LISTEN VIA SOUNDCLOUD ABOVE OR:  Apple Podcasts • Spotify • Breaker

AGAINST EVERYONE WITH CONNER HABIB is only possible through the monthly and annual support of listeners like you via Patreon.com/connerhabib.

Please support the show to connect to and give economic life to something you find value in. Thank you.

Also, please do subscribe to the show, give it a 5 star rating and warm review on Apple Podcasts.

Friends,

Here are the lyrics to HOW TO DRESS WELL‘s song, “Gas Station Against Blackened Hillside” from his latest album,  I Am Toward You:

Hundred times a day
Luziferic demons bringing light
Like the sun cut through the rain, these gods who come to mind
I watch the door open up on a rat’s eye
I watched the door open up

I puked in the rain
10109, explosive shame
“This,” I say, “is the game God has asked me to play”
Was I supposed to change?

No, there’s no way
My spirit companions
Call me back
Drawn like a magnet
Pull me back
Spirit companions

This fauna, this flora, raised under the same sky
Gas station against blackened hillside
Why is life so savage?
Why is life so savage?

If I send my spirit-dog or spirit-child out
To gather information for me worldwide
A crease in the space-time, green stone serpentine
The light is always leaving us all

No, there’s no way
My spirit companions
Pull me back
And all I ever have to know is that it’s on its way

It’s a song that evokes the convenience store in season 3 episode 8 of Twin Peaks (better known as the atomic bomb episode), but that leads us away from the adversarial forces and towards something else. There’s a weaving of image, hope, hopelessness, connection, spirit, and matter. And this weaving is characteristic of Tom Krell, AKA How To Dress Well’s music, which he’s been composing for 15 years.

In his words:

“My whole life is an indissociable mass of philosophy, poetry, sound art, pop music.”

I Am Toward you is an expression of that un-dissociation – the weaving of the constitutive forces of the arts of the soul, the body, and the spirit. It won’t surprise you listening to this episode that Tom is a Doctor of Philosophy, and that he has spent his life engaging with differing subtle forms of communication. And it also won’t surprise you that we talk about all of this as much as we discuss music.

It’s an episode about communicating your self to the All, the Nothing, and also how we connect through in the vast distances between us, finding a fullness in separation.

I’m so happy to share this episode with you, it’s one of the very best conversations I’ve had on the show.

HERE’S A PLAYLIST of songs by How To Dress Well that I love.

***

WHAT BOOK SHOULD YOU READ?

Though it’s only adjacent to our conversation, psychoanalyst Annie Rogers‘s book on how speaking and silence can exhibit so much beyond the obvious, THE UNSAYABLE: THE HIDDEN LANGUAGE OF TRAUMA is a moving and fascinating read.
You can also read Are There People Without a Self?: On the Mystery of the Ego and the Appearance in the Present Day of Egoless Individuals by Erdmuth Johannes Grosse

WHAT OTHER EPISODE SHOULD YOU LISTEN TO?

When Tom and I discuss language, I reference AEWCH 122 where I talk with spiritual philosopher Scott Elliot Hicks about how thinking itself is a spiritual path.

MORE ON TOM & HOW TO DRESS WELL

Most of Tom’s recent activity can be found by linking through here. 
Here’s the the How To Dress Well Instagram.