Jasmine Guffond deliberately embraces the term “muzak” on her latest album, Muzak for the Encouragement of Unproductivity (LINE/Boomkat Editions). Guffond creates ambient music of unusual depth and beauty, bending her own electronics with extended performances by Hilary Jeffrey on trumpet and tuba and Kai Fagaschinski on clarinet. - Peter Margasak, Nowhere Street, 6.6.2025
Listening Back is a sounding and listening practice, a Web browser add-on, and a research into the potential of sound to engage contemporary socio-political contexts, in particular - algorithmic surveillance. The Listening Back add-on sonifies Internet cookies in real-time and was used in a multi-channel installation to provide an audible presence for online tracking. It questions the normalisation of everyday Web surveillance by providing situations to listen back to cookie data within the real-time dynamics of Web browsing.
Muzak for the Encouragement of Unproductivity, is a poetic inversion of muzak’s traditional role in stimulating seamless workplace productivity. Installed near the Amazon Packing Station located before HAUNT-Frontviews, Muzak for the Encouragement of Unproductivity sonically addresses utopic notions of seamless, efficient productivity, inherent to capitalist cultures, and their very real dystopic effects from labour exploitation to the impacts of over-production on the environment. This poetic inversion is not meant as a kind of melodic control but rather a reflective space in which to consider the benefits personally, globally and environmentally, of slowing down.