Videos: Cyberguitar at BRC | Talk: Entertainment As Social Action | Consciousness App | New Merch Galore | Upcoming Shows

"A real work of art destroys, in the consciousness of the receiver, 

the separation between himself and the artist."

- Leo Tolstoy, What Is Art?

New Cyberguitar Videos From Burning Man 2013

Watch the whole set in my Burning Man 2013 playlist.

Live at Center Camp Café, 27-8-2013.  I had just unpacked my camp and rolled my sixty pounds of gear a quarter mile across the desert to play this gig after four straight days of driving across country from Austin to Boulder to Black Rock City – two days of which I spent crumpled in a feverish heap in my friend's passenger seat, praying I would be able to play this show.  The fates were smiling on me this night!  As soon as I got in the gate, a wave of YES broke over me and I ended up jamming one of my most inspired improvisational sets to date.  At the end they told me the next act never showed up, so the last video in this series (right before the camera battery died) is of me inviting my many excellent musician friends in the audience to come jam with me on stage.  

These videos feature a whole bouquet of techniques – Ebow, nylon brush percussion, LFOs, multichannel looping, pitch shifting, delay tweaks, and more – as I transform the initial space-radio 6/8 groove into glacial psy-ambient acoustic metal, then a slow-burning instrumental pop anthem.  Just another day at the wheel...  :)

The best parts of this set, and the one I played at Fractal Planet, are available on Bandcamp as a Free/Pay-What-You-Like Download...along with about 30 more hours of lovely acoustic cyberdelia.  Please, go help yourself if you haven't already.  My cup runneth over, and people tell me it's good music for flow arts, making babies, and stuff.

Here are the rest of my way-hella-tons of audio recordings from Burning Man 2013:

Talks: View From The Horizon | Taking A Cosmic Perspective | Life in the Glass Age 

Music: Earth Song For Sky Dance | Looper's Night at Center Camp

Wow!  It's all published.  Sweet Mercy, that took forever.  Enjoy...

Entertainment As Social Action @ Art Outside 2013

Free / Pay-What-You-Like Download

How do narrative and metaphor construct our social reality...and how can we use entertainment media to challenge our limitations, reprogram our minds, and make the world a better place?

On the use of poetry and cinema to shape perception, how we are bound together by our entertainment in the body of something greater, and how the internet's unique topography offers us a profound opportunity to redefine what it means to be human...my latest presentation explores the liberating potential of art and the importance of the artist in each of us.

"Could A 'Consciousness App' Change The World?"

New Article & Live Webcast for Reality Sandwich

Well, it's finally happening:  The work of a crack team of advisors – including prominent members of The Institute of Noetic Sciences & Princeton Engineering Anomalies Research Lab – the app turns your smartphone into a Random Number Generator (RNG), calculates the non-randomness of your bitstream as a measure of your mind's potential influence on matter, and generates real-time maps of coherent psychic phenomena – launching a new crowdsourced psychic meteorology we could use to predict significant cultural events and other "disturbances in the Force."

Read more at Reality Sandwich

Live webcast interview with project director Adam Curry
This Thursday – 23 January, at 6 pm PST / 9 pm EST!

New Mind Folds

I'm back in the game.  I love doing these!  Email me if you'd like one – prices range between $50 – 100, so they're a bit more affordable than the flatbills & fedoras (for which I'm also currently taking orders).

View / Share on FB

View / Share on FB

Upcoming Events

I am mixed up in some AMAZING stuff over the next few weeks – live webcast panel discussions; musical performances with intense live digital animation by Topher Sipes; the first gallery show for Third Coast Visions (our live art collective here in TX); and the return of the wonderful Head For The Hills Festival.  My full calendar is on my website.  

Here are some highlights with links to the event pages:

And in case you missed them...

Thanks to very helpful collaborators and recent good turns in fortune, my slickest merch ever is here.  Follow the links below to adorn yourself with wearable art I'm truly proud of, and help me make up for the other 90% of my time I spend on work that doesn't pay – like my technology, art, and consciousness discussion group, uploading all those videos, and writing poetry about the Moon...

Buy Link on FB

Buy Link on FB

Buy Link on FB

That's all, folks!  Thanks for reading and stay in touch...

Live at Burning Man 2013 | Interview w/ Rich Doyle | New GRC Embroidered Flatbill | New Pins & Custom Hats | Life In The Glass Age

“The zen tradition has this great saying, ‘Here comes the hearth god, looking for the fire.’ You’re looking everywhere for the fire, and it’s in you. and when you start to find it in yourself, others find you.”

– Richard Doyle

I turned 30 this year on January 8th – sharing a birthday with Elvis Presley, David Bowie, and Stephen Hawking, among others.  Big shoes to fill – which is why this year I'm focused on bigger and more meaningful projects than ever before.

Here are the first preliminary echoes of those great works to come.  Thanks for reading, and enjoy!

I Miss You And It's Okay: Live at Burning Man 2013

Free/Pay-What-You-Like Digital Download

55 minutes of dreamy, compelling electronic guitar improvisations inspired by and infused with playa magic. Recorded at Burning Man's Center Camp Café and Fractal Planet Village , this hour of multi-channel looping improvisations on guitar, voice, and hardware effects is the alchemical transmutation of enthusiasm, playa dust, and sheer PATHOS into the angelic psychofluid captured here as a trace fossil for your appreciation.

Recommended listening environment: sprawled out on carpet, couch, or bare earth while making love or waiting for inspiration to strike.  Dedicated to the dream woman for whom I spent long years searching, a fantasy I finally released by fire in this year's Temple.

Download it here and enjoy the ride...

My Chat with Sci-Fi Professor Richard Doyle

Stream/Download Here

Richard Doyle is now Professor of Information Science, Rhetoric, and Science Fiction at Penn State and author of a trilogy on emergent forms of knowledge, the latest and most acclaimed of which is the epic treatise, Darwin’s Pharmacy: Sex, Plants, and the Evolution of the Noösphere – probably the finest example yet of 21st Century “psychedelic” writing.

The latest in my SolPurpose.com series of visionary-yet-personal dialogues with various inspirational thinkers, we focused on how human exploration is turning once again to the inner frontiers of consciousness.  Doyle's love for language shone through for our whole conversation.  Here are a few clips:

“Our brains have been the frontier of capitalism for the last twenty years, of which the internet is just one manifestation, and the pharmaceuticalization of everything is the other. It’s like we’re on the border of Oklahoma in the 19th century and the gunshot goes, and everybody goes to stake their claim – it’s like the inner realm is that space, now.”

“We don’t need to create another identity politics around evolving consciousness. Because that’s how we won’t evolve consciousness. But we do need other like-minded souls…to help us by verifying, and debugging, and debunking all the stuff we’re working through as all this stuff continues to unfold.”

Read more & listen at SolPurpose.

"Compass Mandala" Pins by MG x KolorSpun

Order yours here | View/Share on FB

1.8", gold-plated, double-posted enamel pins based on my live painting, "Compass Mandala #1" – each colorway (warm and cool) is laser-engraved in a numbered series of 250.  Preorders ship by January 24th.

MG x Herbivore x GRC Embroidered Flatbill

I think my new Grassroots California signature flatbill for Herbivore Designs must be the coolest hat I've ever made – and it damn well better be, because it took almost an entire year to get this most-complicated-design-ever prototyped and ready for sale!  I'm sure you can tell how much work went into this, from the original painted concept to the fully embroidered and sublimation-printed final product (which you can order here):

View on Instagram

View on Instagram

Limited series of 420 – grab yours while supplies last at Herbivore Designs.

I'm also still going strong with the custom painted hats.  Here are the latest – email me if you'd like details on getting one of your own:

View/Share on FB

View/Share on FB

Join The Discussion: Technology, Art, & Consciousness

I also want you to join me in one of the most important conversations of our times.  Join Life in the Glass Age: Technology, Art, & Consciousness, my new social bookmarking club and discussion group:

We live in an age of accelerating change - not just of our technologies, but of our selves and societies. We define ourselves in relationship to our tools and each other – and as one of us changes, so do we all.  This group is for the exploration of the new worlds coming into being as powerful new knowledge technologies are born and we experience new permutations of old struggles: between privacy and accountability; freedom and security; access and permission.

Encouraged: Posts about the personal and social dimensions of sur- and sous-veillance, Big Data, augmented reality, wearable computing, the Internet of Things, etc. How are we changing - and how are we staying the same? How are we learning to make art out of our increasingly intelligent and responsive environments?  Critical perspectives welcome.

Everyone into the pool!  And thanks again for your support.

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

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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!