dontmesswithdinosaurs.com

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.