Today is my mother's birthday and the 10th anniversary of my first studio album, Get Used To Being Everything! (This cover design was one of my first pieces of digital art, combining long-exposure photography with a scan of a screen print my friend made from one of my sketches.) In honor of this momentous occasion, treat yourself to a free download of the whole album - the fruit of more than a year-long effort - from my Bandcamp page. (@michaelgarfield) It's way out of date, before I really knew how to record or mix or sing, and still it's one of the most impressive and profound things I feel I have ever made. I hope that you enjoy! Here are the liner notes: "We are racing toward (or are we living in?) a singularity in which the world as we know it is transformed, the present reigns as its own purpose, and loneliness is unveiled as a lovely but mystifying sham. Until then, my name is Michael Garfield, standard bearer of a musical renaissance, evolutionary biologist, professional illustrator, flawed fountain of light. I set off into songwriting at 15 and never looked back; now I live on the bridge between the drummer-guitarists of the acoustic avant garde and the whirling ecstatics of festival culture. My music chronicles my first steps toward an ever-deepening integration of melody and percussion, the scientific method and centering prayer, left and right hemispheres, self and other, nouns and verbs, work and play. It's an aquarium for the strange creatures in my head; a call to listen intently to our humming world when the stereo shuts off; and a passionate testament to both the sacred and the profane, to searching sorrow and the bliss of union. It's a map of an unexplored continent: an attempt to describe the ineffable, succeeding in its failure like all acts of expression. It's sleek, dynamic music; but it seeps into you too, insinuating itself like wind into your crevices and shaping new things there. Above all, it's a reminder of our nourishing commonality: the processes that destroy and rebuild us in this moment, and this moment, and this..." #freemusic #birthday #guitarist #photoshop #lightpainting #anniversary #nondual #lovewithoutend #idm #ku (at University of Kansas - Lawrence Campus)
