🥳 The Big Day Is Here! (Or was, or will be...)
Plus: Wild Conversations and Riffs on IP, Personhood, Originality, & Culture
🎶🎸 The Age of Reunion Is Finally Online!
The whole dang thing is out today! Well, all eleven singles, anyway. As of yesterday. I meant to send this message but something, probably norovirus, has been tearing through my daughter’s school and our entire neighborhood.
Better late than never is the name of the game with this album. I started writing The Age of Reunion IN COLLEGE. I am now FORTY.
NOTHING has taken longer for me to achieve. Only my MARRIAGE has required anything like the amount of commitment and stamina that it has taken to go from 2002's noodling on guitar in the dorms on what would ultimately become "Hyperstition" (Track 8), to writing "You Don't Have To Move" (Track 6) on a trampoline at Burning Man 2008, to playing "When The Orbit Curtain Falls" (Track 9) and "Really" (Track 11) for the first time on tour across Colorado opening for Papadosio in 2010, to improvising "Transparent" (Track 3) live on stage at Gratifly Music and Arts Festival 2013 while in the midst of a world-first A/V performance with Google Glass, to writing "Signal" (Track 4) on ukulele in 2014 about how desperately I needed to find public park land while living in the endless urban expanse of central Texas, to writing "Always Catching Up" (Track 5) while laughing at myself for getting lost on my friend's cattle ranch on Ayahuasca in 2015, to recording my first take for "Indecision" (Track 2) in 360 on the ruins of a 400-year-old windmill in southern Portugal after playing Boom Festival Official in 2016, to knocking out my first live takes for "Life Finds A Way" (Track 7) on tour across Australia between gigs at Rainbow Serpent Festival and Earth Frequency Festival in 2017 with 100 pounds of equipment on me at all times, to fleshing out the album with ambient studio inventions "Bardo" (Track 1) and "The Ascent" (Track 10) only just last year.
This 44 minutes of music represents a journey across more than half of my life and distills everything I have learned as a songwriter and music producer, instrumentalist, bard, roving philosopher, and stubborn DIYer into one unreasonably ambitious, incredibly dense, richly textured, arguably foolish, already obsolete, profoundly sentimental, supremely intricate package.
The best place to go listen is on Bandcamp and obviously it's the best place to procure the lossless audio and liner notes and leave a kind review...but the YouTube playlist is also good for when you're feeling like some AI-assisted lava lamp insanity, and it won't hurt my feelings if you add some of these tracks to your Spotify playlists.
I'm already on to the next album. Can't wait to share it with you! In the meantime, I hope you enjoy listening to this, preferably on headphones in the dark, half as much as I enjoyed making it for you.
Post-Script: I have been slinging home studio recordings since my first album Buy Me A Producer (produced on a Boss BR1180-CD and available only on CD; raise your hand if you have one!) in 2003. So to get this email — after being up all night with a sick kid, feeling like I’d just pissed twenty years of work into the wind, having a hard time even listening to a final product I basically had to give up on because it never ended and even now with it up on streaming I still want to go back to pitch-correct vocals here, adjust the mix there — felt really, really good:
FAQ:
YES it will be live on Spotify, Apple Music, and every other conceivable platform as an album instead of just a collection of singles, hopefully within a few days. (And it would be really, really cool if you’d follow me there and stream me day and night with your phone on silent so I can start racking up those fractions of a cent and looking much more alluring to talent buyers.) Here’s the link to presave the album.
YES there are celebratory Facebook and Twitter posts you can share about this.
YES there are EXTENSIVE liner notes with all of the lyrics and lots of art and other cool weird stuff linked from the info boxes on every YouTube video — such as:
🏆🎧 My Biggest Podcast Appearance To Date!
Also, this happened. :)
What can I say? Danny Jones’ show is WILD, and always provocative: interviews with remote viewing researchers, quantum gravity physicists, members of the CIA, scholars of the paranormal experience…on a guest list like this I feel relatively tame.
Anyway, we had a totally delicious conversation that’s been paying social dividends this week as I have been meeting folks from Danny’s ranks, engaging in some seriously interesting banter in the comments of this video (which is, I know, Rule Number One of Youtube: DO NOT REPLY TO COMMENTS and yeah there were some jerks but hey, most people are cool). Glad to prop my boys at Noonautics.org for doing their good work to secure the infrastructure necessary to explore consciousness to previously impossible extents! Listen in for more on that. Big thanks to Danny.
And in the meantime, just look at that chapter breakdown:
👾📝 Two Riffs for Your Consideration
Scraped from the deadnamed Twitter, where I still do some of my best public thinking:
✨ Riff One
Would you say the work you produce with generative AI is "by" you?
This is one of the most interesting dimensions of the discourse around technology and power right now, as far as I'm concerned: in what ways should we persist in defending intellectual property as the fruit of individual labor and in what ways should we dispense with that paradigm in order to more precisely and humbly reflect the contributions of countless unnamed and unvoiced agencies in every act of novelty production?
We can look back to the most robust and enduring institutions we can — our wealth of inherited ancient wisdom traditions and Indigenous Ecological Knowledge systems — for insight and guidance on this issue.
But when it comes to the reform of IP laws and norms in an era of superexponential increasing returns to scale locked in by metaindustrial superpowers leveraging network effects... Well, I suspect the transposable wisdom sounds something like: Don't defend stolen "land" as yours for a number of reasons, not least of which is it's sinking below the waves of change anyhow. We're better off filing in an orderly fashion into the lifeboats of new digital commons and a permeable notion of identity that better fits the lived reality of life in the Noosphere. As the rate of information exchange goes up, it becomes increasingly pointless to defend boundaries that only made sense under entirely different conditions, when society existed in what amounts to a different phase of matter.
TL;DR — Personal attribution, the ethics of automated royalty disbursement, etc. all boil down to whether it makes sense to march into the 2030s with a 17th century concept of selfhood. Are we really going to have another century dominated by the logic of print media looming over the age of brain-machine interfaces? If so, we're bringing knifes to a gun fight.
✨ Riff Two
"A truly original person with a truly original mind will not be able to function in the old form and will simply do something different. Others had much better think of the form as being some sort of classical tradition and try to work within it."
— Stanley Kubrick
…via J.F. Martel on Weird Studies 166, who continues to riff on how when culture *works* it provides more occasions for the emergence of truly original people: "That might sound rather elitist and aristocratic until you entertain the possibility, as I do, that creative genius inhabits everyone and it's just a matter of culture providing for people a path to that peak."
Is our society doing a good job of scaffolding and cultivating truly original thought? I'd say no, for reasons akin to those that determine the lower likelihood that beneficial mutations will emerge in mainland populations versus island populations: In small populations, genetic drift (the influence of random variations in allele frequencies) plays a relatively smaller role. "Good ideas" prosper because the network is smaller and innovations propagate more rapidly and thoroughly. But on continents, a useful new mutation is up against substantially noisier conditions and can't rely on passive dissipation to spread.
This is, incidentally, why analysis of streaming data indicates that so much of musical innovation originates in the UK, Iceland, Australia, and other island nations: it's easier to be heard over the noise, easier to form "scenes," easier to saturate a social network with some cool new sound. Another way of thinking about this is that single-celled organisms don't need hearts because nutrients diffuse through the organism without having to pump them. Larger organisms would suffocate without active redistribution of resources. Life as we know it couldn't evolve until the atmosphere had enough oxygen to support larger body sizes, and then we still had to wait for the circulatory system to evolve to take advantage of this. By analogy, this is why Brian Eno argued to Kevin Kelly in 1995 that as the Internet matured and society become more and more networked, curation would become a more and more crucial function. Good ideas don't just spread anymore — and if you create things and try to share them online you already know this in your bones. It keeps you up at night.
Barring outcomes no compassionate person really wants — outcomes like the collapse of planet-scale socioeconomic activity back down to disjointed local groupings — we need to foster innovation by deliberately reconstructing partitions and modularity in our networks that allow for the incubation and establishment of good ideas. As it appears at different spatiotemporal scales, this can look like artist retreats, or academic sabbaticals, or R&D labs partially decoupled from market pressure like Ben Reinhardt has written about at length, or philanthropic buffers for mission-driven nonprofit impact projects, or patronage like Jim O’Shaughnessy’s fellowship program, or digital detox and vision fasting like Andrew Dunn and I have been talking about in prep for next week's course on Embodied Ethics in The Age of A.I., or the infamous shower/nap/walk to which so many scientists attribute their breakthroughs...
The point is that great musicians know to play the rests, and if we're going to meet this century's complex interlinked challenges, we have to accept some third way that reconciles the need to speed up with the need to pause and reflect, let things percolate, go forest bathing, let our guts rest with intermittent fasting, etc. As Tom Morgan noted in a superb recent blog entry, the dominant mode right now is all about hitting the gas and paying substantially less attention to the steering wheel than it needs to. Or as evolutionary biologist Manfred Laubichler explained on Future Fossils Episode 212, the resilience and antifragility of ecological systems depends on how those systems leverage negative feedback loops to balance runaway positive feedback. Bringing it back to the conversation in Weird Studies 166, this is why scholarship matters, why academia matters, why libraries matter...why we need to give people quiet places to think and long time horizons on which to act.
This is why I am so grateful to have worked with Long Now: because long-term thinking is a vital counterpoint to our current zeitgeist of superexponential solution-crisis cycling. It's also why I occasionally need to remind myself that even though everything is connected, some things are or ought to be LESS connected, and it's a good idea to take a step back from the agora every now and then and integrate it all.
More on innovation and scaling and how we can collectively do better at fostering originality here.