for meditation. I had you playing in the background as I was doing work on my computer, and I suddenly noticed your instrumental energizing something deep within, coaxing an unwinding and rising of my kundalini energy. Amazing!"

– Ashley Ray, Crisis Intervention Specialist

Juicy!  If you've had an interesting experience listening to my music, feel free to leave your own impressions here.  About the album:

Michael Garfield defies expectations, remixing the familiar conventions of acoustic music with a fifty-pound pedalboard of beat slicers, filters, delays, and multi-channel loopers, welding fingerstyle technique into a cybernetic bed of live hardware production. 

Picking (or often bowing, with an electromagnet) while twisting knobs and DJ'ing live samples with his toes, Michael's performances embody his other life as an evolutionary theorist and futurist – liberating the organic into the digital, and the idioms of Americana into a new species of transcendental trance.

MG on the Psychedelic Salon Podcast!

Listen/Download

One of the biggest honors I've received so far is to join the ranks of psychedelic philosophers like Terence McKenna and Robert Anton Wilson as a guest in the legendary podcast, Notes From The Psychedelic Salon.  Last December, guest host Matthew Pallamary and I met in Austin to discuss the hyperspatial landscape of time, the stage production of his apocalyptic shamanic novel Land Without Evil, and the future of humankind...

From host Lorenzo Hagerty's program notes:

Today we only go back in time a short way, back to December 12, 2012 when Matt Pallmary and Michael Garfield took a break during their work on the stage production of Matt's novel, “Land Without Evil”, in Austin, Texas. In this wide ranging discussion between salon favorite, Matt Pallamary, and long time saloner, burner, artist, and musician, Michael Garfield, one of my favorite topics was Michael's very positive take on the long-term impact of the work of Terence McKenna, regardless of the fact that the Timewave theory had obviously been disproven. Michael is also a regular performer on the festival circuit, and his schedule may be found online at michaelgarfield.net.

Meme of the Week

My homie Jonathan Zap, dream interpreter and fierce critic of the Singularity, will be one of several amazing speakers on this year's all-star Sonic Bloom panel discussion – along with Mark Heley, Jordan Pearce, Jamie Janover, Alaya Love, Lux Moderna, VerDarLuz, & ReSUNator.  Word on the street is that it might be recorded by The Bloom Series, which would be awesome!  I hope to share what I know will be an inspiring and invigorating conversation between a real bouquet of perspectives...

Fan-Made Custom Homage Electric Guitar

Badass!  Michael Aronson's wife Jane reproduced my painting, "This Was All Ocean, Once" on his hand-built electric guitar.  I can only imagine it'll affect his playing...maybe even the tone.  ;)

This is the first time that anyone has copied one of my paintings and if that weren't a great enough honor, it is also definitely on a guitar this man built with his own hands.  I mean, damn...look at that!

Scope the original blog about this painting here.

Exclusive Interview w/ Incision Magazine

Incision News just interviewed me in depth about music, magic, and my five-year participation in Colorado's Sonic Bloom Festival.  Read the whole interview here.

Q: What makes SONIC BLOOM unique to you?

A: Sonic Bloom is the first festival that gave me any responsibility as an organizer, and I’m deeply grateful to festival director Jamie Janoverfor giving me an occasion to which I could rise. Funny story, back in 2006 I actually emailed every single one of his 900-plus Myspace friends and introduced myself as someone who wanted to apprentice under him, because here I saw a guy who was successfully bridging the worlds of acoustic and electronic music, facilitating a community of visionary artists and musicians, and generally just rocking out in all kinds of cool collaborations worldwide.

That apprenticeship never formally happened and like everyone I’ve had to follow my own star, but I still look up to Jamie (in a more mature, grounded, realistic, human way), and after my four-year stint living in Boulder, Colorado, I have a lot of powerful heart connections to the people and the land of Colorado’s Front Range. So in many ways this festival is a homecoming for me every year, and it’s a delight to see it grow and change, and to grow and change along with it.

Read more / Get inspired.

RSVP for SONIC BLOOM 2013

I'm doing another wedding at Sonic Bloom this year, establishing a new annual tradition.  If you will be at the festival, please join us half an hour before my set at the Hummingbird Stage, 6:30 pm on Sunday June 16th, in your festival Sunday finest, and celebrate the union of my friends Michele Schenk and Andy Beyer.  More info here.

New Festival Announcements

After I let go of trying to plan everything in advance, this summer started to overflow with beautiful gigs at smaller festivals and healing arts convergences.  You may not have heard of these events – check them out – there are amazing things happening!

If you want to help me in my tireless mission to inspire people and spread the excitement about great stuff like this, you can join my more enterprising friends at the Michael Garfield Street Team FB Page they made.  I'm not responsible for it, but I am honored.

Thank you for reading.  May this work nourish your soul and benefit all beings!