"false world": HTDW Substack
Hello,
It’s my birthday. My wife got me some balloons! I’m launching this Substack today without too much editing or preening, because I want to share news that I’ve made a zine about my most recent album, I Am Toward You. I made this with the wonderful folks at Post Office in Amsterdam; thanks to Bryan, Lumir, Marc and others.
This zine is a good example of something I want to share in more detail than I can share on IG or X. I’ll do a full post about the zine sometime soon–early paid subscribers will receive a free copy of this zine with a personal note from me.
But before I go into more detail about this zine and what it means, I want to write a bit about this Substack more generally. When I write without editing, it usually reads as exceptionally pretentious and meandering so… enjoy :+).
Maybe you’re here because you followed my Patreon: this is kind of like the 2.0 version of HTDW Program, for those of you who followed that arc. This is the beginning of something I’ve been circling for a long time, round two of my attempt to create a digital locus for actual value, a stage on which to suspend the incessant flow of algorithmic content and noise.
[Subscribe for: Music] I’ll be sharing a bunch of themed playlists and new HTDW music as it develops. Sometimes, I’ll just post a few albums I’m listening to right now that I feel deserve your attention and more attention. Dig in to the links in what follows to find a few things I’m listening to right now. It’s not the algorithm’s Discover Weekly churn, but selections shaped by memory, thought, and actual listening.
[Subscribe for: Ideas] I’ll be sharing reactions to the contemporary situation, takeaway fragments pulled from my research and reading. Additionally, I’ll be answering questions about the contemporary situation and about my philosophical positions and happy to weigh in on whatever philosophical concepts you’re grappling with.
[Subscribe for: The Postscript] At the end of each post I’ll share a concatenation of links, images, quotes– a super easy one-stop vibe shop. This is for the impatient-slash-illiterate set. Something for everyone.
Why am I doing this is right now?:
I want to create a space to launch the things I’m making, rather than just posting on IG and praying that likeminded people will see my artwork floating around in their personalized Reels cesspools. I want a place to share, for instance, details and reflections about this zine I’ve made with the folks at Post Office. It’s probably the deepest I’ve ever gone on the significance of an album project, and I go pretty far into metaphysics, the concept of fate, the literal ways in which I make music and art, and a lot more. As I said, early paid subscribers will receive a free copy of this zine, which I’m really stoked to share. Sometime soon I’ll do a post on this zine and go page by page and annotate the work.
This zine is a great kick off for this Substack because of how far beyond How To Dress Well music the conversation goes. Further beyond HTDW, I have some thoughts I’d like to share about Mbembe, Bataille, Accelerando, Bladee, Ernaux, Cute Accelerationsm, Kabbalah. Why the emerging Lispector backlash is dead wrong. Why Stiegler is underrated, why TikTok brain is making everyone a conspiracy theorist, why everyone needs to read Anne Carson, Das Kapital, Japanese Death poems and Sadie Plant. Why understanding the difference between economics and political economy should be, as a former professor of mine put it, “a gimme for grownups.”
Again, looking beyond How To Dress Well, I want to share the music that I’m obsessed by throughout the year. Right now, I want to make sure everyone is listening to TLF Trio (an awesome 2025 record) and Teppana Jänis & Arja Kastinen (a time-warping recording from 1916-17 (!)), and that people recognize the importance of Lil Internet’s incredible Gencore mixtape, a watershed moment for AI generated music. I also want to post Oklou’s remix of the Mechatok x Bladee song because it’s incredible.
Additionally, I have many thoughts to share about why the music industry has fallen to pieces. Why the biggest problem with AI art is actually the regression to painting from cinema. I have some questions about why the smartest person you know has the worst take on AI and why the dumbest person you know has the worst take on AI. About what it means to think and write about all this from a pocket of relative peace sustained against the backdrop of (or, if we’re honest, made possible by) the genocide and ecocide that unfold daily across the wastelands of our hellishly xenoformed planet and the screens our addicting, thrilling handheld computers.
On the whole, this Substack is about looking at how the sphere of ideas is circulating on the surface of the slow moving, fast dying earth, and how the cresting waves of truly worthwhile contemporary culture—all of our best attempts to make sense and hold onto truth—melt against the insanely vapid networks that holds us captive.
Each month, maybe every couple weeks, (sometimes more, sometimes less), I’ll write here about love and music, about beginnings and ends, about fatherhood and art, about the possibility of truth in an untrue hellworld. I’ll write about what I’m reading about: how the gravitational pull of capital shapes our psychic and material worlds and about how the therapeutic deployment of uselessness might allow us to elbow out some space for joy. About the value of artificial intelligence, the danger of so-called ‘real' intelligence. About raising a child in the Anthropocene. About the insidiousness of sloptimism and the cycnicism and naivete of critiquing it as if it were avoidable. About making music after the death of the music industry.
I’ll share new music, playlists, HTDW stems, fragments of writing, interviews with people I know who are really interesting, book reviews and reading lists, and stray images.
Much like Program, this is nothing like a fan club for a band. It’s a space for co-thinking, co-listening, and sometimes commiseration. Maybe I should just say a reading group. A workshop. I don’t know. A place to try to understand ourselves, one another, and the wrong world in which we live. A multi-disciplinary, multi-genre, multi-media bibliography and syllabus. I guess it’s just a blog.
I’ll soon share a post about the zine and a new tee shirt to sort of kick off this blog and reflect on the I Am Toward You era. Oh, I’ll also share a new Ibiza-ready song I made with Nick León, some details about a few new records I’ve been helping executive produce, and some other stuff. That’s all in the next couple months.
Speak soon,
Tom
Postscript: (I’ll always drop a few bits here)
“… no works, no language, no words, no mind, nothing. Nothing but a fine Nerve Meter. A kind of incomprehensible stopping place in the mind, right in the middle of everything.”
– Artaud, From the Nerve Meter
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