Dust Devils
But the storm is blowing in from Paradise:
Snezhana Reizen
We can question only Power. Nonpower is the question itself.
(Edmond Jabes)
“But a storm is blowing in from Paradise”, wrote Walter Benjamin describing the Angel of History being horrified by the past events, wishing to remain and repair what has been ruined yet pushed towards the future by the irresistible wind, “while the pile of debris before him grows skyward. This storm is what we call progress” he concluded.
It’s hard to imagine a more timely critique of the world that deploys around us these days, shaking violently from all sorts of conflicts and uncontrollable growth of technological and military advances and ecological and existential crises.
Started as a response to the Russian aggression against Ukraine in the darkness of 2022, and convulsed by atrocities erupting in the Middle East, the album unfolds around this uncanny and unsettling phenomenon that I would call an affective electricity of the war machine by channeling tension and rupture through sonically manifested electric forces. Technically, it is based solely on electrical discharges and feedback loops, processed multilayeredly across multiple improvisational sessions.
Being deeply moved by despair and a wish close to that of Benjamin in his Theses on the Philosophy of History, this work, however, cannot be strictly confined to them.
It is particularly intrigued by this very notion of the storm that fuels history.
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The album unfolds through a narrative line that is rather deceptive — each track, representing its own time capsule, points towards parallel threads through its name, each acts as a “dust devil” of a kind.
Meteorologically, dust devils arise from the interaction of thermal extremes, creating unstable conditions. Speculatively, in the language of mystics, born exclusively from the tension of Difference, these vortexes may represent local energetic portals of emergence of various forms on micro- and macroscopic organisational levels. Being weak transient formations on their own, together, they may constitute a hurricane, through which cosmic cycles come into movement.
In the classical physical world, in its turn, what dust devils produce is effectively electricity. It is done in two acts: the triboelectric friction that happens by means of microscopic collisions and exchange between electrons, and gravitational settling, characterised by the intense updraft of the negatively charged particles high into the top of the dust devil’s funnel, while positively charged particles are too heavy for the wind, remaining spinning close to the ground. This physical separation of charges turns the dust devil into a massive, upright atmospheric dipole. The greater the distance and amount of particles separated, the higher the voltage spikes.
As millions of charged grains orbit the vortex at high speeds, they generate a fluctuating magnetic field.
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The album was made through almost tactile sensations, from scrapes, scars, and fractures hidden in electrical discharges, without any particular terminus, but to unveil the imaginal their tensions and flows may conceal. Noise and hum that appear between disconnected or partly unplugged wires — their groan and rattle, clang and clatter, or the tinkling of feedback loops — are treated here as autonomous actors, convoying me, as an operator, into the realm of the “machinic unconscious”.
Among the procedural techniques employed here are psychoacoustic ones, such as near-antiphase, in which sound waves approach their opposites almost exactly, so that we hear sound drowning in silence, as if submerged underwater, before bursting forth — like a scream with a closed mouth. The sound seems to become absent, while the tension is felt through occasional artefacts. These artefacts are amplified to the limits of their expenditure.
Yet, just as Sufah, a horrifying hurricane that sweeps each thing away while operating at another level, can be rendered as a mysterium tremendum, conveying one, as it is believed, into the beyond, this series of works is an attempt at creating a speculative vehicle to move through the madness of the modern world, by transmuting at least my inner environment.
without resolving the tension.
"What can we do when war overshadows the social imagination? The only thing we can do is to desert."
Franco "Bifo" Berardi
Voltage - an audio-reactive particle simulation made in Unreal Engine in 2022 seeding this entire project
1 Voltage. Vicious Circuit “Weapons are affects and affects weapons.” (A Thousand Plateaus, “Treatise on Nomadology — The War Machine”, Deleuze and Guattari) “The most important occurrence within the crowd is the discharge. Before this the crowd does not actually exist; it is the discharge which creates it.” (Crowds and Power, “The Discharge”. Elias Canetti ) “War is like the fall or failure of mutation.” (A Thousand Plateaus, “Treatise on Nomadology — The War Machine”, Deleuze and Guattari) "Fear plays a central role, because it is the way in which threat becomes flesh, even in the absence of a clear and present danger. It is the way it gets under one’s skin, activates and agitates, without there necessarily being an outlet. Fear makes threat a real and present factor of political existence. Threat and fear form a loop that short-circuits linear political time, to produce what I call “affective facts.” What threatens to come is already here, in the clear and present form of fear. Fear feels threat into being. So the threat doesn’t have to actually eventuate into an empirically verifiable danger to be real, to take real political effect. It can remain in potential, and still exert a force—a force of futurity (made presently felt)." (Ontopower: War, Powers, and the State of Perception, Brian Massumi, Q&A with Duke University Press) ...
2 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)
3 Rosal. A prayer for Rain to come "In the way of true Alchemy, nothing alien or extraneous is introduced by nature. Nature has what it works in. Actives are joined to passives through a joining together or application; but as for the rest, nature works through itself." (Rosarium Philosophorum) "Only unobstructed, effervescing life falls into a thousand new forms and improvisations, brings to light creative new force, itself corrects all mistaken attempts". (Rosa Luxemburg - The Russian Revolution) ~ "There Will Come Soft Rains" (War Time) There will come soft rains and the smell of the ground, And swallows circling with their shimmering sound; And frogs in the pools singing at night, And wild plum-trees in tremulous white; Robins will wear their feathery fire Whistling their whims on a low fence-wire; And not one will know of the war, not one Will care at last when it is done. Not one would mind, neither bird nor tree If mankind perished utterly; And Spring herself, when she woke at dawn, Would scarcely know that we were gone." (Sara Teasdale) ~ "The forms of metals cannot be transmuted unless they be reduced into their first matter, and then they are transmuted into another form than that which they had before. And that is because the corruption of one thing is the generation of another thing, as well in artificial things as in natural things. For Art imitates nature…" (Rosarium Philosophorum, attributed to Arnoldus. ) ...
4 Absential Virtualities "Biological induction, the evocation through simple signals of formational competences, truly epigenetic appearance in space and time and specific complex structures all lead us to “admit a non-geometric ‘dimension’ – a ‘non-spatial’ region in which the ‘ideals’ of specific forms subsist in a ‘semantic’ state, a state of significant themes analogous to the themes of an habitual act or an effort of memory or invention. At the same time, these ideals act dynamically on that which actualises them and are actively realised by it; in turn, these are adopted as its ideas. This particular composite of activity and passivity is characteristic of all consciousness. The cycles of mechanical auto-regulation merely ‘symbolise’ (in the Leibnizian sense) this characteristic and only represent it in a ‘degenerated’ state.” (The Genesis of Living Forms, Raymond Ruyer)
5 Argoing “So fought the armies, like a blazing fire. … Even the wisest people are roused to rage, which trickles into you sweeter than honey, and inside your body it swells like smoke—just so..” (Iliad, book 18, Divine Armor, Homer, translated by Emily Wiltson) ~ The piece was recorded using processed voltage spikes and voices of arguing people taken from open sources. .
6 Ascending a City of Nothingness Find the Eye of the Storm "Pierce through the left side of the belly. Reach the heart of obscured understanding. Exit the front courtyard gates." (4 line of the 36th hexagram, I Ching, the oracle, Benebell Wen) ~ The eternal return of the Orpheus's glance.. ~ “There is no single time: there is a different duration for every trajectory; and time passes at different rhythms according to place and according to speed. It is not directional: the difference between past and future does not exist in the elementary equations of the world; its orientation is merely a contingent aspect that appears when we look at things and neglect the details. In this blurred view, the past of the universe was in a curiously “particular” state. The notion of the “present” does not work: in the vast universe there is nothing that we can reasonably call “present.” The substratum that determines the duration of time is not an independent entity, different from the others that make up the world; it is an aspect of a dynamic field. It jumps, fluctuates, materializes only by interacting, and is not to be found beneath a minimum scale” (The Order of Time, Carlo Rovelli) ~ “Things” in themselves are only events that for a while are “monotonous. But only before returning to dust. Because sooner or later, obviously, everything returns to dust. The absence of time does not mean, therefore, that everything is frozen and unmoving. It is a boundless and disorderly network of quantum events. If by “time” we mean nothing more than happening, then everything is time. There is only that which exists in time.” (The Order of Time, Carlo Rovelli) ~ "And on that wave we will all have to navigate, all who are nourished by the fruits of the Earth." (Odes, II, 14, Horace) ...
7 El Origen de la Humanidad “More generally, the unbelievable variety of phenomena in the entire universe is always reduced in the end to the displacement and rearrangement of the same elementary particles – electrons, neutrons, neutrinos. It is truly inconceivable that the whole pyramid is accounted for by its apex, by the movements of particles in space, and that the greatest masterpieces, in nature as well as in art, are only ‘an alphabet in disorder’. For the pyramid to hold, we require a proper consciousness of forms.” (The Genesis of Living Forms, Raymond Ruyer) “Origin, although a thoroughly historical category, nevertheless has nothing in common with genesis [chronological history]. By “origin” is meant not the coming-to-be of what has originated but rather what originates in the becoming and passing away. The origin stands as eddy in the stream of becoming and vigorously draws the emerging material into its rhythm. In the naked, manifest existence of the factual, the original never allows itself to be recognized; its rhythm stands open only to a dual insight.” (Origin of the German Trauerspiel, Walter Benjamin) "The memory by which an egg becomes a human being is irreducible to material traces in the egg and that it implies a whole architecture of trans-spatial themes in which the egg, and then the embryo, are only the spatial (or quasi-spatial) fulcrum, modified throughout their evocation." (The Genesis of Living Forms, Raymond Ruyer) “The world is an egg, but the egg itself is the theatre, a stage theatre in which the roles dominate the actors, the spaces dominate the roles, and the ideas dominate the spaces.” (Difference and Repetition, Gilles Deleuze) ~ Video is made by Lotta Glybotskaia, employing ai tools. Sound is recorded and composed by Snezhana Reizen, drawing from nothing but electrical fluctuations. ...
El Origen de la Humanidad - video is made by Lotta Glybotskaia
8 With the daggers I pilfered from an angel I build my dwelling ... (Edmond Jabes)
9 You called me by my fever by the walnut violin of my beats by the cricket in the arch of each blaze of nothing ... (Edmond Jabes)
10 Epekeinaphor "Epekeina" is an ancient Greek adverb (ἐπέκεινα) meaning "beyond" or "further on". It is most famous for its use in Plato's Republic as the phrase epekeina tes ousias ("beyond being") to describe the ultimate, ineffable nature of the Form of the Good." (Wiki) "The Desert is a metaphor for a change of field [changement de terrain] in metaphysics, whereas it is an epekeinaphor, a performative term of this change in its traditional mystical usage." (Notes on the axiomatic of the desert, Eugene Thacker) Inspired by François Laruelle’s mystique-fiction, but not circumscribed by it, Epekeinaphor heads beyond the idea of representation that is built into the system that dominates our culture and communication. Epekeinaphor, for Laruelle, in contrast to metaphor with its referential figural frame, operates as an active and creative embodiment of the transcendental. It is a part of my "Eremos", and a precursor for my ongoing research project “U” It was recorded with a pair of mics using sounds of self-reinforcing feedback, emerging in the space of a staircase, and amplified by its reverberation and resonance, accentuated by my presence, observation, and movements.
Connections:
This material was formerly presented as an audio-visual work “Voltage. Vicious Circuit”, which seeded this album and now appears under the same title, as its first track. “Dust Devils” is the first chapter of the “But a storm is blowing in from Paradise”. The second, "Living Mirrors" is completed and will be out shortly after this one. It is also the dark precursor to the “Desert Island”, and the usher into the underworld and the wilderness of the Eremos project.
Credits:
Snezhana Reizen — sound, composition, conceptual framework, video (Voltage), visual art and design
Lotta Glybotskaia — video (El Origen de la Humanidad)
Feliks Mirenskiy — mastering
OUT at Alienation Index in November 2026
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