New Live Tracks & Feature by The Untz | New Jellyfish Painting & Collab with Tourmaline Todd | Podcasts & Interviews Galore! | New Articles for Globalish

Photo by Clay Collins at Firefly Gathering 2015

Wow.  

This summer has already been so powerful and awesome!  Things are really moving, settling into new configurations.  Just when I thought I was done with festivals, two of my old steadies – Firefly and Sonic Bloom – restored my faith in the power and potential of small, intentional celebrations and in my ability to meaningfully contribute to them.

And having a job I really believe in – my work writing for Globalish.com – liberates the art and music from the hustle that have kept them down for years.  All of my work has been transformed by the focused creativity-as-spiritual-practice that Globalish provides, and puts it all within a greater context of serving everybody-all-at-once by pointing past our stories to the peace within which everything exists.

I'll have much, much more to share about them both in the next newsletter.  But while I'm getting photos taken of the latest paintings, rendering my talks and concerts, and catching my breath at home in Austin, here is plenty to enjoy.  Take care and stay in touch!

New Live Tracks & Feature by TheUntz.com

Videos from my Loopers' Night residency at the acclaimed Strange Brew Lounge in Austin, Texas – featuring visuals by the audioreactive Synesthesia software, and a guest performance by my beloved Nicole Taylor on viola.  Download these tracks for free here.

"Haunting, introspective electroacoustic magic...These spacey compositions take on new life as [Michael] rearranges, builds, and deconstructs them on-stage."

– The Untz

Watch in HD on Youtube

Watch in HD on Youtube

New Live Painting:
"Watermelon Tourmaline Medusa"

Share on FB | Buy Prints

Oil & Acrylic pens on canvas (18"x24")
Available – email with inquiries

Painted live at Kerrville Folk Festival 2015 during Rj Cowdery, Joe Crookston / Milagrito Records, Ellis Delaney, The Don Juans, & Amy Speace and at Parish Austin for Art Seen Alliance Presents FKJ, BRANX, Diamond Cuts, & Lefty

Read about this painting and view it through a magnifying lens.

New Collab w/ Todd Shepherd (Available)

New Painted Hat (Sold)

New Writing for Globalish

Hip Hop's Latest Psychedelic Turn: Dig A$AP Rocky's Hopeful, Romantic "L$D"
There’s always going to be a niche for guns and hos and other adolescent bluster, but it’s looking more and more ridiculous with every passing day. When we’re confronted with the Mystery of Being and open our lives to make more room for it – as seems to be the case for A$AP Rocky – we’re forced to recognize how little nourishment there is in our old games of separation...

Lampooning The Global Addiction to Self: Open Mike Eagle's "Celebrity Reduction Prayer"

More of us are waking up to how we’re squandering our lives on self-obsession. Learning this does not mean turning victim’s rage upon the few who manage to exploit the many’s pride and avarice, in adolescent bids for power. The market only follows the demand, and all we have to do to slay the dragon at the other end of this perceived conspiracy is stop investing so much energy and money on a “self-and-other” story that is dubious at best...

Time, Space, Ego: Is "Change Gonna Come" Because That's What I Am?

Self and world change together as a matter of necessity, since self and world are only separated as an artifact of our perception, tuned to keep one part of our experience consistent for as long as possible. Wisdom is in knowing this, and seeing past the revelation that the self and world both change to notice what unchanging deeper mystery contains them...

Sex & Psychedelics: Are We Ready To See Through Separation For Good?

What psychedelics teach us – and what we continue to mistranslate in our bid to “bring the world together” – is that nothing’s separate, never was, and all this back-and-forth is sheer creative play: a universe that can, and so it must, explore the sense of being selves and others...

Challenging The Nature/City Boundary With "Urban Geodes"

Something’s changed in recent years as scientific understanding of our planet’s systems deepened to the point where we can not pretend that we are, or have ever been, a separate phenomenon from everything that we romanticize as “Nature.” We define an epoch of the planet’s life in which the actions of technology and city-dwelling Homo sapiens are actions of geology...

Soul Mates or Cell Mates?: The Blessing & The Curse of "Other" People

If boundaries are ideas, not absolute realities, then we can take them up when necessary, drop them when appropriate, arbitrate together the complexities of sharing space, and celebrate our unity more frequently than we would ever have been able to when we assumed our separation as the basis for our interactions...

Podcasts & Interviews Galore!

"This week we talk psychedelics, philosophy, and discuss whether or not evolution has a defined trajectory."

Shane Mauss is a rare bird and a blessing to the world of stand-up comedy: his jokes are informed by an abiding interest in evolutionary psychology and psychedelic philosophy. He teaches you things while you're laughing, all the while pulling off this "I had a funny thought" vibe reminiscent of late-night dorm room conversations. His podcast, Here We Are, is an awesome series of interviews with scientists and philosophers which he claims helps him research new material for his comedy routine, but also just happens to be a fantastic journey through knowledge and the open horizons of the human experience.

After some mutual friends introduced me as someone who could hold an engaging chat with him about DMT (facepalm) we met up, hit it off, and had a damn-near-three-hour conversation that takes his podcast in some pretty strange directions.

Listen to our conversation here.

I also revisited the lovely folks at Project Bring Me To Life for an hour-long video podcast, and had an accidentally super-intense interviews with Electronic Colorado and Sparkleberry Lane about my participation in this year's Sonic Bloom Festival.  All three of those were fun and offered some interesting space for surprising depth, if you find time enough to venture into them...

Some Upcoming Shows

(Full Calendar Here)

"In the late 20th century, the formative issues in digital media art were about connectivity and interaction. In this century, our post-digital objectives will increasingly be technoetic and syncretic. Formerly, there was much ado about e pluribus unum (out of many, one) – a unified culture, unified self, unified mind, unity of time and space. Now the reverse applies: ex uno plures (out of one, many) – many selves, many presences, many locations, many levels of consciousness."

– Roy Ascott, "Syncretic Art and The Technology of Consciousness"

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!

Perhaps My Greatest Blog To Date: New Paintings (Cleopatra, Lion, Shark, Madonna) + San Marcos River Cyberballadry + Giger's Alien Tribute Time-Lapse Video + New Articles & Gig Announcements

I live my life in widening circles

that reach out across the world.

I may not complete this last one

but I give myself to it.

I circle around God, around the primordial tower.

I've been circling for thousands of years

and I still don't know: am I a falcon,

a storm, or a great song?

– Rainer Maria Rilke, The Book of Hours

Photo by Shane Dooley

No joke:  This is my proudest moment in six years of publishing this blog.  Not only do I get to share with you the biggest and most time-intensive painting I have ever made, but also THREE more paintings, each of which expand my work into a new terrain.  I also have the latest live recording of my ten-year musical experiment in looping the guitar, now all grown up and totally unique as hybrid solo instrumental music blended up with psychedelic glitch, all improvised to suit the special time and place it was performed.  

And here are SEVEN new short essays on my favorite topics (revolution, travel, art, and life).  And here's the latest time-lapse video I made while painting Giger's alien through Google Glass.  And whee, updates about some great new gigs I have on the horizon!

I'm honored that I have the opportunity to bring this all to you – and hope it lands as deeply as it can, inspires your day and week and month, prepares your auric field for major upgrades, lubricates your mind to slip right out of limiting assumptions, and motivates reciprocal creative acts that awe your friends and neighbors.  

Stay in touch – and thanks for reading!

Download YAGUANA: Live at Texas Wild Rice Festival

Some words about my latest record:  “Yanaguana” is Coahuiltecan for “sacred waters.” I learned the phrase from Yakona, Paul Collins’ amazing film about the San Marcos River. What's now the city of San Marcos is the oldest continuously inhabited site in North America, with an unbroken archeological record dating back perhaps 18,000 years…and we can thank the river’s crystalline spring water for its hospitality. The headwaters of the San Marcos – which now flow through the Texas State University campus, after burbling up from the aquifer at Aquarena Springs – make the area a truly, obviously sacred place.

That first mile of the river is also the home to numerous endangered species that live nowhere else – including Zizania texana, or Texas Wild Rice, the only wild plant I know that has a festival named after it. This was the second year I got to play at Sewell Park on the banks of the San Marcos in honor of this place and its inhabitants.

The Texas Wild Rice Festival, a public free event thrown by my friends to raise awareness of the river and the creatures it supports, is just as magical a moment as you might imagine. For someone whose career is basically a quest for gorgeous spots to play, it’s hard to find a more inspiring venue.

Everything in this half hour you’re about to hear was improvised with one guitar, one voice, and fifty pounds of pedals – no software and no pre-recorded sounds – everything a live response to that specific place and time. The music, like the river, flows continuously from one moment to the next, a stream of thoughts and feelings, sometimes wide and languid, sometimes turbulent, and always headed on toward the sea…

(For fans of Boards of Canada, The Books, Four Tet, Kaki King, Ratatat, Nicolas Jaar, Zoe Keating, Tycho, Tortoise)

Stream / Download Here for Whatever You Please

PS – I'm happy to answer specific questions about my gear, technique, etc. for any curious musicians.  Don't be shy if you would like to learn the one-man orchestra modality! I'd be glad to teach it to you.

New Age Cleopatra Basks Apocalyptically in Neon Light 

Like Galatea, Word Made Flesh

32"x48" – oil & acrylic pens on masonite

Read more, shop prints, & look at detail through a magnifying viewer here.

Dedicated to my many visionary artist friends, whose inspirations and recurring themes are honored, teased, and stolen in this piece – a comprehensive catalog of new age painting silliness that ended up becoming something much more dear and meaningful.

Editor's Note: While I was underpainting this at Art Outside Festival, I swear I saw a tiny pale gray moth fly out of the painting. To date this is the only piece that has appeared to generate a living creature – which is appropriate, since Galatea, the woman referenced in the title, is the name of the mythological Greek sculptor Pygmalion's statue, with whom he fell in love. The love and desire animated her and she became a real woman. Theirs is a story of fiction crossing the line into fact, the individual creative process manifesting an impossible boundary dissolution. (But it's not really impossible, since all of our facts are simply practical fictions...)

Click on the image below to check this painting out as iPhone cases, laptop skins, etc.:

Good Kitten (New Age Male)

24"x48" – oil & acrylic pens on canvas

Read more, shop prints, & look at detail through a magnifying viewer here.

The meeting of opposites: aquatic and celestial, organic and machine, masculine and feminine, soft and serrated, still and fluid. A new age male, both powerful and gentle.

Click on the image below to check this painting out as iPhone cases, laptop skins, etc.:

Shark Week All The Time

18"x24" – oil & acrylic pens on canvas

Read more, shop prints, & look at detail through a magnifying viewer here.

Sharks have lived on Earth almost unchanged for over 400 million years. They are immune to cancer and provide an invaluable role in oceanic ecosystems, and yet we slaughter them for soup and out of fear. This piece is dedicated to these majestic and misunderstood creatures...

Click on the image below to check this painting out as iPhone cases, laptop skins, etc.:

Our Lady of Cosmic Reproduction

18"x24" – oil & acrylic pens on canvas

Read more, shop prints, & look at detail through a magnifying viewer here.

The cosmos manifests through vortices across the polar axis of a toroid flow – the "Grail" of esoteric systems, an emotional outpouring mirrored in our hourglasses and our double entendres.  This is just the shadow cast in four dimensions by a crystalline pleroma greater than the world we observe – the universal womb within which everything both bounded by and utterly beyond our short horizon of the possible exists.  The Matrix or the Mother of all matter, beyond all life and death...

Click on the image below to check this painting out as iPhone cases, laptop skins, etc.:

New Articles at Globalish

My job at Globalish has catalyzed a major transformation in my life and work.  We're like a laboratory for collective inquiry – a platform for awakening in our new digital society.

Cyberspace is our monastery – and so we question our society’s assumption of the “digital dualism” between internet and life, because we question our assumption of duality in general: where is the line between the mind and body?  Art and nature?  Self and other?  Just how useful are these categories, and can we embrace them as experiments instead of final truths?  Are we the stories that we tell – and if we aren’t, how can we use the stories that we hold as tools for our awakening?

How will we understand ourselves in ten, or twenty, years?  How does that understanding change how we engage our lives right now?  

These are the questions we are asking here.  We welcome you to join us.  Here are my latest pieces:

Weapons Are The Tools of Fear: On Pussy Riot's Video Dedication To Eric Garner

Getting Used To Being Everything: A Journey "Thru Tel Aviv" & Remix Culture

The End of Revolution Is The End of History: Who's Aware of The Story?

The Overflowing Void: On Shabazz Palaces & Burroughs' Naked Lunch

Tycho's "See": Teaching Audiences How To Discover The World Anew

Juan Pablo Zaramella's "Luminaris" Is A Map of Your Enlightenment

Let Wes Anderson & Stanley Kubrick Bring You Back To "Centered"

Giger's Alien Time-Lapse Video

Watch in HD on Youtube

Watch me paint my H.R. Giger tribute xenomorph piece, "Rainbow Warrior," filmed from my point of view through Google Glass.  (You can grab the soundtrack free right here.)  And if you like this kind of thing, here's every time-lapse video that I've recorded.

Upcoming Gigs

The community experimental music monthly I started with looping cellist Jen Mulhern has been renewed for three more months!  If you are interested in what totally unique improvisation games in Austin's finest listening room sound like, come out May 7th and enjoy an evening with Jen, myself, Shane Dooley, Michael David, Jimmy Allison, Todd Sloan, and Nikki Taylor as we take it to the limit in acoustic-electronic music hyperspace...

What more!: I am literally the very last addition to this year's Levitation Festival lineup, on a bill with Flaming Lips​, Tame Impala​, The 13th Floor Elevators​, The Jesus And Mary Chain​, The Black Angels​, Lightning Bolt​, The Sword​, This Will Destroy You​, and Spiritualized​.

I'm playing a Saturday morning set with a totally fresh quartet featuring live drums and a string section.  It's going to be a spacious, groovy, radical re-envisioning of the cyber-acoustic terrain that I've explored for the last decade, and I'm super psyched to share it with you...

“Every great and original writer must himself create the taste by which he is to be relished.”

– William Wordsworth