The way we listen to music today is not going to last.  A bevy of new technologies is set to radically change our relationship to auditory media.  novel speaker materials, remarkable advances in recording equipment, and pioneering mind-machine interfaces have perched our culture on the verge of a world we would scarcely recognize:  where music can be played back on any surface, where headphones have been replaced by custom isolated open-air audioscapes, and where we don't even need mouths to sing or hands to play our instruments.  For your consideration, I present the following major innovations - each of which, sooner or later, will force us to reconsider what we think we know about communication.

The first, like many wonderful discoveries, came from failure - failure by the UK Ministry of Defense to find a suitable material for dampening the sound of their helicopters.  Instead, they stumbled upon a unique honeycombed structure that conducts sound with surprising efficiency.  Already, the technology as been sold to NXT Sound, named SurfaceSound, and crafted into folding flat-panel speakers (14 mm thick) and "speakerless" automobile interiors and mobile phones.


It has also been fashioned into transparent overlays for computer screens, which can be segregated into as many as SIX isolated sound panes.  It's only a matter of time (less than a year, according to NXT's projections) before we have integrated speakers in our greeting cards and digital photo displays, and ultra-thin clip-on speakers for juicing up obsolete non-musical surfaces.  One of the most exciting prospects for SurfaceSound is as a responsive natural interface for audio engineering - according to the Discovery News article, it "can be made to vibrate when touched, with individual frequencies tailored to each finger" (a benefit of its capacity to be partitioned).  With the ability to place sound-conducting surfaces almost anywhere imaginable, the next challenge for NXT seems simple enough:  to make "silent loudspeakers" which can only be heard when the listener is in direct contact with the speaker surface.

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It's an end that may already have been achieved, albeit differently, by Holosonic Research Labs.  Their incredibly cool Audio Spotlight technology fires a narrow beam of ultrasound that distorts in a predictable pattern through as it travels through air.  The result is the sonic equivalent of a laser - an invisible ray of sound that can only be heard by someone standing directly in its path.  (Their technical explanatory page can be found here.)


I'll say it again:  Audio Spotlight turns the AIR into a loudspeaker that can only be heard by standing INSIDE of it.  Sound can be projected like a beam of light, bounced off of surfaces, and manipulated in all kinds of other novel ways.  The New York Times called Audio Spotlight "the most radical technological development in acoustics since the coil loudspeaker was invented in 1925," and with good reason:

Headphone museum tours are over, soon to be replaced with isolated audio programs for each display.  You can listen to music over open air in the public library.  The insane cacophony of public advertisements will be forgotten in favor of more discrete "hotspots" pedestrians will learn to systematically avoid.  Performing musicians will be able to broadcast multiple submixes into their audiences to compensate for micro-variations in venue acoustics - or even play several concerts at once, through which listeners can move as they dance from one end of the room to the other.  You'll never register a noise complaint against your neighbor's bassy stereo system again.  The technology is already being adapted by an impressive array of clients, including

Eastman Kodak, Hewlett-Packard, GM, Motorola, and Walt Disney Imagineering (the guys who build the rides).  (A full list of current applications can be found here.)  It isn't long before our children are digging iPod earbuds out of the attic and querying their internet implants as to what the hell those things are...

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And when they do, they'll probably be using technology similar to Emotiv Systems' Epoc, a new videogaming interface that replaces handheld controllers with a mind-reading headset. 


Combining 100 year old EEG technology with new software algorithms that analyze human brainwave patterns, the Epoc is a glorified biofeedback device, enabling its users to navigate computer interfaces with nothing more than intent.  Beyond its immediate gaming applications (headsets will be on the market for $300 this Christmas), Emotiv is exploring numerous applications in robotics, education, and medicine - making it possible, for example, for quadraplegics to operate household devices on their own.  I'm giving us a year before progressive musical acts are using these or similar headsets to control electronic music production arrays - heralding the advent of a long-imagined age when artists are able to directly convey their thoughts to an audience. 

(A speculative recipe:  combining the Epoc with the Audio Spotlight yields the potential for multi-scaped audio arrays that are activated and operated without so much as lifting a finger.)

And if that weren't enough, it is easy to imagine how such a device - apparently already well on the road to ubiquity - might catalyze a radical development of mental acuity in our culture.  Having to learn what is currently an uncommon finesse with concentration and intent could well improve the focus and self-control of everyone who uses it...and already, I can hear the next generation marvel with pity and disbelief at our limited attention spans and cognitive agency.

(More on this here:  Discovery Channel)

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The Epoc's clever decryption of brainwave semantics has its limitations, however.  One significant "drawback" (if that term can even be applied to such a stunning advancement) is that it cannot read your brain with enough precision to decode speech.  You'll still have to move your mouth to talk...

...UNLESS, that is, you're using Ambient Corporation's Audeo, a neckband-mounted microchip that relays nerve impulses on their way to the focal cords to a computer, where they are translated into an audible computerized voice. 


Although the device can currently recognize fewer than 200 words, Ambient is working to release an improved model by the end of the year that recognizes individual phonemes and has a functionally limitless vocabulary.  Michael Callahan, Ambient's twenty-four year old co-founder, recently placed the first public "voiceless phone call" at a recent technology conference (You can find the video embedded in The New Scientist's recent article).  In support of my generation-of-techno-yogis hypothesis, Callahan says that making clean electrical signals that the Audeo can understand requires the specific, deliberate imagining of voicing each word - something he calls "a level above thinking."

It's an innovation whose significance extends beyond the obvious enabling-speech-in-the-mute.  Private telephone calls will be made in public, by people who look like they're listening to you.  Ventriloquism through invisible wallspeakers and audio beams will further challenge our confidence in human perception.  Maybe our hyper-attentive descendents will be able to deliver two different speeches at once.  (Most of us already know how to talk without thinking...all it would require is to also talk while thinking.  It's like riding a bike.)

But for me, fettered as I am by my unilingual peasantry, one application takes the cake:  linguistic software could be packed into that auxiliary computer, finally realizing something not too distant from the long-fantasized Universal Translator.

It's not technomusical telepathy, but it's close.  We're getting there.  Yes, indeed:  the future is singing quite a tune.

Three recent articles on bird music research have deepened my already profound appreciation for our sonorous avian companions:

1) Teresa Feo and Christopher Clark of Berkeley's Museum of Vertebrate Zoology just published their study of unusual adaptation in the Anna's hummingbird that allows males to sound a 4 kHz chirp (four octaves above Middle C) by vibrating their tail feathers in flight. Normally birds of this size are too small to generate any significant amount of noise -  but by spreading out their specially-tapered outer tail feathers during a 100-foot dive, these hummingbirds turn themselves into living reed whistles.  (Overwhelming evidence that tail-shaking is sexy, no matter the species.)

The delicious literary twist on this story is that Feo is a clarinetist in the UC Berkeley marching band - so it comes as no surprise that she noticed the reed-like musical courtship of the Anna's hummingbirds in San Francisco's shoreline parks.  It won't be long before this discovery is standard to biomechanics textbooks, adding Feo to the slim ranks of biologist-clarinetist-rockstars...score another point for being an artist and a scientist!

(More on this here:  Discovery Channel  ...and here:  UC Berkeley)

2) The so-called "duck-billed" dinosaurs (or hadrosaurs), an extensive group of four-legged, herding herbivores, are famous for the bizarre ornaments each species carried atop its skull.  These crests evolved from the nasal bones, and many of them were actually hollowed out by sinus cavities - a strange feature that has perplexed paleontologists for decades.


Now, a theory first proposed by Carl Wilman in 1931 is gaining credence - the recent discovery of Velafrons coahuilensis ("sailed forehead from Coahuila") in Mexico by paleontologists at the Utah Museum of Natural History supports the hypothesis that duck-billed dinosaurs used their head flair to amplify species-specific "trumpeting."  From the neck down, each type of hadrosaur looks nearly identical - but their wild variety of crests would each have produced a different sonic signature. 


A study of hadrosaur ears by James Hopson indicates that they were at least as well-developed as those of modern crocodilians, many of which use auditory signals for mating.  And several scientists at Sandia Laboratory have reconstructed hadrosaur nasal passages in a computer and actually made music with them .


(David Weishampel famously constructed a six-foot twist of PVC piping, the approximate length and curvature of a Parasaurolophus crest, that he blared for dinosaur documentaries back in the 1990s - let me know if you can find a video of this online!).  The funky armature of Velafrons is one more compelling piece of evidence to suggest that Earth in the Late Cretaceous Period was a pretty noisy place - covered, as it was, with roaming herds of thousands of five-ton trombones.

And yes, using the principles of Lazy Taxonomy, birds count as dinosaurs, so dinosaurs count as birds.

(More on this here:  NY Times  ...and here:  Discovery Channel)

3) I almost want to devote an entire essay to this one:  Scientists at Cardiff University have found that male songbirds exposed to environmental pollutants sing longer, more complex tunes that are favored by female songbirds!  Specifically, European starlings (Sternus vulgaris) that grow up eating insects full of synthetic estrogen (!) and estrogen mimics sing longer, more frequent, and more intricate tunes. 


Researcher Katherine Buchanan and her colleagues cracked open a few starling heads and found that the high vocal center (HVC) of these birds' brains is significantly enlarged by these chemicals...which also disrupt endocrine function and paradoxically weaken the starlings' reproductive efficiency.

...And here is where I wax poetically about the double-bind of maleness, the intimate relationship between creation and destruction, the aesthetic bonus we inherit for growing up on a polluted planet, speculation about how my own musicality correlates with toxic produce and breakfast cereals, and the crucifixion.  Back in my college town of Lawrence, Kansas, the sunsets are gorgeous - heartbreaking reds and pinks and oranges.  The vibrancy is due to atmospheric pollutants that scatter sunlight, filtering out higher frequencies and leaving spectators with the low, slow throb of the longer wavelengths.  It's only so beautiful because, for hundreds of miles west of Lawrence, the skies are choked with agricultural dust and smokestack exhaust.  Here in Boulder, Colorado, flanked to the west by the Continental Divide, the clean air doesn't offer such a spectacle.  For those of us who see beauty in intensity, it doesn't get much more inspiring than this:  living at the end of the world.  Just thinking about it makes me want to sing.  Maybe my HVC is swollen.

(More on this here:  Science Daily  ...and here:  PLoS)

Afterword:  After a careful consideration of these stories, I noticed that they correspond to three of the four different instrument groups (as I learned them in grade school:  woodwind, brass, and string instruments, respectively).  But, of course, birds have been at music for hundreds of millions of years longer than we have and have all their bases covered.  So I'd like to include Exhibit Four, allowing us to make a full bird-orchestra in our imaginations, complete with percussion:

4) Woodpeckers.

Painting is dangerous.

We don't typically think of painting as dangerous, because we imagine the landscape print in our motel room to have emerged uncomplicatedly from the sweatless brow of some middle-aged homebody with a neat row of clean brushes and a comfortable desk chair.  We are the children of Late Capitalism, recognizing product over process.  Our physicists are busy looking not for fundamental relationships in the universe, but fundamental particles.  We seem not to really grasp the wisdom in statements like, "Happiness is a journey, not a destination."  Machines build things for us. 

Through clever modern chemistry, being an artist is almost totally non-toxic.  You don't even have to get your hands dirty; just use an electronic stylus and tablet, and you can do more with pixels than you ever could have with messier media.  And you can do it sitting down.

Even the treacherous borderlands of the mind have been neutered, packaged, labeled, and thus contained.  Psychedelia is trite.  Been there, done that - our chain retailers advertise with swirling floral blooms and rippling waves of color with an otherworldly richness that puts every Boomer album cover to shame. 

Maybe acid did break our parents' chromosomes...or maybe we, like the kids of those Brazilian shamans, have just been innoculated to these deeper weirdnesses by growing up inside of them.  Maybe consumer culture just gives us too much to experience, and we've grown even thicker shades to wear as we parade into the Light.

Aliens, angels, ascended masters?  Oh yeah, my buddy channels them.  Bilocation?  I did that, once.  We're living in a world that is rending the minds of our parents to tatters, and it's No Big Deal.  The extraordinary is, like, so totally ordinary.

But I don't blame any of us for blinding ourselves to the incredible intensity of our age.  After all, we're dealing with what Rudolf Otto called the Mysterium Tremendum - the deep unknown at the heart of the world that is so beyond our ken that we could not survive the knowledge.  We cower from the face of God for good reason:  that creative Source is a burning brightness of which fire is only a cool, pale imitation.  History can be read as the story of one daring soul after another throwing itself into the flame, hoping to capture a spark.  Our lineage is one of suicide missions, artists and scientists sacrificing themselves for the greater knowledge and experience of the collective. 

I believe that the danger of creativity never really went away - it just moved, leaving a sediment of the once-extraordinary behind as it rolled outward like cooling lava into the sea.  We live on what was once the boiling coitus of elements - now the terra firma, solid and predictable terrain.  Genius and Madness are neighbors because they move fast enough to stay ahead of everyone else, snapping up beachfront property as fast as it is made.  (Madness just builds a slightly shoddier house, slightly closer to the tide.)  And playing around on the edges is inherently dangerous.  In any form, creativity challenges preconceptions, digests conventions, and throws us to burn and drown in the intensely unfamiliar.  It changes who we are.  "Being creative" is agreeing to an adventure from which nobody has ever, ever returned.

The deep blue pigment bygone painters used for sea and sky was cobalt - it drove them insane with chemical poisoning.  Nature photographers have a bad habit of being eaten by wild animals or falling off of cliffs.  The most gifted musicians seem especially likely to drown or overdose.  It's a common myth across ancient cultures from Africa to Athens that the best artists inherit their talent through deals with water spirits - deals eventually repaid with blood.

(For more on this mysterious phenomenon, I encourage you to read up on the Saturn Return and the 27 Club.)

The Muse - actually an entire coterie of entities that the Greeks held responsible for inspiring every creative act - is a lunar, feminine archetype.  The muses were water nymphs, legendary for blinding those arrogant enough to challenge them. 

Honest artists admit that they can claim no ownership of their creative work - that it emerges through them, and not from them.  And like the biological creative passion of our sexual inheritance, artistic creativity drives us into all kinds of self-destructive recklessness in order to satisfy its own expansive urge.  The Muse does not care about you, except as a means to an end.  The island on which we perch our traditions is literally built from the bones of artists and scientists.

I think about this a lot, when painting at concerts in front of a heart-rattling beam of sound.  I may not have to worry about carcinogenic paints devouring my brain, but that doesn't stop me from feeling like I make my living like a deep sea creature on periphery of a hydrothermal vent, somehow surviving on the narrow ledge between crushing pressure and unbelievable heat, thriving off the rich intersection of extremes.  Those benthic creatures lay root at the sweetspot where the ocean carries sustenance directly into their blood - and I plant myself right where a wall of tidal music energy is sieved through my energetic body into crystalline patterns of paint.  These images are the love child of the audience's and performers' energies feeding back over a massive electrified circuit, leaving cross-sectional deposits in opaque pigment on a black board - a kind of spectrograph of the evening's collective resonance, deformed and amplified by the matrix of my interpretation.

And this is matter-of-fact science.  Chemist Ilya Prigogine won a Nobel Prize for his theory of dissipative structures - the gist of which is that order emerges when so much energy flows through a system that it must reorganize into a higher level of complexity.  If it can't keep up with the surge, it is totally destroyed.

Necessity is the mother of invention, just as whirlpools form because the river's current is constrained by the lay of the riverbed.  Life is the floret that pushes forth from the equal and opposite vectors of structure and chaos.  And so, like Robert Johnson (a member of the 27 Club), I find the soul of my artwork at the crossroads.  That's about as deep a truth as I have ever known:  that creativity lives in between things, balanced on the head of a pin, spilling from the broken crust of opposing forces.

Putting in my earplugs comes with a sense of frontier glee akin to what I imagine a welder feels when lowering the mask:  the pride of having to wear protective equipment so I can play on the turbulent edge of knowing.  I didn't think to bring any on my first night out painting, and my ears rang afterward for an entire day.  Working on fine art in a crowd of hundreds of drunk dancers requires a special awareness of the space around me, should any teetering reveler pitch over into my easel or elbows.  Keeping a dance party schedule means getting to sleep at hours that can't be good for my health.  After five consecutive nights of painting, my legs begged for days to wobble out from beneath me.

And even in this supposedly enlightened age, I still have to work in a cloud of noxious fumes if I want to use gold or silver paint.  (It's funny:  When I was a child, I acted in a public service announcement declaring the dangers of huffing paint.  I was the "bad kid" who didn't learn his lesson from the hospitalization of his friends...and now here I am huffing paint every week, only barely against my will.)  My burning nostrils connect me to every artist who ever chose beauty over practicality.

I like to think that this job is somehow a mythological gauntlet or trial, that the frightful intensity is a door to greatness.  Surely, these four-hour performance painting sessions are growing more muscle in my legs, cultivating my ability to improvise and listen, and teaching me how to conduct myself like a professional.  Maybe one of these days I'll come out of the kiln with the strength and coherence that can only be found in fire.  Maybe this is just what I need, in a culture that has abandoned its rites of passage.

In the meantime, however, I'm glad that performance painting doesn't require me to dive any deeper into the creative maelstrom than I already do.  Sustainable artistry requires compromise, comfort, and care.  It demands that artists be responsible enough to keep a little distance from the turbulent shores of the Godhead.  Get too close and you'll be consumed, erasing any further gifts you might have transmitted.  If you care at all about keeping yourself alive and sane for long enough to do something more than a single incandescent opus, remember that the womb has teeth.  The sun is on fire.  You can't breathe underwater.  And painting is dangerous.

"What gives light, must endure burning."
- Viktor Frankl

In the midst of vast culture-level arguments over digital rights and intellectual property, my friend Matt Jones does something incredibly cool:  he releases a bi-weekly podcast of his original electronic music compositions, Blue Stone Jones.  His so-called "musical sketchbook" features recordings of his Live PA sets, various studio experiments, and whatever else he manages to cook up with laptop and accessories, delivered neatly to your computer for absolutely nothing.  If you have twenty minutes in your week you could fill with tasteful and evocative electronic music, I highly recommend that you subscribe to his podcast.

He also publishes his work under a Creative Commons 3.0 license, which means that you can share it with as many people as you like, so long as you don't alter or sell it.  As someone who releases all of my own music under a Creative Commons license, I really resonate with Matt's modus operandi - and for that reason, I've started a collaborative project with him, somewhat akin to The Postal Service's album-by-correspondence (songwriter Ben Gibbard and electronic composer Jimmy Tamborello (Dntel) put together an album a few years ago by sending each other tracks in the mail - long ago, before the age of services like YouSendIt.com and Zshare.net allowed us to do these things electronically).

I've been using live loop sampling more and more in my performances recently, the consequence of which is that I've accrued a fantastic amount of short loop phrases that have been just languishing in my computer, waiting for some clever and daring remixer to cook up something with them.  My particular looping pedal, the Boss RC-50, offers three channels of recording banks for each patch - meaning I can record and loop three different sound samples and play them back individually or together.  So I've been sending Matt these blocks of three short audio clips at a time, and he's been tinkering with them, adding synthesizer pads and wild drum programming, enriching the tonal palette of the bits and pieces that I've fed him.  The result is pretty cool - he's featured his first two elaborations in the latest podcast, which you can listen to or download here.  And of course, it just wouldn't be full-thrush primate mutual grooming without him tipping a nod to my music and my blog in his own blog, here.  This is only the beginning of what promises to be a very enjoyable long-distance musical relationship.  I have to admit, I think his solo work is more impressive - but I suspect we'll ripen over time. 

And meanwhile, I encourage you to check out Matt's piano work in the band Blue Stone Jones, a jazz and funk ensemble that is definitely worth your listening.  So go do it.

A moment of speculation, rooted in a study of universal trends:  Human history can be defined as development along any of numerous axes, but my preferred story-for-our-species is of an advance in mind control technologies.  For good and ill, the development of our consciousness flies tandem with our expanding capacity to access and explore various states of mind at will.  Our command of navigating mind with sensory and electrochemical stimulation has matured to include everything from early entheogenic experiments with drumming and chanting, to contemporary techniques of magnetic temporal lobe stimulation and virtual reality immersion…and with the impending advent of biotech and nanotech that will profoundly deepen the intimacy between brain and machine (and erase such primitive distinctions), we can be sure that mind control is one of the best markers we have for measuring our humanity (and our trans-humanity).

With this in mind, I spend much of my time looking at contemporary art and music as touchstones, clues to our place as a self-transcending species in the cosmos.  Every time I see intention meet technology in a deliberate manipulation of mindstates, I rejoice that we are on the right track.  And nowhere is this confluence more apparent than in the careful structuring of electronic musicians like Akhentek, a self-described “crystalline array technician” from Elphinstone, BC, whose psy-trance productions are “precision engineered sonic textures intentionally designed to induce higher frequency mindstates.”

Akhentek’s nuanced tracks, like the burbling glitch of “Spectrality” or the free-floating guitar and synthesizers on his “White Girls In Saris” remix, definitely induce a strange, buzzing feeling – and unlike many other buzz-inducing artists, I know that he’s doing it on purpose. 

Deep beneath the art of this music coils the esoteric science of neuroentrainment:  getting the brain to vibrate at specific frequencies.  It's an easy enough trick.  Our brains expect to hear more or less the same thing in each ear, so they split the difference between tones that don't quite line up, creating the auditory illusion of a single note.  This activity requires special collaboration between the right and left hemispheres, which syncs brain activity at that agreed-upon mean.  If the left ear hears 104 Hz and the right ear hears 108 Hz, the entire brain will pulse at 4 Hz - with the brainwaves producing a corresponding state of mind.  It's one of the cheapest ways to engineer consciousness.  No drugs, no surgery, no nanobots - all you need is a pair of headphones and a "crystalline array technician" to prepare the sounds for you.

These binaural beats coast inaudibly across each other underneath warm and deep mastering, giving this music the strange quality of feeling at once transparent and mysterious.  It’s little wonder that he has a background in biology and “Brazilian Genetics” (which I assume is a euphemism for ayahuasca initiation) – this guy’s eye and ear are definitely trained on human evolution and accelerating its numerous permutations.  Cascades of twittering clicks and swells of buzzing oscillations sweep through me as I listen, reformatting my consciousness on a subliminal level.  I start feeling the effects of his “rare sensitivity to frequencies” as the café around me starts to ripple with gauzy transparency.

We may be a long way from having total agency over individual awareness.  In the meantime, however, I’m relieved to know that we have innovators like Akhentek out there fighting the good fight, sculpting sound with to elevate consciousness directly and for the greater good, those secret agent techno-shamans enlightening unwitting ravers and inspiring the next generation of state-engineers to plunge even deeper into our limitless potential to explore – and create – novel states of mind.

Akhentek’s music, as well as information about Entheogenetic (his electronic music label) and the Entheos Gathering (his festival) can be found online at CBC Radio 3.

He is also an member of the Zaadz Visionary Music community.  Go be his friend:
http://akhentek.gaia.com

Compared to Life (if the familiar dyad even makes sense), Death is famously dispassionate.  Death doesn't care when, or why, or how, or who.  Death can not care, because caring is the job of the living.  And so choice has precious little to do with death, which is why we clutch at whatever choices we do have about our final moments.  We usually don't have the luxury of the death we would prefer, and so we do insignificant and desperate things like making living wills and funeral playlists, pre-emptive strikes at the infinite unyielding unconcern of nonexistence.

Some cultures don't consider suicide to be as tasteless as ours does (thanatophobic and euphemistic, we have a long history of plucking out our own offending eyes without mourning our lost sight).  Here and now, we can do little to decide the terms of our passage without distressing the ones we love.

We can, however, write declarations of love that stamp a seal of determination on our last breath.  Tenderly capturing his request to die in the presence of his beloved, Elbow frontman Guy Garvey penned an exemplar of such quietly raging hopeful confessions:  the organ ballad, "Switching Off."  Painting precious, half-iambic metaphors of his last night's fading lights from the perch of candid youth, Garvey imagines a distant and peaceful shutdown - and his partner's place beside him, amidst the creeping noise and the crumbling synchrony.

Elbow - "Switching Off"

Last of the men in hats hops off the coil
And a final scene unfolds inside
Deep in the rain of sparks behind his brow
Is a part replayed from a perfect day
Teaching her how to whistle like a boy
In love's first blush

Is this making sense?
What am I trying to say?
Early evening June, this room and a radio play
This I need to save
I choose my final thoughts today
Switching off with you

All the clocks give in, and the traffic fades
And the insects like...like a neon choir
The instant fizz, connection made
And the curtains sigh in time with you

You're the only sense the world has ever made
Early evening June, this room and radio play
This I need to save
I choose my final scene today
Switching off...

Ran to ground, ran to ground for a while there
But I came off pretty well, I came off pretty well...

You're the only sense the world has ever made
This I need to save
A simple trinket locked away
I choose my final scene today
Switching off with you

This song is one of the truest love letters I've ever heard, daisies growing from a double grave, holding hands to die of old age, because "You're the only sense the world has ever made."  Whatever happens between now and then, God save this feeling, this certainty and adoration, togetherness and memory, this "simple trinket locked away," until I can look back and smile at its accurate prediction.

We may not get to choose how we die, but we can hope against hope that we die in someone's arms.  We can't carry anything across that threshold, but we can carry our cares right up to its silver edge.  We can adorn our lives with these solemn vows, giving worth to each living moment.  We can prove that death is in fact meaningful, because it is by death that we determine what is valuable.  Romance as I know it is a skull with rose window eyes, burgeoning even as it breaks.  And so there is nothing more romantic than telling someone you want them there when you die.

"Switching Off" is a perfect portrait of recognizing what matters.  It is the beauty of yearning listening as it strains against fadeout.  It'd be a strange song to play at my funeral - bringing the particulars of my death into sharp focus, where wishes may not hold against facts - but I would put it on my funeral playlist anyway, because it so gracefully captures for me the timeless splendor of love.  Because we may not get to choose, but we can always hope to choose.  And after years of arguing for the concrete value of choice, I am only now beginning to understand the diaphonous, glistening value of hope.

Sometimes I feel like grabbing someone and pleading with them to please remind me what I'm doing, pretending to be a painter.  It's a term I can only offer with the following (usually unuttered) disclaimer:

I don't know how to use a paint brush.  I am intimidated by the notion of mixing my own colors.  In fact, I have no formal education in art of any kind - and so I use paint markers on foam board.  I borrowed an easel to do my first show.

It's one of the enduring ironies of my existence, that I define myself by my work but the best descriptor for what I do is something I don't consider myself to be.  There's more than a little imposter's guilt in me when I carry my easel into the Trilogy Wine Bar every Wednesday night to be a painter, like I accidentally received an invitation to the party and I don't have the guts to admit I don't belong there.  Like I'm a wild bird that snuck into the aviary to live off the free food.  Like I'm a fox pretending to be a lapdog.

But I might make up for my lack of disciplined training with twenty years' experience of doodling in class, at parties, on planes, and in my sleep (although those images rarely survive the morning).  A childhood of dinosaurs and aliens carried me into a scientific illustration course in college, from which I was hired directly to draw plates of frogs, snakes, and lizards for species descriptions at the University of Kansas Natural History Museum. 


I reconstructed the fossil armor of bizarre pig-crocodiles, two hundred million years dead...


...and pieced together the awkward gait of extinct flying reptiles from trackways preserved in the mud of an ancient lake.

I brought to life numerous prehistoric invertebrates in ink - alternate-reality lobsters with rows of flippers and compound eyes.


Over the three years that I was working daily hours at the museum, I must have drawn at least a hundred thousand scales.


How I stumbled into live painting is easy to see, in retrospect:  those were three years I spent drawing with headphones on, learning to make the cleanest possible lines with the smoothest possible strokes, making immersive and meticulous detail my natural habitat.  Training and straining my attention.  Doing my best to hold the pen as lightly as possible and push the rate at which a person can stipple in a relaxed and even rhythm.  Dot after dot, slowly sculpting the contours, ridges, recesses, tubercles of creatures as long as my thumb, working under a microscope, moving through my whole arm in slow sweeps and hypnotic pointillist pecking.

The living pulse of this work is trance-inducing, tunneling through boredom into exultation.  Hunched and squinting, I felt connected to the ocean of nameless monks whose gilded script illuminates our ancient sacred manuscripts.  And there was never any doubt for me that I was working in a church - a temple to the natural world, complete with byzantine catacombs of holy relics, shelf after shelf of preserved creatures from all over the world, soaking in alcohol jars.

But then, I was probably the only one having such thoughts.  I was the contract artist in a hall of scholars and their graduate disciples, a hundred others who would probably have balked at the notion of science as a religious institution.  (Kansas is, after all, the epicenter of a fierce debate between Evolutionary Biology and the so-called science of Intelligent Design.  It's a tender topic.)  Not a grad student, not a field researcher, not an official employee, I worked as someone whose dreams of paleontology had evaporated and left me in the alkaline and existential expanse of accidental mercenary illustration.

And so, long before I had ever entertained the notion of live painting, the whole foundation had already been poured.  A degree-carrying biologist pretending to be an artist, or an artist pretending to be a biologist?  Whether inking frogs in a corner of the herpetology library or staking out easel space to the side of the stage, I can't shake the feelings of being a peripheral animal, living on the fringes.  The meditative and monastic quality of my experience as an artist, ritually ornamenting some precious text, has flown from the stone cloisters of the halls of science and landed in the whirling ecstasies of more embodied worship.

While illustrating descriptive papers and field guides in the museum, I used the creative faculties of my right brain to present ideas with fidelity and frugal care.  While tracing psychedelic lattices and floral blooms in vivid color at concerts, my left brain remains engaged in executing emergent rules and patterns, the visual genome and evolving geometry of pieces I consider living and breathing artifacts of the evening's energies.  The organic metaphors that pervade my identity and work, my doing and being, point to the deep structures of my ecological education - while the creative yearning and the commitment to exact visions are the signature of a poetry that runs through my life in settings hushed or boisterous, scholarly or celebratory.

With all of this in mind, my inability to paint (according to my definition) makes little difference to my identity as a naturalist-artist-monk, exploring the strange fauna of the subtle energy worlds conducted by heaving bass and dancing throngs.  Plate by plate, I'm assembling a new field guide:  a field guide to living jewelry, the bizarre beauties of a mind just on the other side of this one.




(There are many, many more of these images in my portfolio...or rather, my museum.)
Whenever I set up my easel and pull out my bundle of paint markers, I remember one passage in particular:  Aldous Huxley's introduction to his essay, "Heaven and Hell."  Before my work in the museum, before I recognized the sacred responsibility of the artist, this passage fell through my eyes and down into my deepest reaches - rippling outward until now, finally, I hear it and know who I am:

"Like the earth of a hundred years ago, our mind still has its darkest Africas, its unmapped Borneos and Amazonian basins.  In relation to the fauna of these regions we are not yet zoologists, we are mere naturalists and collectors of specimens.  The fact is unfortunate; but we have to accept it, we have to maket he best of it.  However lowly, the work of the collector must be done, before we can proceed to the higher scientific tasks of classification, analysis, experiment, and theory making.

Like the giraffe and the duck-billed platypus, the creatures inhabiting these remoter regions of the mind are exceedingly improbable.  Nevertheless they exist, they are facts of observation; and as such, they cannot be ignored by anyone who is honestly trying to understand the world in which he lives.

It is difficult, it is all but impossible, to speak of mental events except in similes drawn from the more familiar universe of material things.  If I have made use of geographical and zoological metaphors, it is not wantonly, out of a mere addiction to picturesque language.  It is because such metaphors express very forcibly the essential otherness of the mind's far continents, the complete autonomy and self-sufficiency of their inhabitants.  A man consists of what I may call an Old Wold of personal consciousness and, beyond a dividing sea, a series of New Worlds - the not too distant Virginias and Carolinas of the personal subconscious and the vegetative soul; the Far West of the collective unconscious, with its flora of symbols, its tribes of aboriginal archetypes; and, across another, vaster ocean, at the antipodes of everyday consciousness, the world of Visionary Experience.

If you go to New South Wales, you will see marsupials hopping about the countryside.  And if you go to the antipodes of the conscious mind, you will encounter all sorts of creatures at least as odd as kangaroos.  You do not invent these creatures any more than you invent marsupials.  They live their own lives in complete independence.  A man cannot control them.  All he can do is go to the mental equivalent of Australia and look around him."

So that's what I do.

Live painting was a curiosity to me, bizarre and insignificant, until last summer, when I finally got to see it actually happen.  I had just moved to Boulder from Lawrence, Kansas, where I had been working as a scientific illustrator.  Colorado seemed fertile with opportunity, but I was crazy from coasting on my last few hundred dollars while finishing an online degree program and recovering from what may or may not have been the flaming crash of a three-year relationship.  I was teetering like a drunken meadowlark on the fencepost between manic exuberance and a panic attack, when my buddies from Lawrence drove up and took me out to the Red Rocks Amphitheatre to catch Sound Tribe Sector 9 (STS9) in concert.

STS9 is the flagship of a recent musical movement called "livetronica," an integration of traditional band instruments with electronic music elements, manipulated as it is happening, on stage.  Although artists had been playing around with "live PA" set-ups for years, a full marriage of traditional and emerging technologies only happened a few years ago, when laptop music production software like Ableton Live suddenly made it possible for artists to do all of their soundsculpting in realtime, while recording, under the heat of stage lights.  Live turned the laptop computer into a legitimate instrument, and one of the first bands to capitalize on this was Sound Tribe, for which computers perfectly complimented their already-quasi-electronic breakbeat drumming and trance-inducing guitar patterns.  (You can find features on their use of computers in concert here and here.)

But that's all pretext for me to explain how the band's reputation for innovative syntheses led them into partnerships with other performance artists, to augment their already-dazzling concerts.  The most famous of these is Kris Davidson, a painter whose works have morphed over time from pretty but somewhat prosaic geometrical diagrams:


...into vivid, layered, and organic dripping scapes reminiscent of natural history illustrations and mycelial microscopy:


The point is that Kris D was painting with STS9 when I saw them at Red Rocks last September.  And for the first time in my memory, I got to watch someone paint and dance at the same time.  I showed up for the second night of a two-night run, so the evening began with what looked to me like a finished painting on stage...and then Kris spent the next three hours burying it in washes and strokes that systematically and repeatedly redefined it.  What started out looking like a wall of cubes became a sprawling cityscape, then the face of a mechanical goat, then a spray of tribal warpaint.  The painting was breathing and dripping, shifting and blooming, while Kris dashed in for a few quick brushstrokes before retreating a few feet to gain some perspective.  He bounced back and forth in a wide stance, perched on the stage with the ready tension of a bowhunter and the easy, casual hips and shoulders of a track runner.

There was something playful, almost flippant in his back and forth:  the springy rave dancer with eagle discernment swooping in to exact some measured micro motion and then yaw back out into loose-limbed and watchful bouncing.  And back and forth in those oscillations all night.  It was an exaggeration of the double-moded painter stereotype, juiced into a higher octave by the uptempo beats and epileptic light show.  Ah:  this is the difference between painting alone at home, and painting on the receiving end of ten thousand intoxicated dancers.  The incredible intensity of Red Rocks - literally, built over the bones of indians and dinosaurs, and channeling thousands of watts of sound between two ruddy monoliths that thrust up from the mountainside like heaving whales - that energy was rushing down onto the stage and through that brush into the painting.

While my own ass-shaking had merely bled heat energy into the mountain air, Kris D funneled that same vibe into a haunting and mysterious work of art:


Here was someone who wasn't merely doodling in class, or cooped up at home with his canvases and cats.  Here was someone who had managed to shine, to really shine, in front of thousands of people, without being a member of the band - a rockstar painter who musicians request to goof off with them on stage.  Here was someone who got to play pro at some of the best parties in the country and had found an audience for his work that studio artists can scarcely imagine.  Here was someone who made his living by painting while dancing.

And that's when I started taking live painting seriously.

As I've said before, the soundtrack to your funeral is as personal a playlist as you'll ever make.  Assuming you have the luxury of deciding what to play to your mourning crowd (and assuming that you have the luxury of a mourning crowd), the funeral playlist is your final opportunity to give a life-affirming message that helps people deal with their grief and conveys the sum of your wisdom in a personal voice.

If it's not clear already, I take this responsibility very seriously.  But then, I take everything very seriously.  I was born under a Capricorn Sun (on 8 January, same day as Elvis Presley, David Bowie, and Stephen Hawking), and have recently come to appreciate the full significance of this:  Capricorn is ruled by Saturn (aka Kronos), the god-devouring Lord of Time and the home planet for intense gravity of both metaphorical and literal varieties.  Capricorns are saturnine, heavy, pragmatic, associated with bones and the skeleton, earthiness and history.

And so it comes as only a little surprise that I became a paleontologist, only to shift my attentions to the study of time itself.  Little surprise that I was so deeply drawn to Boulder, Colorado, where I now live in the shade at the foothills of the Flatirons and play in a band called Ethereal Underground.  Little surpris