E r e m o s
a sojourn devoid of place
Eremos (ἐρημος) is a Greek word
meaning "wilderness" or "desert”
From Proto-Indo-European *h₁reh₁mós (“dark”)
from Proto-Indo-European *h₁reh₁-(“to separate”)
(Wiki)
Welcome to the desert of the Real.
(Slavoj Zizek)
At last all wells were poisoned, all rivers ran with filth,
all seas were dead; there was no land left to grow food.
Some of our wise men turned to the contemplation of deserts. …
Stay in the desert long enough and you could apprehend the absolute.
(Margaret Atwood ‘Time Capsule Found on the Dead Planet’)
The wind of the spirit blows only in the desert.
(Edmond Jabes)
For here is the desert propagated by our world, and also the new earth.
(Deleuze & Guatarri “Anti-Oedipus”)
"What can we do when war overshadows the social imagination? The only thing we can do is to desert."
Franco "Bifo" Berardi
It may appear as a cryptographic device, a technological image, or a sonic fiction piece (or so I imagine) that coils around the figure of the desert with all its lavish ambivalence and exuberant dialectics. In fact, each time speaking of music or any sonic phenomena we inexorably fall back into this liminal space out of place - a sonorous wilderness.
It’s quite a tricky thing to speak on behalf of it, as it is rather intrinsically unspeakable and hence meant to speak on its own. Yet, as Edmond Jabès once noted: “We know of silence only what words can tell us. Whether you like it or not.” So I will try to hint at least at some semantic dimensions I found behind its flows.
A famous desert traveler Isabelle Eberhardt once wrote that if something exists in this space of wilderness, then it’s time. I am not sure - it depends on how one decides to interpret it. Yet, this piece is spiraling around the time question in quite an intriguing manner - starting from the very way it exhibits itself. It is coming out one circle after my “Desert Island,” but it was recorded before. “Inexorably, - writes Carlo Rovelli in his “Order of Time” - “the study of time does nothing but return us to ourselves.”
And so does the figure of the desert.
It is worth noting that the desert we are dealing with here is not a landscape in a Quinean sense. It implies neither less nor more, nor explicitly nothing - it embodies precisely this “neither/nor” in conjunction with “either/or” - a radical openness, dynamic and destabilising, meta-local and trans-historical.
Sonically, the set is based on the “concrete” media of electrical discharges, magnetic fields, and feedback loops, recorded with piezo sensors, microphones, and wires, and processed multilayeredly with various software in multiple improvisational recording and mixing sessions. Each track has its specifications in its description. But in its core, the whole set relies on and develops through traces of electricity as a basic vehicle, drawing on the trails of its materiality. It was made via almost tactile sensations - from scrapes, scarps, and fractures - without any particular terminus, but with the only one wish - to unveil the hidden dreams their flows may conceal.
Noise and hum that appear between disconnected or partly unplugged wires, their groan and rattle, clang and clatter, or tinkling of magnetic fields were treated as autonomous actors, ushering me with their hypnotic movements into the machinic unconscious realm.
Among the procedural techniques employed here are psychoacoustic ones, such as near-antiphase, where sound waves almost exactly approach their opposites, so that we hear the sound drowning in silence, as if submerged underwater, and then bursting forth… like a scream with a closed mouth. The sound seems to be absent, but the tension is felt through occasional artifacts. These artifacts are amplified to the limits of their expenditure.
The album unfolds through a narrative line which is rather deceptive, so I would encourage you to treat the tracks as puzzles of the story rather than linearly. Each track, representing its own time-capsule, points to some parallel threads through its name.
1 Voltage. Vicious Circuit It started almost four years ago in the darkness of 2022 with this whirlwind I made in Unreal Engine, which some of you have seen already. “Voltage.Vicious Circuit” deals with something I would call an affective electricity of the war machine on multiple levels, but first of all, as a prime representative of the accelerationist movement in its clearest and darkest. The only sound source for this part comes out as noise that appears between disconnected or partly unplugged wires. It is the dark precursor to my Desert Island. And it is the usher into the underworld and the wilderness of the Eremos. (As does Sufah, a horrifying hurricane that sweeps everything away, yet, operating as a mysterium tremendum, treated as a chariot, it may convey one into the beyond)
2 Complicity with Anonymous Materials referring explicitly to Reza Negarestani’s famous theory-fiction “Cyclonopedia,” also demonstrates a strong resonance with object oriented ontology and atomist cosmology, that leads the whole war-machine discourse beyond itself. From this perspective, there might be some sort of autonomous wills, or to put it another way, “I”s behind the driving forces and such phenomena as Oil, War, or Storm, - a swarming orchestra of points “within the unseen - a supra-physical spatiality, (qayb),” as Muhammad Sangesari has suggested. A continuous One in this matrix is a compound of discrete secret points, whose movements generate and codify the cosmic cycles. Within this frame, a process of history appears to be open and re-programmable through cosmo-temporal intervention. Some may rhyme qayb with qbism’s “U-view” in this respect. For this part I have used magnetic fields in addition to the same, kind of typical of mine, sound sources - electric discharges, underlining intensity of the flow mostly through work with a resonance on its continuous layer, and drawing on the granular re-sampling techniques on its discrete part.
3 The Real is Radical "One can only think according to the Real by thinking to the force of its foreclosure." (Jonathan Fardy following François Laruelle)
4 Ascending a City of Nothingness Find the Eye of the Storm
But “Isn’t the desert a paradoxical figure of the aporia?” asked Derrida.
And aren’t we all here, at a point of radical uncertainty, with no reliable or assured ways, going through loss and still holding the remnants of hope for salvation, in the era of artificialisation and desertification on each level of our lives?
Isn’t it a time for the intervention into patterns that constitute this world — which we inherit - with the daggers we may pilfer from angels?*
*“With the daggers
I pilfered from an angel
I build my dwelling”
These are lines from a poem by Edmond Jabès, and the title for the next Eremos chapter,
which is in progress and may come out next year, if my will coincides with the heavens’.
“You will never walk far enough,”
as he wrote in his “If there were anywhere but desert.”
© 2026