And Now For Something Completely Different! New Music, Art, Writing, & Talks To Get Your Mind Off The Apocalypse

Hello, beloveds. It takes almost no effort at all to double down on the spookiness of this time of year, so let's at least have some fun with it, zoom out, and let me help remind you of the deeper currents in which we're all swimming with some of the best work I have ever produced.

I am honored to share with you, in this edition of the newsletter:

— a new psychedelic folk song it took me over twelve years to write and produce;

— a new electronic guitar improvisation I made as part of a peer-reviewed archaeology paper;

— the final (?) installment of my essay series on augmented reality and evolutionary arms races;

— my presentation on deepfakes for The Long Now Foundation's Ignite Talks;

— my logo design mockups for the South West Science Writers' Association;

— two excellent Future Fossils episodes on the pro-social and anti-social applications of deepfakes;

— my guest appearance on the delightful Talk of Today podcast; and

— my guest appearance on the equally delightful Plutopia News Happy Hour.

Lastly, as a pure and unadulterated offering, check out the extensive Future Fossils Wavescapes Spotify Playlist I've been secretly brewing for you good people over the last couple months. It's excellent.

I suggest optimizing for synergy by listening to my new tunes while you read the new pieces and then listening to the podcasts while you do whatever urgent work you assuredly have to do right now...

Let these be not bids for your attention but gifts to help lift you into a better state of mind, an invitation to enjoy some highly-polished and substantial treats — nourishment for your mind, heart, and soul.

Thank you and wishing you the best through all the turbulence.

love,

Michael

PS — Here's the jack-o-lantern that I carved this year, because how could I not:

My Crowning Musical Accomplishment:

"You Don't Have To Move" Finally Gets Studio Treatment

Listen on All Major Streaming Platforms

Twelve years ago I wrote a song on a trampoline at Burning Man inspired by UFO sightings and apocalyptic dreams I had after getting out of college and watching the plans I'd had for my entire life fall to pieces.

Since then I've carried that song with me and cultivated it across a 30-stop national tour, dozens of festivals on three continents, and half a dozen interstate moves...and it's grown ferns and gemstones, doubled in length, and continued to fold in all of the new guitar techniques I learned along the way to stand as a living record of everything I know about the instrument and how to plug it into electronics and transform it into other things entirely.

Until this year, though, it had no definitive recording. Never made it to the studio — my life just moved too fast. It was the flagship of an album I'd been promising the world for years but then I got a job and had a kid and had to stop the touring, and the timeline kept receding. Seemed like I would never get this done.

And then we all got quarantined for months and suddenly I was back in the saddle with recording — and NEW songs started coming faster than they ever have, and it's now all that I can do to get the old ones finished and the new ones down before the next batch tumble in and add another album to the FOUR that I'm now planning...

It turns out that this song had wisdom in it that I never heeded and I never understood until it came true in my life: that you don't have to go out there to see the world, but if you stay in one place long enough the whole world comes to you. You truly, truly do not have to move.

And so it's with immense excitement I announce today's the day that "You Don't Have To Move" is now complete and published on TIMEWHEEL, an awesome group that I've been eager to contribute to since 2012! With everything else that's been going on this year it's almost hard to savor this accomplishment but this weird autumn flower is a consummation of a lifelong process and a deep delight.

Löwenmensch: The Lion Man

A Cyberacoustic Deep-Time Sojourn

Listen & Watch on All Major Streaming Platforms

(including YouTube, Facebook, Instagram)

Performed by Michael Garfield for inclusion in an archaeological research project by Liane Gabora and Mike Steel about cross-domain knowledge transfer (how people translate a 40,000-year-old sculpture made in mammoth ivory into modern electronic media). 

The associated video is the best-yet showcase of my "cyberguitar" technique, using the acoustic guitar and hardware pedalboards in a kind of home-brewed modular digital synthesis to dream up a full electroacoustic orchestra with minimal equipment. You can read more about it at Guitar Moderne.

New Essays & Talks on Psychedelic Futurism

Read Here

Beta-testing Google Glass was only the beginning. Uninstalling AR dinosaurs taught me no man’s an island…and that we must be far more careful about who gets administrative access to our minds.

Read & Watch Here

Ignite Talks are five-minute lightning presentations with 20 slides that auto-advance every 15 seconds. It’s a fun and challenging format, and my invitation to present one for The Long Now Foundation seemed like a perfect opportunity to distill my thinking on a complex and difficult topic: the rise of AI-assisted forgeries and their social implications.

Listen Anywhere You Go For Podcasts

This week I chat with artist Stephanie Lepp, producer of Infinite Lunchbox, the Reckonings podcast, and — most excitingly, for me — Deep Reckonings, a stunning new project exploring the “pro-social” uses of AI-generated “deepfakes” and other synthetic media for education, therapy, and other beneficial outcomes. In this discussion, we explore how deepfakes can expand and enrich the potent benefits of earlier media like theater and the novel; why it’s so controversial to portray wrongdoers finally accepting accountability and moral leadership, even when it’s an explicit fiction; and how science itself is going to have to change to accommodate a more nuanced and multi-dimensional understanding of truth.

Listen Anywhere You Go For Podcasts

This week I chat with film-maker Michael Morgenstern about his latest transmedia project, I Dared My Best Friend To Ruin My Life, which takes young adults down a mind-bending and immersive narrative vortex about weaponized synthetic media to teach vital 21st Century literacies and the society-threatening implications of #deepfakes — including how synthetic media will turn the logic of waking life from something sober and tangible to something more like a dream or shamanic journey; and the ethical concerns they had to consider and enact in producing something intended to create good but capable of accidentally causing serious harm.

Episode & Show Notes Here

I sit down for a real barnstormer with host Sam Barton to discuss:

• Coronavirus and the epistemic crisis;
• Community and fragmentation;
• Evolution as a multi-billion year remix project;
• Psychedelics as training wheels for transhumanism;
• Restoring democracy, and regenerative communities;
• Rewilding the future; and
• The power of ideas.

Watch on YouTube | Watch on Facebook

"Deepfakes, sensemaking crisis, information warfare, surveillance capitalism, augmented reality - much to talk about! The Plutopia team speaks with our guest Michael Garfield, Community Manager for @longnow and host of the Future Fossils podcast. We'll work on better distribution of the future!"

Vote for My Designs!
South West Science Writers' Association Logo Contest

Vote Here

Vote for me in the Southwest Science Writers Association (SWSWA) Logo Contest! I cherish every opportunity to return to my roots as a scientific illustrator and while the (international) competition is fierce, you can vote as many times as you want. So please do vote more than once, and share this post.

Thank You Burning Man
for Including Future Fossils in Your Official Newsletter!

Check It Out Here

MG on Comedy Central / The Garden of Unearthly Delights / Martian Arts EP / H.R. Giger Tribute Poetry / New Episodes of Future Fossils Podcast

“As if there were an opening, an opening which would be an assembling, which would be a world, which would be that something might happen, that many things might happen, that there is a crowd, a swarming of what is possible, that all the possibilities are seized with pricklings…” 

– Henri Michaux on mescaline, 2001

Hey friends!  I hope this message finds you well – it's been an inspiring and productive spring this year, deciding I'd take time away from festivals to focus on my writing, music, podcast, partnership, all of the things that constant travel means I've left neglected.

But behold!  Some great new things to share in every medium – and big announcements!

(And if you are a cable TV viewer, check out my debut on Comedy Central, interviewed by comedian Moshe Kasher for his show Problematic's coverage of the MAPS Psychedelic Science Conference.  Admittedly, it's only like 10 seconds – and they cut up my responses beyond recognition – but I think it's an accurate depiction of Moshe's ADHD point of view, based on our conversation.  Anyone who thinks that I'm "TL;DR" will laugh at this.  :))

Enjoy and stay in touch,

Michael

• New Art •

"The Garden of Unearthly Delights"

• Signed Paper Prints are on 100 lb. 17"x11" cardstock.

• Canvas Prints are limited series of 25 full-size 36"x24" giclee reproductions on UV-sealed archival canvas with 3/4" stretchers, signed and numbered on reverse.

My latest collaboration with "Tourmaline" Todd Shepherd, started at a legendary underground party in Austin, Texas during South By Southwest and passed back and forth for over two months of intensive, detailed studio work. The palette and depth reminded me of Hieronymous Bosch so much it swerved into the territory of a tribute to his famous painting, "The Garden of Earthly Delights" – although, instead, a vision of the future, otherworldly surreal – not beastly combinations of terrestrial life, but ineffably familiar vegetation, massive structures in the distance, strange habitats and intersecting vectors of mysterious activity.

• New Music •

Martian Arts EP

Stream or Download at Bandcamp
(Available for free to Bandcamp & Patreon subscribers.)

This set at Martian Arts Festival in San Marcos, Texas was a doozy. I did not expect to see a UFO that night – but who does, really? It was my first sighting in ten years. Things shifted. Something opened. I admitted to myself that I have been in Chapel Perilous since then, the place where everything syncs up and all of it unfolds as a conspiracy in which we're implicated and the shapes begin to come together and we notice what they point to. 

It all seems ridiculous. That is my rationality rebelling when I KNOW that something magical occurred that night. A portal opened. Call it what you will. All this music's just an overture to what came next. We never saw it coming. Now it's all that I can do to not grab onto what remains of that extraordinary mystery, to let it be. How does a person live like this, and make of glimpses of perfection, transcendental truth, a way of life, an everyday reality? 

Edited for time and mastered on a laptop. Otherwise, exactly as it was performed, all live, one take, no post-production mixing.  Guitar, Voice, Pedals.  On the eve of mystery.

Thank You...

Download Martian Arts EP at Bandcamp.

• New Writing •

An ode to H.R. Giger inspired by the recent premiere of Alien: Covenant and a recent episode of the Stuff To Blow Your Mind podcast. I've had a thing for the erotic biomechanical horror of Giger's work since I was nine years old, and a significant sub-basement of my psyche is devoted to the xenomorph. Enjoy!

Reading Necronomicon at New York Comic Con:
So wrong, my clothes are tight
like Han in Carbonite,
might get a callus tonight,
metallic phalluses bite
vestigial human in scenes
of pumping stillbirth machines,
I jump into the regimes
of ancient alien queens
and clumping organs between
the shiny carapaces
and their mute and chrome-toothed faces,
plugged into a Hell so hot it's issuing steam...

Read (or listen to me read aloud) the whole thing on Patreon.

• New Podcasts •

“Empowerment comes down to your awareness of the upgrade that you want.”
– Sara Huntley

This week's awesome conversation is with multidimensional artist-futurist Sara Huntley, on the future of performance art and the ethics of our relationships to sentient digital beings.

Listen to this episode on iTunes, Stitcher, Google Play, or Patreon.

Check out the show notes, quotes, and cited books at MindPodNetwork.

“You cannot change the present system. This thing is dying, it’s structurally unsustainable. And so to try to somehow fix the present system is just a waste of time. Don’t waste your time on the present system. We have to start working on building the new world.”

– John Petersen

This week we welcome futurist John Petersen of The Arlington Institute into the digital archives, for a challenging and visionary chat about how wrong we’re guaranteed to be about the future – and what we CAN expect about the new paradigm (which is coming sooner than you might suspect).

Listen to this episode on iTunes, Stitcher, Google Play, or Patreon.

Check out the show notes, quotes, and cited books at MindPodNetwork.

• Upcoming Gigs •

Speaking on time, technology, and evolution at the all-star festival to end all festivals.

17 - 23 August in Big Summit Prairie, Oregon.

Playing UtopiaFest's first-ever sunrise set for their last year at the glorious Four Sisters Ranch.

22 - 24 September in Utopia, Texas.

• Thank You For Reading! •

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

What is the Opposite of Fear? + The Evolution of Beauty + Talk & Music from COSM + JF Martel on Future Fossils

“Ultimately, art does have a function: it’s to help us better navigate the infinite chaos that is reality.”
– JF Martel

Yay, it's spring!  Time to navigate the chaos of 2017 with grace, open-mindedness, exuberance, and playfulness.  Here are some things that, hopefully, will help you with that – starting with a few quick videos and one extremely deep and magical discussion...

New Videos

On my recent tour of Oz, I stopped by Uplift Connect to chat with them about what I've learned from studying the fossil record and what it can teach us about the extraordinary times we're living in.

Here's a quick two-minute takeaway insight I hope serves you as well as it serves me.

I think this is the coolest video I've ever made – in which I lay it plain how sex, art, and consciousness all intersect and led to the creation of the world we know.  Bookmark this for when you have seven minutes to appreciate it.

It's a 360º time-lapse live painting video of my first collaboration with my friends Randal Roberts and Morgan Mandala, two of the coolest people I know.  But the real magic sauce is in how the music and narration combine with this video to create a synesthetic, synergetic and emergent something-greater-than-its-parts.

I literally spooked myself with the synchronicities of the end result.  Enjoy!

New Podcast

My latest inspiring conversation about the cosmos is with JF Martel, film-maker and author of Reclaiming Art in the Age of Artifice – as well as the three-part essay "Reality is Analog," about the philosophical themes lurking behind Netflix's series Stranger Things.

You can download it here or subscribe to the show on iTunes or Stitcher Radio.

New Music & Talk from COSM

Stream or Download it here.  

Recorded live on 12 November 2016 at COSM, Alex & Allyson Grey's Chapel of Sacred Mirrors, in Wappingers Falls, New York.  Performed on acoustic guitar, voice, and hardware effects pedals (no computers, no prerecorded samples, entirely live and improvised).

This music is an invocation of creative spirit for the benefit of all beings. Recommended listening environments: painting parties, cuddle puddles, chillout sessions, game night, long daylight drives, and making love...

33% of sales go to supporting the Chapel of Sacred Mirrors and their project to build Entheon, a museum of visionary art.

Stream or Download here.

Delivered at the Chapel of Sacred Mirrors (Wappingers Falls, New York) on 12 November 2016, this talk – my first at COSM – was truly epic (three hours, minus the half-hour of pauses and throat-clearing I edited out for your benefit). Based on the work of Penn State professor Richard Doyle – especially his book, Darwin's Pharmacy: Sex, Plants, and the Evolution of the Noösphere – this is a talk about art as magic, and awareness as the medium of all creative work.

It's about how we got here and what we're doing and how the cosmic table's tilted in favor of evermore creative and intelligent ideas and organisms. It's about your purpose in the world and where this ride is taking us and how you can embrace the change and chaos for a more creative and rewarding life...

New Merch

I've been slacking on my society6 merchandise shop for a while, so I just fixed that with dozens of new items featuring some of my favorite recent pieces.  If you have a new device or space, consider fancying it up with some of these new decals, cases, pillows, notebooks, tapestries, etc.  ...

That's all for now.  Thank you for reading and have a magnificent week!

love

Michael

I'm Going To Get A Little Vulnerable With You, New Electric Guitar Tunes from Sonic Bloom 2016, Kishi Bashi Interview, New VR and Robotics Essay for the Body Hacking Blog, More Technoshamanism Goodness

“We are at the end of an era in which lies can be used to steal from the public and the commons. We are at the beginning of an era in which truth in public service can restore us all to a state of grace."

– Former CIA agent Robert David Steele

(My latest live painting in progress at Green Beer Fest, alongside a piece by my friend Martin Cash.)

I'm writing a book and recording a new studio album, both projects I've been promising my friends and fans for years.  It isn't easy but it IS exciting, and inspiring to share this process with you.

Here's the climax of a recent exercise in vulnerable and transparent writing:

------

If you are anything like me, the last ten or eleven years have not been easy. You were probably, like me, sold on the dream that your involvement in the pyramid-building of somebody else's vision would reap you rewards you haven't seen. You sought outside yourself authorities to help make sense of all the change, and wondered where you fit in all of it, and wondered if our parents had it easier, without the crushing daily in-your-face reminders that it isn't simple anymore.

But hopefully, then you are also like me in that you have recently decided to stop waiting for the aliens to land and give us Cosmic Christmas, you've stopped buying into party lines and flawed but visionary projects that devour your power and convert it into someone else's profits. You have made the change and now you hope that you can live as an example of the new model of the interdependent human being, motivated by your own relationship to intuition and the loving intelligence that speaks through it. You've given up on gurus, leaders, priests, your parents, bosses, and the future, and you're dedicated to the work of simply being true and clear to what you are and what you're called to do.

If you're like me, you aren't an "independent artist" - you're the intersection of colliding infinities, the universe unfolding as a human life, the product of an ecosystem. You are not "self-employed," because you are employed by that intelligence that lives distributed between all species and their interactions, what cybernetics calls the "Mind at Large." You are employed by everything to serve no less than everyone.

You can stop looking for a home. You have no home. The world is your home.

You can stop looking for a job. You know what you have to do right now. Go do it.

And now for as much music, art, and writing as I can create and share with you for free:

New Electric Guitar Track from Sonic Bloom Festival

I played my first electric set in years for the SolPurpose Visionary Art Academy at Sonic Bloom this June – the soundtrack to a live art session with instructors Martina Hoffmann, Randal Roberts, and Morgan Mandala.  Here is a clip from that performance – the whole show is a perk for all my Patreon and Bandcamp subscribers.

Honestly this one is kind of scary. It has pretty passages but they’re all in between a lot of roaring, black hole grooves and deadly space. There are some clearings of real beauty in there, sentimental lovely lead guitar lines. There are also plenty of unpleasant noises, hatching dragons, flying metal crumpling in a firestorm - even so, they’re interesting, raw and vivid like a heart attack or car crash filtered through slow motion overload, like music from the mothership that feels like maybe it’s just peaceful inquiry…but also could be reprogramming your brain with sound. Some parts of it are distinctly sexy. Not on purpose and it kind of spooks me. I don’t know where any of this comes from, so it’s listen at your own risk, guys. Thanks!

Listen to "Redisintegration – Final Breakdown" here.

Kishi Bashi Interview for Performer Mag

I recently interviewed one of my favorite musicians, Kishi Bashi, for Performer Magazine.  We had a totally bizarre and wonderful discussion on the past, present, and future of music and human connection.  Here's a tiny piece:

"I also had this thought the other day that in the future there may not be any music. Neuroscience will be at such a point where, I feel like within my generation, we’ll be able to recreate the effect of hearing a great song in our head. That little dose of that Dylan song you love and gives you goosebumps? That feeling will probably be able to be recreated, and there’s going to be people who will be able to map out the emotion of a great song, or a great movie, or a great book. Some of them will probably be more complicated than others, but I think people will start combining THAT with new visual and physical experiences. It’ll be a weird world by the time I’m dead."

– Kishi Bashi

Read the whole thing here.

New Writing on the Future of Virtual Reality and Robotics

A huge part of the book I'm working on right now is inquiry into the future of the human species and how it will feel to be alive once everything has stopped exploding quite so much – or, once we're used to it, at any rate.  Here is the latest, on the Body Hacking Conference Blog:

"It took less than a decade for the smartphone to insinuate its way into our sense of self. In some important senses, most of us are now dual-platform beings, living in at least two parts: the flesh and the machine. We don’t all think this way, yet – it takes time to steer the paradigm – but five billion people live with some device connecting them at all times to the sum of human knowledge, incredible machine intelligence, and the mediated life experiences of those other cyborgs. That phone is kept at all times inside the envelope of the magnetic fields projected by our hearts and brains, and someday soon we’ll think of human being-ness as slightly more about these organizing fields than what continuously cycling meat exists within them. So we’re each a binary: a person and a cellular device, a wizard and its owl familiar…if you don’t mind reviving the archaic to explain what modern language can’t sufficiently address."

Read the whole thing here.

Moogfest Technoshamanism Lecture Audio on Bandcamp

When Dennis McKenna and Bruce Damer weren't available to speak, Moogfest gave me the opportunity to present on "technoshamanism" at this year's event.

Consequence of Sound called it "Easily the most mind-opening presentation at Moogfest 2016" which is CRAZY TALK, but I'll take it.

You may have heard it already on the Psychedelic Salon Podcast – but for my own upload, I edited about 5 minutes of "uh" "like" "you know" out of the recording. Enjoy!

Listen to the whole thing here.

Catch Me Live

An intimate show with the amazing musical talents of Daniel Hansen aka RootFlute, who makes his own sacred instruments; and Johannes Rath, the only "guitalimba" player in the world. Both of these guys are experts in weaving trance-inducing, magical music out of their virtuosic playing – and we're going to mix solo sets with a group jam for maximum effect. Plus we get a double cherry on top: live painting by two of my favorite Boulder artists, Martin Cash and Joshua Wine Morriston. This is my only public concert on the entire Front Range until 2017!

Details and tickets here.

FINALLY! I'm teaching a class AND playing an instrumental cyberguitar set at the global epicenter for visionary art, Alex & Allyon Grey's Chapel of Sacred Mirrors. My three hour afternoon workshop will focus on focusing – that is, how to gather and apply attention – yours AND your audience's – for the benefit of all beings.

Details and tickets here.

For anyone in the New York area, I'm playing music for this amazing event with Alex & Allyson Grey, Luis Eduardo Luna, Ralph Metzner, Daniel Pinchbeck, Allan Badiner, Steven White, Esthela Calderón, and my friend Skytree.

"Join leading authorities on ethnobotany, ayahuasca, anthropology, visionary art as we explore the cultural history, traditional and neo-shamanic practices, artistic and literary inspirations, and the scientific, therapeutic and ecological dimensions of the sacred Vine of the Amazon."

Details and tickets here.

Thanks for reading. :)

Now on Patreon, Live at Boom Festival, New Live Painting, Technoshamanism at Moogfest, New Future Fossils Episodes, How To Resolve A Paradox

Hello, friends!  A note about creativity and courage:

If you're reading this it's probably because we met while I was painting and I inspired you to stay in touch.  The funny thing is that I've been an emblem of this "daring artistic lifestyle" for several years, but visual art was something I stumbled into as a way of making ends meet. It wasn't a courageous swan dive into the creative life; it was the path of least resistance for someone who'd grown up doodling in class. I've always liked painting but being called a "painter" is like getting stabbed a little.

Now I'm at the point where I either put the emphasis back on my writing and my music, where my soul really is, or I die a little inside. And I'm standing at the edge where I've seen so many people falter, on the cusp of taking that leap of faith and embracing the thing I can't imagine actually paying for itself, and pissing off most of my supporters in the process. And wow, it really IS scary here!

Selling art was never going to buy the life I wanted for myself and for my imaginary future family. (At least, not without my heart in it.) But NOT constantly producing pretty flash for people to consume means stepping out across a chasm with no bridge in sight.

I've set up a Patreon account for anyone who cares about the work I offer and who'd like to see me emerge victorious from this transition with an album and a book and lots of extra podcast episodes.

If I've inspired you at any point I hope that you will join me for this ride, and that I can be – more authentically and deeply than ever – a living example and a catalyst for anyone who's scared to follow what they love beyond the point of sense and into wondrous things...

And now onto the offerings I'm proud and grateful to share with you today:

Live in 360º at Boom Festival’s Chillout Gardens

Audio Recording Here (Name-Your-Price Download)

My concert at Boom Festival's Chillout Gardens was the most amazing gig I've had so far: playing to an audience of thousands in an eighty-foot-tall psychedelic stupa ringed with a six-point Funktion One sound array, stretched fabric and cushioned red carpet flooring on the beach of Idanha-A-Nova, a glorious and glistening lake that literally shimmers with flecks of golden mica.

I played the first set (after a short break) following an epic five-hour dance party by Gaudi – can't ask for a better energy than that – and improvised an hour of music that was alternately spacious, spooky, lively, trancey, woodsy, futuristic, and serene (and sometimes all at once).  For the first time I read some excerpts from a favorite book to deepen and intensify the space of my performance – in this case, William Irwin Thompson's book-length essay, The American Replacement of Nature.

Also for the first time, I included software piano – and recorded the first 25 minutes of the set as a 360º videosphere.  Check this out – you can scroll around and watch everything I'm doing with my pedals, gaze up at the amazing stretched fabric roof of the stage, and look out into the sultry deliciousness of the Chillout Gardens audience:

PS – You can see all of my 360º photospheres from Boom Festival and Portugal here.

New Painting: Eclipse Flower

Buy 11"x17" Prints

Astrologically speaking, I have a Pisces Moon.  That means I'm an intuitive, moody, empathetic, emotionally slippery kind of person.  This is true.  And at no time did it seem MORE true than in the final stretch of working on this painting, when a Lunar Eclipse on the exact degree of my natal Moon (24º) cast me into a Persephonic pit of oozing darkness known to the Internet as "THE FEELS."

In every medium, I find myself trying to express the dark-bright beauty of life's messy emotional paradoxes.  Like, for example, the closing track off my first album, "It Hurts So We're Not Dead."  And here we have the visual representation of that:  is it one plant blossoming riotously in the moonlight, or is it two plants fighting one another for supremacy?  Do these distinctions even make sense when it comes to the inherently conflicted inner landscape of emotion?

This piece is for anyone who has ever felt like an alien cactus possibly attacking itself.

Original piece painted live on 40"x30" canvas with oil & acrylic paint pens at the Denison Cultural Arts Festival, SPRATX, and at home from 16-20 September over the Lunar Eclipse.

New Future Fossils Podcast Episodes

Subscribe / Rate / Review Future Fossils Podcast at iTunes

My podcast with cohost Evan Snyder, in which we take the perspective of future archeologists digging through the digital remains of modern culture.  What messages of value can we send posterity?  Explore the nature of time and our place in it through the conversations of the unconventional, bizarre, free-roaming, fun, irreverent, and thoughtful kind...an auditory psychedelic to get you prepared for living in a wilder future than we can imagine. Our latest episodes:

Author Kingsley Dennis on the emergence of planetary "new monasticism."

Author Ashley Dawson on the relationship between capitalism and mass extinction.

Both conversations were amazing.  Check them out on iTunes and leave us a review!

Video + Audio: "Technoshamanism" at Moogfest 2016

Stream/Download Audio

My talk from Moogfest 2016 was a highlight of my career as a public speaker – Consequence of Sound called it "Easily the most mind-opening presentation Moogfest 2016 had to offer," which is no small statement on a lineup that included virtual reality inventor Jaron Lanier and gender-bending transhumanist Martine Rothblatt.

I think part of what made it so effective was the audioreactive visualization software Synesthesia, transforming my words into flowing imagery behind me while I spoke. You may have already heard this talk as Episode 508 of Notes from the Psychedelic Salon, but seeing it is a very different thing. It was like having a cybernetic collaborator, early AI offering the digital ground to the figure of my presentation.

I've also made the talk's audio available in my own archives as a free download, for which I thoroughly edited most of the "ums" and "likes" so that you can listen to me wax visionary without having to suffer my atrocious Valley Girl dialect. ;)

Time-Lapse Mural Video: "How To Resolve A Paradox"

I had a little fun with the time-lapse app on my phone to capture most of the process while I threw this paint pen mural up in my friend's camper van.  Unfortunately he moved before I could finish it!  But here you are.  Voiceover from my talk at Sonic Bloom 2015, music from my latest album. 

 Hopefully this helps somebody you know that's confused about an either/or dilemma.

Catch Me Live

An intimate show with the amazing musical talents of Daniel Hansen aka RootFlute, who makes his own sacred instruments; and Johannes Rath, the only "guitalimba" player in the world.  Both of these guys are experts in weaving trance-inducing, magical music out of their virtuosic playing – and we're going to mix solo sets with a group jam for maximum effect.  Plus we get a double cherry on top:  live painting by two of my favorite Boulder artists, Martin Cash and Joshua Wine Morriston.  This is my only public concert on the entire Front Range until 2017!  Details and RSVP here.

FINALLY!  I'm teaching a class AND playing an instrumental cyberguitar set at the global epicenter for visionary art, Alex & Allyon Grey's Chapel of Sacred Mirrors.  My three hour afternoon workshop will focus on focusing – that is, how to gather and apply attention – yours AND your audience's – for the benefit of all beings.  Details and tickets here.

For anyone in the New York area who can't make it out for the COSM gig (and also those who can), I'm also playing music for this amazing event with Alex & Allyson Grey, Luis Eduardo Luna, Ralph Metzner, Daniel Pinchbeck, Allan Badiner, Steven White, Esthela Calderón, and my friend Skytree.

"Join leading authorities on ethnobotany, ayahuasca, anthropology, visionary art as we explore the cultural history, traditional and neo-shamanic practices, artistic and literary inspirations, and the scientific, therapeutic and ecological dimensions of the sacred Vine of the Amazon."  Details and tickets here.