No point in pretending otherwise: these are dark times. So I hope the treasures that I have to share with you help carve a bright, warm haven in the fear and loathing, and restore a sense of peace and beauty to this otherwise benighted Autumn.
NEW ACOUSTIC GUITAR EP
Let's start with some music: twelve minutes of guitar that an executive at my all-time favorite label told me was "a perfect soundtrack for an autumn morning."
Mudras, my new EP of solo fingerstyle guitar tunes, is now live on major streaming platforms. Reviews have been entirely positive; one of my friends, a fabulous guitarist, told me that it made him cry. Maybe 12-minutes of your attention doesn't make even free music exactly "free", but I hope it's the kind of listening that benefits you:
I'm also hard at work on The Age of Reunion, the insanely ambitious singer-songwriter album I've been teasing on this blog for over a decade. It's now halfway done (!) and the latest finished track, "You Don't Have To Move", is up on Patreon. Four other songs are up on Bandcamp, where you can listen to them all and pre-order the LP.
NEW LOOP LIBRARY
And for fellow musicians and sound artists, I just released a library of over 300 loops from some of my most inspired improvisations, recorded on tour across three years and three continents. This archive is organized into 65 tempo-matched scenes in a ready-to-jam Ableton Live set, but fans of other audio software can easily lift the WAV files as-is for use in Logic, ProTools, or whatever floats your boat:
NEW PODCAST EPISODES
I've been chipping away at a couple of paintings; you can follow their progress (as well as the drawings I've made in my daughter's first sketchbook and a colorful bouquet of other visual miscellany) on Instagram. But lately, much more of my time has been going into Future Fossils Podcast, which has become a totally reliable font of inspiring conversations with amazing people:
In episode 151 I talk with Jon Marro, one of the purest creative souls I’ve ever had the luck to encounter, about his relationship to time, identity, and purpose, his commitment to service and the creative life, and where he thinks we are in the Big Picture amidst all the chaos and possibility of 02020.
I speak with the ultra-talented, immediately relatable, and immensely likable Colin Frangicetto about what we’ve learned from our high-dose psychedelic experiences, from our extended and potentially crazy periods of constant synchronicity, and from traveling the world playing music and making art.
I talk with Burning Man’s resident philosopher Caveat Magister, anarchist community organizer Naomi Most, and playa trickster historian Mitch Mignano about the festival’s uneasy but remarkable transition into virtuality. We cover everything from complex systems and the evolution of the city, to the unquantifiable value of culture, to the strange ontologies emerging in our screen-bound era.
An excerpt of this conversation's transcript made it up on Lucid News, one of my favorite psychedelic culture mags, as "Can Burning Man Be Replicated Virtually?" Quick and illuminating read.
NEW WRITING & ANIMATION ON "SLEEPING BEAUTIES"
My first long-form article for Long Now, "Sleeping Beauties of Prehistory and the Present Day," explores five new discoveries, in the fossil record and in living organisms, that interrogate the boundary between the living and the dead...
...and, poetically, at the same time I was writing that I was assigned to produce a new animation for the Santa Fe Institute about what Sidney Redner learned from his survey of 110 years of physics papers — and why some scientific discoveries (what Redner calls "sleeping beauties") take so long to get noticed:
I'll part with the friendly reminder to help keep everybody safe with proper face masks. If somehow you've made it all the way to Autumn 02020 without one of these — or you just want to level up your style — check out the four designs I have up at Idea Fab Labs. You can select from head straps (which I like) or ear loops (if that's more your kind of thing) and each contains a pocket for a fancy filter, if you want to take your safety measures all the way:
Here's a quick overview of what I'm sharing in this update so you can zero in on what sounds most interesting to you without getting cross-eyed trying to scan it all:
• I'm hosting a sci-fi book club for Octavia Butler's amazing Lilith's Brood and hope you'll join!
Stay safe and sane out there, my friends.
Love,
Michael
• New Art & Swag
End of the World Party! My presciently-titled Tyrannosaurus painting from Sonic Bloom Festival 2016 (along with three other fan-favorite paintings, below) is now available in face mask form AND eco-friendly giclee canvas prints.
Evading Confinement was a very fun collaboration with data artist Kirell Benzi. He made a one-minute experimental video with deep-learning AI networks and asked me to compose a musical accompaniment. Since the cyberguitar work I’ve been up to for the last 10 years is an explicit effort to render the shifting landscapes of closed-eye hallucinations in sound, it was like he had just re-visualized the music I was already making. Be sure to watch it in 4K!
The Fish & The Clam: Two Evolutionary Strategies is a short rant about two strategies for navigating the turbulence of our accelerating age, recorded while on tour in Byron Bay, Australia three years ago by Uplift.TV:
Pavonis is a 20-minute clip from one of my favorite live cyberguitar performances of all time. It is a deep dive into epic neo-minimalist psy-ambient terrain, ideal for anything involving incense or art:
Boom Toolkit for Covid-19 #5: Spiritual Perspectives is part of an ongoing series of featurettes produced by Portugal's amazing Boom Festival. Some of my set from 2016 made it into their latest video, with insights from shamanic ceremonial leader Satya and yoga teacher Filipa Veiga:
All of us grew up in a world too vast for anyone to understand. No single person comprehends a smartphone, or the economic networks in which it precipitated. Our necessary adaptations to the baffling complexity of postmodernity include a subtler and more nuanced grasp of context. It’s what Gestalt psychologists call "figure-ground reversal," where you realize that the object you’re examining emerges only at the intersection of more objects, a moiré of ever-shifting, mutually-defining processes.
In common parlance, people talk about this in folk psychological terms like, “You are the combination of the five people you talk to most frequently.” If all of those five people share the same beliefs, it probably won’t matter in a crisis like the one we’re in if they’re all prestigious public intellectuals or they’re all plumbers.
The Atlas Model...in which Chris Kutarna, Scott Jones, and I discuss the above essay. Probably one of the best conversations I've had about complex systems, scaling laws, networks, and how it relates to our current mess of inter-related crises. Insights therein on fighting the pandemic, radical police reform, and new modes of fractal governance. (Chris is a fellow at Oxford and co-authored the amazing book The Age of Discovery. Very cool guy, honored to be in the mix with him.)
Here We Areis Shane Mauss' TOP 10 IN THE WORLD (!) science podcast. I just appeared on it for the third time to talk about cognitive biases, social decision-making, fake news memetics, and what that all means for science communication during #COVID19 (e.g., my job at the Santa Fe Institute).
Future Fossils Podcast Ep. 145is a recording of my talk from Earth Frequency Festival 2017, about a revised narrative of prehistory from which we can grow new myths better suited for our times. We take a tour through mass extinctions, the evolution of plant-pollinator symbiosis, my critiques of transhumanism and SpaceX, and how fish and clams represent complementary strategies for dealing with turbulent environments...
Future Fossils Podcast Ep. 146is a recording of the panel I once sat on with Ralph Metzner, Dennis McKenna, Allan Badiner, Gay Dillingham, and Valerie Plame Wilson in a geodesic dome in Santa Fe — a rather intense discussion at the intersection of psychedelic medicines, nuclear disarmament, and ecological conservation generously released from the archives of Synergetic Press...
• Coming Soon to the Future Fossils Book Club
We're about to reboot the Future Fossils Book Club! Next up is Lilith's Brood by Octavia Butler. We'll discuss it in three parts since it is actually a trilogy. To whet your appetite, here's a cool essay on some of the themes explored by this very timely series.
The scheduling poll and book club video calls, as well as access to recordings of those calls, are available for Patreon supporters only. I'm sure most people here can afford the lowest tier, but if you truly can't and want to be a part of these discussions, just email me about it.
