New Time-Lapse & Live Music Videos • Collab with Tourmaline Todd • Mural in Progress • Festival Announcements

“Technology reflects who we are. If we want to have better technology, we must be better people.”

– Nikola Danaylov
(Review the Future Podcast, Episode 57)

Thank you for reading this...you are the one for whom this work is made.

If you have any questions, say hello.  I'm always glad to hear from you!

love,
Michael

– Music – Paintings – Writing – Talks –

Beyond Duality - POV Live Painting Time Lapse

Watch on YouTube
Free Downloads: Narration | Music
Buy a print of "New Age Cleopatra"

What happens when we cease identifying Nature as something outside of us?  What will our culture look like when we see our cities and our songs as something Earth is doing?  This video features my Google Glass first-person footage while live painting my own vision of a future in which "made" and "born" are not two separate categories, narrated by an excerpt from one of my talks on human evolution and transpersonal psychology, and scored by music improvised on acoustic guitar and looping pedals as a performance of this new cybernetic nondual paradigm.

"Really" featuring Jenuine Cello

Watch on Youtube

Download music (pay what you like)

I've been waiting years to grab a solid video of this song, one of my favorites – it goes deep, says a lot in few words, and has a lovely funky little break in the bridge that opens up this modest number into something truly groovy.  Superb accompaniment by my friend and frequent co-conspirator, Jenuine Cello.

Recorded live on Febuary 4th at the monthly live looping residency Jen and I have held at Strange Brew Loungeside, Austin's finest listening room, for 14 months now.  (Incidentally, you can now like the Loopers' Night fan page on Facebook or join our Facebook group for more direct participation.)

Lyrics:

Nothing ever goes away, really

It only ever changes shape.

Innumerable masks and shades peeling

off your only lover's face.

We grieve and overcome the late

weeping, stranded in an elder age

but everything has been exchanged

sealing the gone in all that still remains...

We have traded blood and even if you die

no flood can wash away the sky.

In the cold and mud we're left asking why

but love will only answer, "I AM"

We lean on battered hearts and faint

weakened, wounded for the want of taste

but nothing ever leaves or stays, here

cuz Heaven permeates all space...

"Living Ships"
New Small Studio Collaboration with Tourmaline Todd

12"x16" – studio – oil and acrylic paints on canvas
Buy a print of "Living Ships"

Really getting into more collaboration paintings this year (check my Instagram for more on that) – this one, my homie Tourmaline Todd let me take home and finish.  I really like the opportunity to catch the pass and bring it home across those last few yards, to use an awkward football metaphor for art...the markers lend themselves quite well to finishing and detail work.

This piece is one of several in a new "best of" collaborations section in my store.

Mural in Progress

Not much to say about this one except I'm having a blast working on something bigger!  This painting is on the curved ceiling of a friend's camper here in Austin – about seven feet wide or so.

 I've taken little clips of time-lapse video on my phone using Lapse It Pro for Android and a magnetic-footed Joby Gorillapod, which I'll be sharing soon.  That's a gift you can expect to keep on giving – expect 1080p time-lapse videos to be a thing, now.  :)

Upcoming Events

All that hard work's finally beginning to pay off – the quality of festivals inviting me to join them this year is amazing, and I now curate not one but TWO monthly gigs in Austin (Loopers' Night and Paint Jam) that are each unique and excellent in their own right.

Highlights:  I'm presenting on technoshamanism and teaching an interactive live looping workshop at this year's Moogfest in Durham, North Carolina.  And I'm playing music at Boom Festival's Chillout Gardens in Portugal this August!  Hot damn, folks – if you'll be at either of these, hit me up...

I'd love to know where YOU think I should be this year – check out my calendar and let me know if you think anything is missing!

I'm Done Hustling Paintings – Live Art from Levitation Festival – New Full Band & Duet Recordings – More Articles from Globalish – New Painted Hats – Summer Festival Schedule

“To the poet, to the philosopher, to the saint, all things are friendly and sacred, 
all events profitable, all days holy, all men divine.”

― Ralph Waldo Emerson

"Some things in life are so serious all you can do is laugh."
– Mark Twain

After Today, I'm Done Hustling Paintings

I'm done trying to sell my original paintings.  I've never felt any conflict between creativity and commerce, but for whatever reason I have sold hardly any of my pieces in the last two years, and trying to hustle them just cheapens what I do and distracts me from the work.  I'm grateful to have found another satisfying way to make a living, as a writer, and that I can go on making work of personal significance, and sharing it with you, without the burden of the hustle.

That said, I put a lot of work into a new art gallery and store last month, where you can surf my art by year, read up on them, use magnifying view to scrutinize them in excruciating detail, and order prints with greater ease than ever possible before.  Here's the whole new full-featured gallery where you can order prints – and here's a list of all of the original paintings I still have available.

Views are always free.  I hope this work improves your day a little.

Psych Rock Thistle

Magnifier View // More Info // Prints

Levitation Festival (formerly Austin Psych Fest) is – if you can believe this – the first real rock & roll festival I've ever attended.  I had no idea!  People had come from all over the world and were genuinely there for the music – really committed, excited fans.  I'm so used to this "transformational festival" rhetoric about breaking down the boundaries between artist and audience, producer and consumer, but the honest truth is that when everybody feels like they're contributing then nobody is listening, and the people who have actually honed their craft to a professional level are often lost in the noise of everybody trying to show off.

In the sense that an amateur is someone who does it for love (amor), I'll always be one.  And I'm glad to have inspired so many other people to get out there and paint at shows, and play guitar, and study science...but wow, it was such a refreshing thing to be at a festival where the bands were playing and the audience was listening and when I set up to paint there weren't fifty other live painters.

I played my musical set at Levitation from the deck of a converted Airstream trailer that opened up like a transformer into an awesome stage, joined by my beloved Nicole Taylor on viola and my homie Randall Warren on cello, and there was a whole campground of people vibing to us when we brought a morning rainstorm down on them.  Afterward I met a bunch of great people who had traveled from all over the country to be there – and even a few inveterate psych rockers who'd come from London and stuck around for fifteen minutes while we broke our gear down to let us know they'd never heard anything like the music we were playing.

What a beautiful festival.  And so clarifying to my sense of who I am and what it is that I'm doing, musically.  Folks, if you like psychedelic electro-acoustic post-rock, you'll like these new recordings:

New Full Band & Duet Recordings

Free Download // Streaming Page

On the first Thursday of each month, an ever-evolving lineup of daring instrumentalists gather at Strange Brew Lounge in Austin, Texas. Exploring new music technologies and spontaneous collaborations in a boutique listening room environment – often in tandem with pioneering dancers and live visual projectionists – Loopers' Night is a truly one-of-a-kind event.  These recordings are of the completely improvised all-hands-on-deck jams we have at the end of every show. In many cases, these people have never played together before.

Please share this music if you like it! Loopers' Night is a community project and we appreciate your help spreading the word.  (Here are links to more info about our next shows on 4 June & 2 July.)

Easter w/ Nicole Taylor on Violin

Free Download // Streaming Page

One this rainy morning in Central Texas, at a lovely small flow arts conference on a permaculture farm, my partner of ten years and I performed together for the first time in entirely too long.  I looped her fiddle work and mixed it together with my own acoustic guitar improvisation while fifty or so world-class flow artists jammed along on hoops, poi, staff, sticks, and other toys.  It was a beautiful moment and the resulting recording conveys the spirit of that loving and relaxed environment.

New Articles for Globalish

My latest writing for the excellent web magazine Globalish.com, where we explore the lived experience and meaning of awakening in the digital age.  Every article frames a totally fascinating (provocative or downright gorgeous) video – even if you're not interested in my writing, you'll almost certainly be as moved as I was by what I'm writing about.

The Yin-Yang of Police & Perps: Are They Fighting or Secretly in Love?

Given that “the world’s a stage and all the men and women, merely players,” can we come together as a single play, one great phenomenon, acknowledging a unity that doesn’t just transcend, but maybe even needs, the drama, so it has a plot?

The World's First Holograms for Freedom March Redefines The Protest

We really do not know which futures are in store for us…and ultimately, we won’t get to live the better ones without the shift from selfish personhood to serving Whole-as-Self, beyond whatever stories we inhabit and inhabit us. Paradoxically, to build a better future we must jettison our big ideas and be response-able to what emerges here and now.

Protesting Music Festivals: Do We Really Have to Choose Between The World and Heaven?

It is the brain-bound ego, after all, that wants to free itself from its materiality. Desires are phenomena of flesh – including the desire to rid one’s self of its desires.

Graffiti Only Visible From Space: Where Does Landscape End and Art Begin?

Graffiti is the reclamation of the commons – a digestive act that challenges the boundaries of private property, recognizing life as art and everything in reach as media with which to ornament the world.

Let Noah's "Flaw" Show You How the Worlds of Waking and Dreaming Are One

Somehow the dreaming mind is unattached to categories in the way and to the same degree our everyday cognition is so fervently devoted to them. Letting something be two totally disparate things – letting our identity be local and diffuse at once – is all so hard for half our lives, so easy for the other half.

Is The Music Video Our Generation's Tibetan Book of the Dead?

Death, as a punctuation mark between one life and many (saplings growing in the light revealed by fallen trees), is not so much “end” as “amplification” of the terrible and beautiful intensity of being – what Rudolf Otto called the “numinous,” a mysterium tremendum et fascinans, ecstatic, rapturous, and inescapable.

Hot Chip's Time Travel Shenanigans in the Koan-Tastic "I Need You Now" Video

What we declare to be a cause entirely depends on how we frame the question. Causing what, within what span of time, within what volume, and to what degree? …To whom? There’s always going to be more room to add more complicated answers to this question, as we push the sphere of our investigations outward to include more differentiated parts within the unity of universe-as-one-phenomenon.

How New York's Projection Napping Turns The City Inside-Out

Projection Napping offers us a chance to see ourselves and our environments anew – and maybe even ask about the boundaries we have placed by habit in between the landscape and the body, mind and the environment. What separates us waking sleepers from our city dream?

A Magazine Printed with HIV+ Blood: Who's Aware of the Story?

So many of us hide our stigma, and in darkness marks are all the darker. Rather than exposing them to air and light to heal, we bury them, which makes the mystery and shame much deeper. Hidden, trees don’t grow; they die, decay. If we can’t talk about our problems (as we see them), nothing good can ever come of having them.

The New Scarlett Letter: Hong Kong Uses DNA Tests to Publicly Shame Litterers

Can we authentically maintain the sense of separation necessary to identify as modern individuals when we’re confronted with the striking similarity of every human’s inner life? When every last frontier of mind and body’s named and quantified, when we can’t hide from one another, who is left?

The Mystical Allure of Taboo: Trespassing the Sexual Imagination (NSFW)
Each generation, bound by new taboos, must find its own way there – we only have the opportunity, no guarantees, and many of us lose the way by seeking temporary fixes – but on arriving, every person’s idiosyncratic history no longer matters. All that matters is the sweet release, which lives forever only now and now and now.

New Painted Hats

I'm not accepting custom orders at this time, but Heady HQ in Oregon and I have been talking for a while about getting some of my hats in their shop, so I finally made good on it and sent them a couple brand new pieces.  Hit them up if either of these speaks to you...

Summer Tour Highlights

So many cool new festivals this year!  I'm excited to be back in New Mexico, Arizona, and Colorado this June and to get involved in some of New England's emerging boutique festivals in July.  And then Missouri and more Colorado in August!

Check out my full concert calendar for more details about these and several other awesome small events where we can meet up in person this summer...

That's all for now.  Thank you so much for reading and feel free to write me any time!

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

First, A Message From The Future

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

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

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

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

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

Next, Help Yourself To Some Free Tunes!

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

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

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

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

And Now, The Paintings

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

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

I Know It Means Something...

(Kingfisher & Code)

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40"x30", paint markers on stretched canvas

Original painting available (email for price)

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

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

Painted live at Wakarusa Festival 2012 during:

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

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

– Alan Watts

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

– Rich Doyle (amazing interview link)

Petroglyphs

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40"x30", paint markers on stretched canvas

Original painting available (email for price)

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

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

Painted live at Desert Rocks Festival 2012 during:

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

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

– Antonio Porchia

"A billion stars go spinning through the night,

Blazing high above your head.

But in you is the presence that

Will be, when all the stars are dead."

– Ranier Maria Rilke 

Biomechanical Tide

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36"x24", paint markers on stretched canvas

Original painting available (email for price)

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

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

Painted live at Impulse Festival 2012 during:

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

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

– James Hayden (cool NYTimes article link)

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

Going Backward To Go Forward

(As Awesome As Three Unicorns)

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36"x24", paint markers on stretched canvas

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

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

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

Painted live at Sonic Bloom Festival 2012 during:

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

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

– Ben Hecht

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

– Annie Dillard (great author website)

"No human thing is of serious importance."

– Plato

Upcoming Gigs

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

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