Vibe Check: Ten Months of Anti-Matter

At the eve of this iteration's first anniversary, and after carefully listening to reader feedback, I'm choosing to adapt and evolve. This is where I've landed.

Hello.

As soon as this missive hits your inbox, I will have published 41 interviews and 41 essays since relaunching Anti-Matter in July of last year. To add some context to these numbers, there were only 25 interviews in the Anti-Matter Anthology book, and that pretty much summarized the original fanzine in its entirety—which means I am well on my way to doubling the output of the original fanzine in a little over one-third of the time.

But also consider this: A 300-page book is approximated to hold roughly 82,500 words. The current word count for all of the essays and interviews that I’ve turned in so far comes close to 257,000. In other words, over the last ten months alone, I have written and published the equivalent of more than three 300-page books about hardcore—by myself. I am equal parts proud and stunned by this calculation.

With that in mind, I thought it was time to reflect a little bit, and more importantly, to listen. I’ve been looking at my DMs, taking in feedback from subscribers and unsubscribers alike, and speaking with readers from around the world while touring with Thursday. I’ve also been checking in with myself, thinking about what’s important to me and what I hope to personally achieve from this project. As a result, I’ve come to some conclusions about how to institute some practical changes that reflect all that I’ve learned in the last ten months. On the eve of this iteration of Anti-Matter’s first anniversary, here’s where I landed.

Sustainability + The Publishing Schedule

The most frequent and consequential piece of reader feedback that I’ve received in the last year has been some version of this: “I love what you’re doing! But I’m having a hard time keeping up every week.” Time can be an issue. I get it.

In an age of streaming media and on-demand content, it can be easy to get in over our heads—and that feeling of being overwhelmed, whether it’s because you’re two weeks behind on Anti-Matter or two episodes behind on Baby Reindeer, can make some of us feel unsettled. As a publisher, the single factor I most often have to consider is sustainability. Typically, I’ve applied that question to what I can handle. But I’ve come to realize that sustainability works both ways: Whatever I do here must be sustainable both for myself and for the reader. So I’ve taken this feedback, and I’ve chosen to adapt.

Beginning this week, I’ll be adopting a new publishing schedule that I hope will be more user-friendly: You can expect the first three weeks of every month to be business as usual—one essay on Tuesday and one interview on Thursday. The fourth week, however, will consist of only one low-stress update: our monthly AM Radio dispatch, which will now feature on the last Thursday of the month. This means the next essay and interview will drop a week from today, on May 7.

My hope here is that this monthly “breather week” will give you time to catch up, whether it’s a more recent piece or something you missed from the archive. I also suspect that this new schedule will assist with my personal mission of keeping quality high, instead of bowing to quantity. Realizing that I’ve written and published the equivalent of three 300-page books in the last ten months was kind of sobering, to be honest, and it made me realize that I needed to correct the course. This new publishing schedule is not exactly a drastic correction from the bar I inadvertently set, but I believe it’s a meaningful one for all of us.

There’s also an unintended bonus: One thing I never accounted for when I devised the original publishing schedule is that its sheer relentlessness might actually get in the way of future offline Anti-Matter projects that I still want to put out into the world—beginning with a revised and expanded Second Edition of the Anti-Matter book, and if the stars align, an updated repress of the Anti-Matter compilation album. I want nothing more than to see those things finally come into being in 2025, and thanks to your honest feedback, I’ll be in more of a position to see it through.

Community mayhem at a Zulu show. Trans Pecos, Queens, NY. November 20, 2021. Photo by Mitchell Wojcik.

Community + The Subscription Model

Next: Admittedly, the subscription model that I launched with in July was crafted with idealism. I called it “the PBS model”: Accessible without cost for everyone, but supported by readers like you. What this meant in practice is that, by and large, everyone was given the same experience, and the people who chose to support this project with their financial stamp of approval did so for the benefit of the entire community and for their own personal sense of contribution. Which is absolutely incredible! But over time, as subscriber rolls began to settle into a pattern, I began to feel some level of conflict over how this model was working out on an ethical level.

The reality is that those of you who have been so generous as to become a paid subscriber have also become some of the most engaged and active members of this community. To ignore that completely would be impersonal, and that would go against the very ethos that I started this with. I felt like there had to be adjustments to be made on this end, too.

To begin with, I am gratefully indebted to my paid subscribers for allowing me the freedom to work as hard as I’ve been working on Anti-Matter for the last ten months. Their support literally made a space for this work to exist, and it feels only right to begin adding more practical perks for joining their ranks. To that end, I’ve started with a couple of small, but significant changes—especially for future readers who will be finding Anti-Matter for the first time after today.

First, commenting on posts is now a paid-subscriber benefit. (I’ve already been working this feature into the site over the last several weeks.) Furthermore, beginning today, free subscribers will continue to have access to read the most recent four weeks of content, but only paid subscribers will have access to the entire Anti-Matter archive. I believe this is the start of a fair solution that provides both reasonable accessibility for the community at large and offers a more concrete thank-you to those readers who have chosen to support Anti-Matter with a paid subscription.

Finally, paid subscribers can also expect to receive discounts and exclusives on the next merch drop (which I’ll say more about in the coming weeks), and when the time comes for those aforementioned physical releases—the book, the album, or whatever else comes—I’ll be working on paid-subscriber exclusives there, too. (A paid-subscriber exclusive vinyl variant of the comp, for example, is a sweet idea I’d love to see happen.)

My point being that, truly, this cannot survive without you. My conscience needed to acknowledge that somehow.

But for real, thank you all.

When I took the step that launched this iteration of Anti-Matter ten months ago, I was truthfully walking into the unknown. I didn’t really know if there was an audience for the kind of writing and interviewing that I wanted to do anymore. I only knew that no one else was really doing it, and that I believed it should exist.

Since then, I’ve learned so much—about myself, about my readers, about the people who make up our community, and about this thing that I created 31 years ago—and I realized it would be hypocritical for me to ignore that information to make a better Anti-Matter. If there has been any one recurring theme that has shown up in my essays, time and again, it is that hardcore has always depended on evolution as a means of persistence, and that we are thriving today as a result of the bold adaptations of the people who came before us. If I really want to see this newsletter grow into becoming a long-term outpost for contemplation and hardcore conversation, I’d do best by following in those footsteps.

Thank you, friends. x

Norman

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