"Fortunately, most people still believe in love, and love, after all, is God's secret name.
The inevitable consequence of love is the building of temples."
“When we win it’s with small things, and the triumph itself makes us small. If only we would let ourselves be dominated as things do by some immense storm, we would become strong too, and not need names.”
This spring, I was blessed enough to perform my evolving "cyberacoustic" guitar music for audiences across Colorado, Texas, Oregon, Arkansas, and New Mexico. These improvised instrumental pieces soaked up the energies of each location – places with history and holiness that I can't even describe, except through music. From the sacred deserts of the Southwest to the rain forests of the Northwest...playing along with aerial fabric dancers in Denver and to dinosaur skeletons in Dallas...I gathered the most evocative and inspiring numbers into a new double-disc LP that takes my experiments in acoustic-electronic integration to a whole new level.
An all-terrain album if there ever were one, A Million Anniversaries: CyberAcoustic Guitar for Lovemaking journeys through anthemic electro-grooves into hypnotic tribal ambience, cinematic instrumental rock and tender romantic interludes. It's a testament to the orchestra hidden in an acoustic guitar, pushing the envelope of this traditional instrument into an age of digital angels and mycelial technology – and after months of preparation it's finally available:
The entire ninety-four minute, two-disc album (along with liner notes and exclusive high-resolution fractal zoom poster art) is yours for supporting my tireless tour schedule with your donations.
I'm also offering six of my favorite tracks together as a free EP for people who dig this music but can't purchase the whole album...just head over to the download page and turn yourself on to the freshest, deepest, grooviest, most intelligent music I have to offer!
Please blog about this, share it on Facebook and Twitter, and turn on your friends in the live music scene. Word of mouth is really important and anything you do to spread the word about this work makes an incalculable difference. Playing for you is my passion and I deeply appreciate your support!
Beyond the music itself, this album is a milestone in another important way: it marks my first physical release and a new style of hybrid freehand/digital illustration. The music is free when you buy a package of the ayahuasca-inspired fractal zoom stickers I designed while on retreat at Shimbre Shamanic Center with Papadosio & Kurt Redeker back in March:
Two each of all three fractal zoom designs
3.5" across, printed on die-cut glossy sticker paper
$15 for the set - free shipping & digital download of A Million Anniversaries with purchase
Watch it in full HD!
The first video showing how I layer all of these tracks live is now online – a romantic clip from The Manifestation Celebration with Alex & Allyson Grey, The Nadis Warriors, Govinda, Phutureprimitive, D.V.S*, and many other amazing talents at the Dallas Natural History Museum (!):
Watch it in full HD!
"Extinct" is one of the six free tracks from A Million Anniversaries. Go grab it and join the celebration – the new era of cybernetic instrumental folk music is here!
For anyone curious to learn more about the story behind this new work, Matthew Warnock of Guitar International Magazine recently interviewed me about making a career out of improvisation:
GI: Improvising that much on an album seems to offer up a lot of freedom...but there is also a lot of other pressure due to the fact that no one, including you, knows what’s coming next. Do you think that this is why more artists don’t attempt this sort of thing, that they’ve weighed the options and the risks outweigh the rewards?
MG: I think it’s a more common thing these days. I’m basically following the lead of live electronic acts like EOTO, who are very vocal in their publicity about how they improvise everything. On the other hand, you find out very quickly the result is that you end up flying in small tight circles, improvising similar patterns over and over, precisely because you don’t want to explode in flaming wreckage by taking it too far out of your zone. At some point I started wondering just how adventurous it really is, if you’re not writing anything but you’re not really putting yourself out on a limb, either.
(Read the whole interview here.)
...And while we're on the topic of interviews, I just published a fabulously far-ranging interview with Shannon Clay of Evergreen State College on SolPurpose.com. It's my most articulate attempt yet to explain how I see art & science as two wings on the same bird, and to offer a unifying paradigm in which everything can be seen as both art & science:
SC: What are the benefits of reconnecting the two and how can we combine them? Talk about how we can do this in the scientific world…a lot of people in academia are very sincere about keeping science and the metaphysical separate.
MG: It’s like having two separate personae and you can’t show your friends one, and you can’t show your parents the other. You know you’re both, but those two lives can’t meet. It’s an awful place to be. Science and art are interwoven so profoundly that to speak of them as NEEDING to be bridged belies a horrible rift in the modern mind. [We are] getting to a place where there isn’t “a dialogue between art and science,” but rather both are recognized as specific strategies that we may choose to adopt in order to frame our experience in a particular fashion appropriate to the place and time.
It’s not about building a bridge between art and science, any more than we can build a bridge between your left and right arm. That’s ridiculous. It’s about recognizing the larger context in which both of these methodologies emerge to answer specific needs in human culture and psychology. It’s about moving into an “integral” perspective, within which all of our various methods of inquiry – art and science being only two of many – precipitate as adaptive responses.
(Read the whole interview here.)
Last but not least, I just edited the HD video I took of our amazing live art team at Wakarusa Festival. I am so incredibly proud of everyone involved and look forward to doing it again in just a few days at Sonic Bloom!
(If you happen to be in Colorado this weekend, you'd be silly to miss this one – in addition to 78 of the world's finest electronic acts on three stages, workshops, aerial and fire dancers, and gorgeous installations, I'm also coordinating an eleven-person live painting team and our new Unified Field Gallery in Grassroots California's 30-foot dome! More info here.)
Watch it in full HD!
Next Week: tasty new custom fedoras, another live music video from A Million Anniversaries, and the recording of my talk at The Manifestation Celebration on "Evolution, Astrology, & The Science of 2012"...
