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The Age of Reunion

by Michael Garfield

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  • Streaming + Download

    Pre-order of The Age of Reunion. You get 5 tracks now (streaming via the free Bandcamp app and also available as a high-quality download in MP3, FLAC and more), plus the complete album the moment it’s released.

    The entire album is already available to Bandcamp, Substack, and Patreon subscribers. 💝
    Purchasable with gift card
    releases April 24, 2024

      $10 USD  or more

     

1.
Bardo 02:27
2.
Indecision 03:19
In the moment before acting lies a void Where every future gleams, reflecting every other Every moment a uniquely blooming world. In the space between two thoughts Where every other instant grows Expanding now into infinity And every possibility unfurls... How do you choose your next life? It may seem your heart has stopped between two beats. It's not the universe that's ended But that you're already dead Remembering everything at once Seeing past the limits of your head. In the seconds it would take to drain The oxygen from your exquisite brain A few mere seconds, all your life replays An intimate refrain. It isn't just the fireworks of dying neurons firing. You are slipping from the grip Of that which kept you in the slow procession. Now your feathered eyelids open To behold the whole terrain... How do you choose your next life? It may seem your heart has stopped between two beats. It's not the universe that's ended But that you're already dead Remembering everything at once Seeing past the limits of your head.
3.
Transparent 04:54
You wanna talk the erosion of privacy? Any hill goes, you're bound to find some bones in there. The holy mountain of the separate self Falls into ocean like an ice shelf. None of it comes with any anomie, A bloom of novelty and sunlight, not enemies. But as our skeletons become transparent We would be scared if we weren't sharing it.
4.
Signal 05:35
Out beyond the breakers and the noise The body's still coherent Spread through though it be Into the web of light that shines between us. Everything ignites And ancient fire behind our eyes, it binds us. But even in the city, girls and boys are constantly suspended, Only in a soup of human nature tamed and disassembled, As the fires inside us are externalized and then extended. I want to live where there's no signal. Even as it makes us, it destroys. The gods are all prosthetic, High on death denial but still corporeal and pathetic, Animals and angels making love, always allopoeitic. But even in our detriment we're poised To grow beyond these fetters, Luciferic wildness spreading wings in the domesticate To love the world entire And as brightly as we were intended. I want to live where there's no signal. Gone, gone, I don't recognize you anymore. So long to everything that's come before. I know all songs are reborn into a wider score. But i try to hide my eyes from all that lies in store. I want to live where there's no signal.
5.
Time's not a river; more like a landslide. Arrows in quivers, breaking inside. Every shiver, molting a new life, Needed and given, stride after stride. You're always catching up. You can't be helped to respond to what is already gone. You're ahead of yourself, Lapped by your ghost on the life track, Short rope in the well, Unraveling more for more slack. You're a flaming caboose, Punctuating the past, Flagellate prop in the juice, Bringing up a fast pack's back. You're always catching up. You can't be helped to respond To what is already gone. But walking, according to physiologists, Is a controlled fall forwards. Toddling to tottering, All of us are always one step from And one step toward. But life's just like that. Languages grow at the rhythm of walking pace, And every idea you inhabit Is seconds behind your Original Face... You're always catching up. You can't be helped to respond To what is already gone. You can't be helped to move on, Pushing the river that started this song.
6.
You Don't Have To Move
7.
Life Finds A Way
8.
Hyperstition
9.
When The Orbit Curtain Falls
10.
The Ascent
11.
Really

about

A new track and AI music video drops every Wednesday from 2/14 to 4/24 here and on YouTube:
bit.ly/theageofreunion

And of course on Spotify:
spoti.fi/49AQr1S

This album is the consummation of over twenty years of writing, playing, and recording music as a spiritual practice — a showcase for everything I have ever learned as a multi-instrumentalist singer-songwriter and producer since I first picked up the guitar in high school. It is also a chronicle of the deep questions I have lived and discoveries I've made while journeying across three continents on tour and through the distant reaches of psychedelic hyperspace, while leaving and returning to and leaving academia again, wrecking myself in turbulent long-distance love, beta-testing radical new creative technologies, and finding myself as a father. It is my secret garden of uncompromising artistry and a fossil of the contemplative process of creation as this took its shape one jewel-encrusted track after another.

This particular bouquet has roots in UFO sightings in 2006 and 2007, a trampoline at Burning Man in 2008, and years of late-night tinkering. These songs were all polished on tours in two hemispheres, in some cases performed hundreds of times without ever getting a proper studio version. Life never slowed down and I couldn't find or make the time to let the molten creativity congeal until I found myself responsible for children — at which point full-time work and the pandemic made it even harder. Three of my greatest inspirations — Jeff Buckley, Elliott Smith, and Michael Hedges — all left behind unfinished masterworks when they died, and I vowed to everyone that I would finally complete this monster. It took seven years of stolen isolation and a superhuman allocation of lost sleep.

But even though I didn't know what shape it all would take for quite some time, I always knew the theme and motivation. My next major studio effort would have to continue and resolve an inquiry that started with my 2006 album Get Used To Being Everything (1), my 2008 EP Double-Edged Sword (2), and my 2009 single The Cyclist/Throwing Sparks — exploring the co-evolution of humans and technology, the tension between yearning for transcendence and the embrace of very real constraints, and the paradoxical teachings of my visionary experiences. I wanted to create a work that spoke to human life at the intersection of colliding infinities, that grappled with the peril and the promise of contemporary life — that found and spoke from both a childlike wonder and a hard-earned soulfulness and strove for a reconciliation of the animal and angel, the made and born, the lost and found.

In 2010 I read The Ascent of Humanity by Charles Eisenstein and fell in love with his idea of The Age of Separation (civilization, characterized by humanity's alienation from nature and divinity and one another) and The Age of Reunion (the coming era in which we've reclaimed a sense of place amidst a cosmic order and have healed ourselves from the illusion of our otherness). This next album would have to synthesize the expansive urge to transcend and include it all with a story of the fall from oneness into multiplicity and limitation. This story took its form in the tale of a human life from conception to death and the pilgrimage through an accelerating world that lies between.

These are, each in its own way, all love songs. They're about the nonduality of confusion and clarity, loneliness and togetherness, yearning and satisfaction, the simple and the complex, the past and future, the familiar and the foreign, the other and the self. They are an ode to seeking and to finding, to the rich soil of folk music I've inherited and the glimmering potential of revolutionary creative tools just starting to appear around and through us. They are about the glory of coming home to ourselves and to each other, of learning who we are and where we belong. In that sense, this is about apocalypse — but one world's end makes room for more worlds to begin, and so these anthems, ballads, and inventions are dedicated to becoming and the endless forms most beautiful produced by constant recreation.

Thank you for pausing to take this in and for your help with my ongoing efforts to make music with real smarts AND heart.

In Love & Gratitude,
Michael

(1) michaelgarfield.bandcamp.com/album/get-used-to-being-everything
(2) michaelgarfield.bandcamp.com/album/double-edged-sword-ep
(3) michaelgarfield.bandcamp.com/album/the-cyclist-throwing-sparks-ep

credits

releases April 24, 2024

Michael Garfield: voice, Martin D-35, Taylor 324ce Builder's Edition, custom-built third-party Stratocaster, Alvarez Yairi DY-72 twelve-string, strandberg Boden Original eight-string, Chapman Stick, Jamstik, Kala ukulele, Ableton Push 2, Arturia Augmented Piano, field recordings, software synthesizers, samples, programming, recording, mixing, mastering, graphic design

Booking: michaelgarfield@gmail.com

Follow me elsewhere (Spotify, YouTube, etc.):
hyperfollow.com/michaelgarfield
patreon.com/michaelgarfield
michaelgarfield.substack.com

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Michael Garfield Santa Fe, New Mexico

Singer-songwriter, avant-guitarist, and live electronic producer all at once, Michael's dynamic live shows and intricate albums takes listeners on emotional trips spanning folk tradition and the avant-garde.

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