As we move toward the winter solstice, the realm of spirits shall increasingly make its presence known in the realm of the living. May you contact your wise ancestors, summon the strength of ancient beasts, and embrace your own transience and mortal fragility in the season of spirits.
This track can be downloaded on
http://www.patreon.com/historianhimself
and https://historianhimself.bandcamp.com/
Hi. I made a painting to auction off to raise money for bailproject.org
All you have to do to bid is leave a bid as a comment on THIS TWITTER THREAD.
Bidding ends July 4 at 5pm Pacific Time.
You can download the music from the above video here (right click & save):
Historian Himself – The Totem.mp3
I am honored to announce that I am featured on Yugen Blakrok’s new album Anima Mysterium. I am on track 4, “Hibiscus”. You can stream the entire album here for free:
http://bit.ly/2BfOcDh
If you like it I hope you’ll consider supporting her music by purchasing it on bandcamp (available in various physical formats for yall artifact collectors):
https://yugenblakrok.bandcamp.com/album/anima-mysterium
For those that don’t know Yugen is one of the most skilled and imaginative lyricists currently active and innovating in the world of hiphop and I have been following her work since around the time she released “Chatterboxin” several years ago. About two years ago I was taken by surprise when she randomly contacted me through twitter complimenting my album Gather Bones and wanting to collab. At the time I was living reclusive in my family’s mountain cabin in the Sierra Nevadas in California grinding through paleoart commissions to keep myself fed and pay rent, while Yugen was based in South Africa. Despite the physical distance we subsequently had a several long sprawling conversations via Skype and explored the seemingly endless territory of our overlapping interests, philosophical, scientific, aesthetic and musical. At the time I was still making a little music on the side, it was definitely on the side, and part of me was even turning over the idea of letting the historian wither in his cave in order to strictly focus on the visual aspects of my creative output. Those conversations with Yugen, however, completely reinvigorated my desire to continue to deepen my development and investment in music and lyricism, and shortly after one of those conversations I rode that wave of shared energy & recorded the verse now featured on the album.
Since then I’ve met with Yugen a couple times in Europe, where she is soon to be based for a time, and plans are in the works to shoot a video for Hibiscus and begin development of another project, which I will refrain from saying much more about now.
The financial backing and encouragement of my patreon supporters has been integral to my ability to continue making music. Music for me is a deeply self explorative and trial and error based endeavor, which means it takes a ton of time and is intensely personal. When you make albums that spasm through innumerable iterations over several years in order to evolve into their final form it is sometimes hard to see it as a worthwhile investment of time, energy and resources, especially when, like Gather Bones, they mostly get slept on. But thanks to my patreon supporters I don’t have to incur as much of the financial risk that taking the time to figure out music often takes. In a strange way the entire equation is based on trust on multiple levels: my patrons trust me to make the best work i can, i trust music made from the gut to resonate with others, and we all trust that through the power of human connection that music will find its audience. Thank you for your trust.
An in depth update on Earth Beasts Awaken is long overdue, and in the last couple months I’ve managed to make a little progress. A new practical effects behind the scenes update is now up on my patreon. Yeah, it’s for supporters only, but a measly $1 pledge gets you access to it and a gaggle of other exclusive content, and that buck helps me immensely to make progress on these ambitious and often difficult projects.
Thanks again to all of you who have supported my art in various ways over the years. I have not stopped. There is a small cauldron of historian projects (music & music videos) simmering over the old hungry fire as we speak. I will however be dedicating my time to paleoart again this summer and fall, as I have landed several huge commissions. More on those later.
A long overdue update of my reel featuring some of my more recent projects…
The narrative is from an audio short story that supplements Gather Bones, and is available for download to my patreon supporters.
2015 was a busy year. Here’s some of the stuff I finished during our last rotation around the sun…
Sort of as an experiment in minimalism, I made this music video for a track in collaboration with beatmaker BLAQ MASQ
I also recorded several other verses for musical collaborations, such as this one (the others have yet to be released):
I also designed and animated several minutes of animation for a TV documentary about viking mythology. Here’s a short clip of some of my animation. I plan on assembling all of it as a standalone short as soon as I can find the time:
On the front lines of paleoart, I launched the #buildabetterfaketheropod hashtag along with a pile of art poking fun at the dinosaurs/science of some dinosaur movie that came out this year and was sorta big.
Somewhere around that same time I went out to Moab Utah to photograph and explore the Mill Canyon Dinosaur Trackway, which I then created an illustration of for an interpretive sign commissioned by Utah BLM Paleontologist Rebecca Hunt-Foster.
Later that summer I traveled out to Utah again to participate in my first paleontological field expedition, again with ReBecca Hunt-Foster, her husband John Foster, Sharon McMullen, Mikey Schiltz and Matt Wedel to survey a newly discovered secret site, cluttered with mid mesozoic dinosaur fossils and giant petrified trees! That was awesome. But I can’t say more because it’s all still super secret and I’d be beheaded in sacrifice to our great archosaur overlords if I said any more.
Sometime after I got back from that trip I did these two drawings for an upcoming paper on Apatosaur combat I’m a coauthor on with Matt Wedel, Mike Taylor and Darren Naish.
I then finished a mixtape of new raps about fighting you with animals in the jungle called JUNGLECAT TECHNIQUE, and a new self produced album called Gather Bones. If you like my music, I hope you’ll consider supporting it on bandcamp.
Also at some point I did this reconstruction of an early Cretaceous angiosperm called Frenelopsis for Nathan Jud’s paper re-describing the taxa:
And I also did a bunch of drawings and concept art for Earth Beasts Awaken part 3, and a pile of sketches as rewards for my Patreon supporters, many of which can be seen in the photo galleries over on the historian facebook page…
And now (like right now) I’m working on another illustrated sign for another Utah BLM dinosaur trackway site commissioned by ReBecca Hunt-Foster. I’m not going to share it right now though, because you have to support me on Patreon to see the behind the scenes stuff that isn’t finished yet, as well as special bonus content videos like this B-reel footage of the Snow Painter creature from Earth Beasts Awaken part 1 that I put together for my new Patreon supporters:
For those of you who have supported my work by buying art, making a donation or just sharing and hyping the hell out of it, thanks for the support!!!
Oh yeah, and I also put a ton of art up on my new Redbubble store, so you can even support my art by rockin’ it in the forms of various interdimensional style armors!!
Click the Ghost Elk to DOWNLOAD Gather Bones.
On a mobile device? CLICK HERE FOR MOBILE DOWNLOAD/STREAMING
The above download is free, but if you like my music & art and you want to support my upcoming projects you can make a small monthly donation on MY PATREON PAGE. Signing up is easy, it helps make projects like this possible and it gets you access to exclusive content, such as an audio short story that supplements this album (that can’t be found anywhere else)…
Or you can make a one-time paypal donation:
This is my second full length album that I composed and produced myself. Every note in this album is from my heart or lungs, or from those of a close friend of mine.
Album Credits:
Lyrics, lead vocals, whistlin’ & production – historian
Fiddle & banjo – Drew McGowan
Flutes – Jackie Liu
Spooky singin’ – Kim Megowan
Ghuzheng – Jiayi Meng
Mastering – Steven Doman
I also owe a big thanks to those of you who supported this project by purchasing the art I created for it way back in December 2013, when I foolishly thought I could finish this album quickly because I had amassed most of the writing, melodies and ideas that would eventually form it. I didn’t realize how long it would take to actually put it all together and make it sound close to the way it did echoing around in my brain. You can see a gallery of that art here, and each of the pieces is based on ideas in the music.
Prints of these paintings can be requested only by my patreon supporters.
And T-shirts, hoodies, leggings & more can be bought in my Redbubble shop.
EXPLORE AROUND, THERE ARE A LOT OF CLOTHING OPTIONS FOR EACH ILLUSTRATION.
Here’s a track from it you’ve never heard before:
There’s also this video I put out a long time ago:
I put together a video using B-reel footage from Earth Beasts Awaken pt 1 to put up on
my patreon page, where my supporters can also download the music featured in the video.
I plan on doing a bonus footage video like this using footage from Earth Beasts part 2, but that one will be available only to my Patreon supporters, so subscribe now & don’t miss any of the bonus content & behind the scenes material that I will be putting up on that page. To those of you who have already pledged your support on Patreon, be sure to log in and download the soundtrack to this video, and thanks for the support!!
Despite what I say in the video I’ve been having some technical trouble with paypal’s recurring donation feature so really the best way to make a recurring monthly donation is through my Patreon page:
MY PATREON PAGE
OR, you can make a one time donation on Paypal:
I hope you’ll consider making a small recurring monthly donation to support my work on a monthly basis. Small donations add up, and it is entirely within your power as my audience to determine whether or not I can make my videos and art fully independently, or if I have to submit myself to the existing media structure in order to make a living.
Frame from footage shot for an upcoming Earth Beasts Awaken Video