Michael Garfield's Love Without End Tour Newsletter: Taking A Cosmic Perspective + My Latest Cyberacoustic Guitar EP

"Death is a stripping away of all that is not you. The secret of life is to 'die before you die' – and find that there is no death."
– Eckhart Tolle

"What man can stand with autumn on a hilltop and fail to see the span of his world and the meaning of the rolling hills that reach to the far horizon?"
– Hal Borland

It isn't autumn – at least here in Austin. But everyone I know is going through so much change – so much letting go, so much making room for new things – that the theme of autumn is timely nonetheless.

I'm proud to share with you my latest record, as well as the talk I gave at AURA Music Festival back in February – both of which center on facing the transcendental unknown with our heads up and our hearts open. They're both free downloads. Enjoy!

And stay in touch – I'm putting together a tour of the Southeast United States in early August and if you live nearby it would be great to connect. Friends near Austin, Dallas, Denver, Boulder, and Kansas City, check out my concert calendar to check out the wonderful dates I already have planned to spend with you. Love and blessings!

Yellow Leaves

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Recorded in a single take at a private backyard concert on Thanksgiving 2012, this 33:33 of improvised "cyberacoustic" instrumentals is my most spacious and poignant yet – evoking big autumn skies, far horizons, and the crunch of fallen leaves by bonfire light – but it defies expectations, remixing the familiar conventions of acoustic music with a fifty-pound pedalboard of beat slicers, filters, delays, and multi-channel loopers, welding fingerstyle technique into a cybernetic bed of live hardware production.

Picking (or often bowing, with an electromagnet) while twisting knobs and DJ'ing live samples with my toes, I perform as an embodiment of my training as an evolutionary biologist and futurist – liberating the organic into the digital, and the idioms of Americana into a new species of transcendental trance.

Yellow Leaves is a definitive take on the adventurous and visionary musical attitude that earned my tenure as ReverbNation's #1 Experimental Musician in the world.

This performance was recorded on Thanksgiving 2012 and is a kind of musical fossil of that atmosphere of abundance and gratefulness. I hope that it serves you in your self-discovery. That its folksy-yet-futuristic vibe lends itself to your integration of past and future into the ever-blooming now. That it gets you laid by faeries. (Based on the feedback so far, it may also be good for driving, painting, doing yoga, etc. I encourage you to experiment with set and setting.)

Pay whatever you like if the music works for you. I've had people reporting kundalini experiences, mad love sessions, and other wild shit going on with what I consider to be a pretty tame, if pretty, release.

Regardless, I would deeply appreciate it if you would share it with your people, and tag my music page.

Have a beautiful time with it, and thank you for receiving what I have to give! Feedback welcome.

My talk from AURA Festival 2013

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My latest fleet jaunt through the wooded trails of the human imagination. A philosophical performance examining our relationship to the transcendent – whether through awe and wonder or good old Fear of God, we all have an intense relationship with the Mystery – and how that relationship is due to change.

This time I took on the illusion of the individual, the evolution of technology, and the strangely familiar ancient future – weaving them all into a ripping speculative yarn on worlds beyond our imagination. I discuss right and wrong motivations for transhumanism, the prehistoric origins of the internet, and how the next industrial revolution might bring about a #festivalearth...

Here's the track list, to pique your interest.

1. My lifelong love affair with the Big-Loud-And-Scary

2. The universal desire for novelty

3. The kundalini yoga of techno-evolution

4. The paradoxically tribal, animistic future

5. Cybernetics, materiality, and the extended mind

6. Transcendent worlds in a fractal cosmos

7. Accelerating evolution vs. the ego and Olaf Stapledon's Last Men

8. 3D printing, living buildings, and the civil design revolution

9. Why don't I have a flying saucer?

10. Balancing the inner and outer worlds

11. Beginner's mind and the social incentive for playful brains

12. Living in the belly of the beast

13. LUCA and the illusion of the individual

14. The sacred geometry of convergent cultural evolution

15. What do I think about time warps?

16. Engineering consciousness & Phil Dick's Mood Organ

17. Wild-type transhumans

Download it here. Talk about it here. Feel free to tag or email me with questions!

Customized MGxGRC Signature Flatbills

I still have a few hats in every size except 7 3/4 and 8. If you'd like to order one of these with or without custom paint, email me and I'm happy to give you the details.