Rainbow Unicorn Xenomorph Painting • New Psych-Futurist Writing • Electric Ballads EP • Unplugged Peter Gabriel Cover • New Future Fossils Podcasts

“If you have a good idea, SAY IT, for God’s Sake!”

– Terence McKenna

Greetings, everyone – I hope your summer's going well!  (And that if you're in Santa Fe this week, you'll join me and a lot of awesome scientists and artists at the Interplanetary Festival...)

Here are the things I've made for you in the last month:

New Painting:
"They Only Come Out At Night, Mostly...Mostly"

36"x24" - paint pens on stretched canvas

painted live at Cosmic Flux Festival (AR) and Tap Iñ 2 (TX)

plus copious studio time over April & May 2018

- Buy A Print -

For anyone who loves HR Giger or Lisa Frank, or both, or unicorns and rainbows and pegasuses and chestbursters and biomechanical horror. Transgressive, suggestive, and downright queer (in the original sense: weird, strange, abnormal). Not intersectional, though – unless by that you mean the intersection of alien parasites and cuddly mammals (of which I will always approve, in fiction).

The title is a pun.  Guess I'm just in a "let your freak flag fly" mood...in addition to being WAY into skirting that edge between light and darkness, the sacred and profane, the happy and the horrible.  As should be evident in my latest piece of writing:

New Essay: 

"The Future Acts Like You"

Read on Medium

The latest chapter of my book-in-progress, How To Live in the Future, this twelve-minute read explores our coming age of simulated digital persons and the merged analog-digital identities we may one day possess; the effect of human cloning on the War of the Sexes; and as much deliciously freaky psychedelic futurism as I can squeeze into one wild, jazzy riff.  Enjoy!

New Free EP:

"Electric Cowboy Ballads"

Download for FREE on Bandcamp

Three new recordings on voice and solo electric guitar (Oh electric guitar, where have you been all my life?), recorded in Austin and San Marcos, 2018.

My life as a singer-songwriter is understated, passionately soulful but not something that I flaunt around. It is, however, closer to my sense of self than being a live painter, or a futurist, or essayist. Playing guitar and writing music are, I think, the best ways I know how to get a point across. These songs say more with less than I seem to be able to in other writing, or in conversation.

I wrote the closest thing I've ever made to outlaw country, "Don't Fret," in 2001; I wrote the tender neuroscience anthem "Always Catching Up" in 2015 as part of the windfall from an ayahuasca mishap; and I never actually wrote "Electric Improvisation in D Major" to begin with, just attuned to its always-already-ness and let it speak through me. So you're hearing a wide swath of my inner life and musical identity in three relatively short movements.

New Video:

Acoustic Cover of Peter Gabriel's "Don't Give Up"

Watch on YouTube

One of my favorite songs by one of my favorite artists. Peter Gabriel said he wrote this piece after seeing a collection of National Geographic's photographs from The Great Depression...since most Americans haven't benefited from economic growth since the 1960s, and my generation in particular got out of school just as the sub-prime mortgage crisis happened, I feel like many of us can resonate with these powerful lyrics.

This is my own arrangement, down 1/2 step from the original version. And yeah, I know I don't sound like Kate Bush, but hopefully you can forgive me. :)

New Episodes of Future Fossils Podcast

If you're not already in on this stream of amazing conversations, now's a great time to dive in.  As far as I'm concerned the guests and topics just keep getting better.  Image links are to the downloads and show notes for each episode, but you can find them on any podcast platform:

Subscribe on Apple Podcasts • Stitcher • Spotify • iHeart Radio

Join our Facebook Discussion Group

  

 

Stuff You Might Have Missed

 

Happy Halloween! | Playing at Arcosanti | Alien Queen & Cello | Velociraptor & Embellishments | Magenta Ceiba on FF

“Abandon all hope of fruition but do not fail to strive.”

– Willow Pearson

Happy Halloween, everyone!  Not a lot to report just yet – except next month's gig at Arcosanti, the oasis of visionary architecture just north of Phoenix – but big things (new music, science fiction, essays, coloring book pages, and more) on the way.  For now, here is some bite-sized news.  It is my honor to do my part in the Great Work of using art to make this world a better place.  

Enjoy, and thanks for reading!

love,

Michael

New Paintings

"Queen of Swords"

24"x48" – oil, acrylic, and aerosol paint on masonite

Prints & Notes About This Painting Here

"Velociraptor & Embellishments"

2017 – acrylic and oil paint on two 18"x9" canvases

Original Available – Info Here

Magenta Ceiba on Future Fossils Podcast

iTunes | Stitcher | Google Play | Patreon

This week’s guest is master community builder, singer, and human spirit animal Magenta Ceiba of the Bloom Network.  We discuss a sweeping suite of topics, such as the adoption of regenerative culture practices, cultivating planetwide resiliency, communicating across HUGE political gaps, and the perennial question:  "How can we be good ancestors?"

Upcoming Appearances

2 November – Austin, TX – Vortex Repository Theater
Original Music & Sound Design for P3M5: Plurality of Privacy Project in 5-Minute Plays

3 November – Austin, TX – Guan Yin Tea House
Cyberacoustic Guitar Instrumental Tea Set

10 - 11 November – Mayer, AZ – Arcosanti Convergence
Cyberacoustic Guitar + Live Painting

You Might Have Missed

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 Paintings: Giger's Alien, Spinosaurus, Crystal Egg | Year-End Print Sale | Another Killer Time-Lapse | More Articles From Globalish

"If you bring forth what is within you, what you bring forth will save you.

If you do not bring forth what is within you, what you do not bring forth will destroy you."

– Gospel of Thomas

I ordinarily try to space these out and keep things focused, but it just happened that I recently completed THREE new paintings I'd been working on for quite a while, PLUS a time-lapse video, PLUS a bunch of writing for the awesome Globalish.com – so this newsletter's kind of overfull.  

Suggestion: open in a separate tab and read at leisure.  There's a lot to dig, here.  Be well and enjoy!

$10 Year-End Print Sale

Every print older than this newsletter is only $10 until 2015 – these above and dozens more, which you can browse on Bandcamp.  If you want to do all of your shopping in one place, I'm trying to make it as easy as possible for you.  Happy Holidays!

New Time-Lapse Video:

The Common Core of Science, Art, & Spirituality

Watch in HD / Share on Youtube

Free Downloads: Music | Narration

A look into my process and philosophy, inspiration and commitment as an artist.  Recorded through Google Glass; soundtrack from my New Year's Day 2014 sunrise cyberacoustic guitar set; narration from my talk at Firefly Gathering 2014.  You can get a better look at the final piece below...

Rainbow Warrior (Giger Tribute)

Buy 11"x17" Prints | Share on FB

20”x20” – oil & acrylic pens on canvas

Original painting available – email with inquiries

Painted at
• 2014.11.15 – Empire Control Room & Garage (Austin, TX)

for Govinda, Living Light, Cactus Bath

•  2014.11.14 - 18 – Studio (Austin, TX) 

H.R. Giger's alien has haunted me since childhood.  I swear their hives must occupy the bulk of my imagination's dark side.  And now my friends at Synergetic Press have just released a new book, H.R. Giger and the Zeitgeist of the Twentieth Century, by pioneering LSD psychotherapist Stanislav Grof.
It's amazing – both Grof's essay and the Giger art inside, a lot of which I've never seen – and if you would like a copy, enter "Garfield" for $10 off at checkout.

Godzilla Was Real! (Spinosaurus aegypticus)

Buy 11"x17" Prints | Share on FB

24"x36" – oil & acrylic paint pens on canvas

Original painting available – email with inquiries

Painted at

• 2014.09.28 – Zelicks (San Marcos, TX) – Fractālà

• 2014.10.18 – Empire Control Room & Garage (Austin, TX) 

for Pretty Lights Music Showcase: Paul Basic, SuperVision, Michal Menert, Eliot Lipp

• 2014.11.18 – Holy Mountain (Austin, TX)

for DJ QBert, Jeremy Ellis, Table Manners Crew

Spinosaurus aegypticus was first discovered a century ago, but its type specimen was destroyed when the US bombed Berlin in WWII. We had no idea what this creature looked like, or how it lived, until another expedition recently discovered even more complete specimens. And the truth is weirder than anyone expected: Spinosaurus had a body specialized for living and hunting in a shallow freshwater environment: short, probably webbed hind legs, high nostrils, heavy bones to help it stay submerged...

We are talking about a fifty foot predator with a five foot head and claws longer than your foot. IT ATE SHARKS AND CROCODILES. AND while I MAY have taken artistic license with this painting, it might also have glowed with radiation...

Crystal Moon Egg Bathes in Silver Light

Buy 11"x17" Prints | Share on FB

2014 – oil & acrylic pens on canvas
Original painting available – email with inquiries
Painted at
• 2014.11.05 – LANAI Rooftop Lounge (Austin, TX) for Create Culture

for Shanti Planti, BogTroTTeR, EazyT, Shuniya, Fractālà
• 2014.11.19 – Empire Control Room & Garage (Austin, TX)

 Art Seen Alliance, Fool's Gold Records, & Brainfeeder present Azizi Gibson, Kamandi, & Barnes 

• Studio (Austin, Texas) 2014.09.30, 10.08, 11.04, 11.22-25, 12.01, 12.04

"They proceed to sing objects into existence. Amazing objects. Objects that are Fabergé Eggs, things made of pearl, and metal, and glass, and gel, and when you're shown one of these things, you look at it and you know, without a shadow of a doubt, that if it were right here, right now, this world would go mad. It's like something from another dimension. It's like an artifact from a flying saucer. It's like something falling out of the mind of God – such objects do not exist in this universe, and yet, you're looking at it."

– Terence McKenna

More Thought-Provoking Articles at Globalish

I can't think of any other site that keeps its finger on the pulse while staying deep like Globalish.  If you're the kind that wants both gorgeous videos and excellent companion text, we work for you:

Revolution

2014 Year in Review: DJ Earworm's Mashup on the United State of Pop

Travel

Slow Life: Where Underwater Creatures and Psychedelic Journeys Meet

Pripyat, Chernobyl: Postcards From A Nuclear Disaster

Inside the Gay Wing of Men's Central Jail in Los Angeles

B Style: Japanese Girls Who Want To "Look Black"

Art

Money Collage: Giving Dollars Value By Destroying Them

Karim Jabbari's Light Calligraphy Illuminates the Desert Night

Seeing The Invisible: Merging Music and Science to Visualize Sound

A New Take on "Depth of Field": Android Jones with "Electric Love"

Life

Living Buildings: Futuristic Family Homes Based on Biogenetic Forms

Meat: A Visual Poem on Youth Sexuality in Online Spaces

Barnyard Human-Horse Burlesque: Who's Aware of the Story?

Tis The Season For Ridiculous Trippy Clothing!

Because if it doesn't cause permanent brain damage for innocent bystanders, it's not worth wearing.

On a slightly less hyperbolic note, you are in fact guaranteeing that you will become a walking conversation piece if you leave the house with this stuff on.  With great power comes great responsibility.

Rants 2010 - 2013 | Purging The Music Vaults | New Live Painting | SonArte | Nocturnal Sketches | BassAware

“It’s absolutely irrational to not be filled with the fire of consuming hope.”

- Terence McKenna

“You need a balance of gloom and optimism.  Let one get out of control and take over and you are in trouble.”

- Howard Bloom

I hope you guys don't mind that I don't have much to say in preface to the fullest, most abundant newsletter I've ever put out there.  My hands are sore from typing this week - the natural consequence of preparing pics of my latest live painting; a collection of my best concert banter from the last four years; not one but FOUR musical releases (mostly old material for super-fans only – to clear the brush from the trail of my mind, as it were, in preparation for a few truly excellent releases in 2014); previews of the collected sketchbooks I plan to publish in the next year; news on my recent partnership with audio-to-artwork startup SonArte; an article on the coolest new music technology I've seen in years; and the long-overdue page I created for Live Painting on Facebook.

I'm as open to your correspondence as ever.  Stay in touch, and have a beautiful last few days of 2013!

Rants: Concert Banter on Aliens, Love,

and Other Great Mysteries, 2010 - 2013

Free Download | Share on FB

Culled from four years of live concert recordings, "Rants: 2010 - 2013" highlights the visionary diatribes, cornball goofery, and contagious enthusiasm that make my shows so distinct and personal. Every set is an opportunity to blow minds - and not just with music. 

Enjoy this journey into the mind of a modern performance philosopher coming of age on tangents both profound and profane. Thirty-six minutes of sheer...sheerness, somewhere between bardic wit, standup comedy, and raving lunacy.

 

"Amazingly well-spoken."

- Charles Eisenstein, author of Sacred Economics

"[Michael has] a wonderful ability to articulate the difficult and complex divinity of this world."

- Sarah Dawn Haynes, coordinator for Bioneers Colorado

"You goof-a-potamus."

- Nicole Taylor, Beautiful Music Violins

Purging The Music Vaults – Happy Holidays!

  

Free Download | Share on FB || Free Download | Share on FB

B Universe: Experiments & Outtakes

Here is a little journey through my developing sound over the past four years, as improvised guitar loopscapes became a bigger and bigger part of my singer-songwriter sets...and eventually took over, as I gathered new gear, new techniques, and new confidence in flying by the seat of my pants.

I think each of these performances has something to love, but the recordings are too raw to justify putting them out on a "big" release. So here they are, the black sheep and weirdos – which, maybe, say more about me than anything else.

(If you only download one of the four releases I threw at you this week, this is the one.)

A Global Odyssey of the Arts

Just over one year ago, Dixon's Violin, Texas State University experimental music professor Richard Hall, and myself got together for a show withARTheism and acclaimed hooper Brecken Rivara.

"A Global Odyssey of the Arts" was a night to remember. Here is a free recording of the instrumental magic that transpired...a superb soundtrack to peaceful winter ambiance. Enjoy!

  

Free Download | Free Download

Listening to these is kind of painful now, but also proud – to hear how far I've come.  Recommended for anyone interested to know my roots, here are two windows into the very early days of my experimental guitar work.  Scapegoat was the first of my annual winter holiday releases, back in the dinosaur-infested yonder-year of 2008; Live From Zero Point is mostly made of good songs performed by someone who hasn't grown into his pants, but features "Zipline," my first ever attempt at a danceable cyberacoustic groovescape.  

Both of them are beyond free...if you're dedicated enough to listen to these greenhorn releases, let me know who you are so I can declare you a super-fan and lavish you with appreciation.

~ New Live Painting ~

Feathered Tongues of Flame

Buy 11"x17" Prints | View on FB

20"x30" - paint markers on canvas

Painted during the music of:

The Parish, 2013-11-15 ... A.J. Vincent, Holiday Mountain, ishi

The Parish Austin, 2013-11-22 ... Holding Space, The Motet

Speakeasy, 2013-11-29 ... Immortal Guardian, Consider the Source

Emo's East, 2013-11-30 ... D.V.S*, PANTyRAiD
Email me to bid on the original painting.

Part nudibranch, part fire elemental, kind of erotic, based on this sketch I did on the plane coming back from playing a New Year's concert in Costa Rica in 2011.  Click on the picture for a closer look – I'm really happy with all of the subtle detail that went into this one, the transparencies and jellylike rippling effects.  Evidence that the more things change, the more they stay the same...

Alien Queen & Black Pearl 

 

View on FB | View on FB

I don't doodle as much as I used to.  But I did just scan hundreds of pages of my sketchbooks in preparation for a formal release sometime in 2014.  Stay posted, and enjoy these two more recent white-paint-marker-on-black-construction-paper pieces in the meantime!

Making Sound Into Art w/ SonArte

View on FB

Sample graphic for the kind of sonograph-to-painting commission work I'm now doing for a new Los Angeles-based company, SonArte. Cool concept, check it out:

"Behind every sound is a story told through a waveform. With each beat, note and tone comes a beautiful pattern which is the physical representation of sound. Now you can have that waveform created as a work of art. SonArte takes the unique waveform of any sound be it a song, a phrase, or a heartbeat and creates luxuriously handmade custom paintings and digital art. SonArte paintings and digital art are created by real artists, not computers. The parameters are specified by the customer so each piece of art sent out is unique and will never be duplicated. Using a waveform of sound of your choice, SonArte’s artists transfer your sound onto a canvas."

I'm one of six artists on the ground floor. If you want your favorite sounds transformed into visual poetry, go here.

~ New Article on SolPurpose ~

Introducing BassAware: A Revolution In Wearable Audio

I have been tracking audio technology developments since 2007, excited to imagine how our accelerating world might change the way we relate to our senses. But years of speculation takes its toll, resulting in a kind of “future fatigue” (“Where is my hoverboard?”) – and so it was with immense delight that, on a trip to New York this summer, I met inventor Michael White and experienced his new device bassAware, a wearable subwoofer that takes personal audio into an entirely new and sexy dimension.

This isn’t just a concept; it’s a reality, market-ready, and poised to change the way we relate to our favorite music forever. Michael was kind enough to indulge SolPurpose with an email interview on the history and social implications of bassAware...

Read the interview here.

Live Painting has a home on Facebook

Visit the Live Painting Community Page

FINALLY.

Blessings, everyone.  Thanks for your support!