From the LP, Alien Intelligence, 2024
https://jasmineguffond.bandcamp.com/album/alien-intelligence

'Alien Intelligence' came into being during Guffond’s residency at Parisian institution GRM in 2021. While learning how to generate sound and make music with the in-house Serge modular synthesiser, the Australian artist noticed the typical role of human input for machine output was being subverted by the behaviour of certain electronic elements, which came to exercise their own influences on the direction of the music.

Taking this idea one step further, Guffond proceeded to explore the programming environment MaxMSP, a customisable interface which allowed her to blur the lines between human input and machine directives even further. Across the three extended pieces which make up 'Alien Intelligence' you can hear the results of Guffond’s inquisitive approach as she coaxed the machines into bringing their own ideas to bear on the music. The tension inherent in this thematic duality is mirrored by the contrast between glacial ambience and chaotic interference across the album.

Alien Intelligence (OOH-Sounds 2024)

https://jasmineguffond.bandcamp.com/album/traced

Selected Tracks from Traced, Sonic Pieces, Pattern Series, 2017.

TRACED (Sonic Pieces, 2017)

https://jasmineguffond.bandcamp.com/album/microphone-permission

Selected Tracks from Microphone Permission, Editions Mego, 2020.

Microphone Permission (Editions Mego, 2020)

https://jasmineguffond.bandcamp.com/album/yellow-bell

Selected tracks from Yellow Bell, Sonic Pieces, 2015.
Reissue of LP, coming out in Autumn, 2020.

Yellow Bell (Sonic Pieces, 2015)

From "Microphone Permission" LP, Editions Mego, 2020
https://jasmineguffond.bandcamp.com/album/microphone-permission

An Utterly Dark Spot

In collaboration with Stephen Boakye for SAVVY Contemporary's 
"How Will You Ascertain Time?" Invocations, 28 - 29.05.2022.
I invited Stephen Boakye, a former international student at Kyviv Medical University to recount his journey to Berlin from the perspecitve of the sounds he heard while waiting. His journey from war-torn Kyviv to Berlin, at once in motion and waiting, is generously shared from listening perspectives. Sound as a medium that unfolds over time never truly disappears but continues to reverberate beyond human aural perception. The figure of sound provides a metaphor for the varying repetitions and feedback loopings encountered through ongoing experiences of waiting that resonate both personally and systemically, highlighting how waiting is political and experienced differently according to race, class and geography in ways that deeply impact psychologically, emotionally and physically. 
https://savvy-contemporary.com/en/events/2022/how-will-you-ascertain-time/
Team
Concept & CURATIOn  Hajra Haider Karrar
ARTISTIC DIRECTION  Bonaventure Soh Bejeng Ndikung, Elena Agudio
Co-Curation Sagal Farah
CURATORIAL ASSISTANCE Lili Somogyi, Antonio Pedro Mendes
MANAGEMENT  Onur Çimen, Lia Milanesio, Lema Sikod
PRODUCTION Rafał Łazar, Santiago Doljanin, António Pedro Mendes, Nancy Naser Al Deen , Onur Çimen, Waylon D'Mello, Lili Somogyi, Hubert Gromny
SOUND DESIGN  Rey KM Domurat
LIGHT DESIGN  Emilio Cordero
TECH  Bert Günther
COMMUNICATIONS Anna Jäger
Graphic DESIGN  Juan Pablo García Sossa
Handout  Nancy Naser Al Deen
INTERNSHIP Hubert Gromny

Silence Is The Loudest Sound You Can Ever Hear

Excerpt from a live recording at Les Instants Chavirés, Montreuil, 17th June 2022

Les Instants Chavirés LIVE Excerpt 17June2022

The sound of five faces as detected and analyzed by facial recognition algorithms. 
Recordings from a live intervention / temporary sound installation for the Authorized Access Festival, Berlin, 11th October, 2014.

For day 3 of the Authorised Access Festival, before entering the bar, visitors’ faces were detected and analyzed using facial recognition algorithms. Facial data was digitally synthesized into sound via Max/Msp, producing unique sonic imprints of peoples’ faces. The individual Sonic Potraits were added to a continually growing soundscape and simultaneously recorded to a usb armband for people to take home and share with friends and family.

Facial detection / recognition technologies (FRT) use mathematical algorithms to create a digital template of a person’s face, otherwise known as a face print. FRT when employed as a surveillance technology, (for example some CCTV cameras in London, China and the U.S.A.) requires no involvement from the person that is being surveyed or incidentally captured by camera. Unlike other biometrics FRT can operate anonymously in the background. People do not need to surrender their face image as they would their fingerprint or their iris scan. A face can be captured and (de)coded without the person’s consent or active participation. FRT is therefore considered to be a ‘silent technology’.

FRT underlies internet activities such as tagging yourself and others in photos uploaded to social media sites and is used within photo management applications such as Apple’s iPhoto and Google’s Picassa. In 2011 Facebook introduced FRT to automatically identify faces in uploaded photos by comparing them to other tagged pictures. It was rolled out without warning -- a move that backfired in the EU as regulators and privacy campaigners forced the social networking site to turn off the functionality. Facebook have announced plans to extend facial recognition to profile photos in other parts of the world and consequently hold the largest biometric database in the world. The Tesco supermarket chain in the U.K plan to install facial detection technology at petrol station forecourts in order to tailor advertising according to customers sex and age, while cueing at the checkout. Since 2005 the Bundeskriminalamt offers centralized facial recognition on mug shot images for all German police agencies. 45 new eGates, (an automated border processing system that uses FRT to compare the face of the individual with the image in the e-passport microchip), are operational at 10 locations in Germany; Frankfurt, Munich, Hamburg and Dusseldorf Airport. By the end of 2014 at least 32 more eGates are scheduled to be installed. 


Five Faces

Audio Excerpt from Sound Installation
Klangfarbe Ludwig / Nikolaisaal, Potsdam / February 2014

Sound studies students were invited to produce on site sound installations for the Alles Beethoven! Festival at Nikolaisaal, Potsdam. Manipulated excerpts from Beethoven’s ninth symphony were played back via speakers attached to suspended trumpets and trombones. Referencing the ‘Ear Trumpets’ Beethoven experimented with in attempts to augment his diminished hearing, we inverted the function of these instruments.

Equally interested in investigating perceptual aspects of listening and the ‘listening’ of instruments themselves, we allowed for the instruments to ‘speak’ with their own bodies. Music emitted via the small mounted speakers was so quiet as to encourage an active listening, but put your ear to the mouth piece and a whole universe of sound is revealed. We imagine this could be similar to Beethoven’s sonic experience during the writing of the 9th Symphony.

Beethovens Ear

Taken from 'Alien Intelligence' out now on a limited edition vinyl and download > https://ooh-sounds.bandcamp.com/album/jasmine-guffond-alien-intelligence

Through the medium of a distinctly synthesised, sustained ambience, seasoned artist and composer @jasmineguffond arrives on OOH-sounds to explore the tension between technology and human creativity in an increasingly ambiguous playing field.

Alien Intelligence came into being during Guffond’s residency at fabled Parisian institution GRM in 2021. While learning how to generate sound and make music with the in-house Serge modular synthesiser, the Australian artist noticed the typical role of human input for machine output was being subverted by the behaviour of certain electronic elements, which came to exercise their own influences on the direction of the music.

Taking this idea one step further, Guffond proceeded to explore the programming environment MaxMSP, a customisable interface which allowed her to blur the lines between human input and machine directives even further. Across the three extended pieces which make up Alien Intelligence you can hear the results of Guffond’s inquisitive approach as she coaxed the machines into bringing their own ideas to bear on the music.

The tension inherent in this thematic duality is mirrored by the contrast between glacial ambience and chaotic interference across the album. On ‘Serge & Maxine Variation One’ the presiding mood is a slow and patient one, as undulating waveforms rich with harmonic overtones spill out over one another across 10 minutes. The track’s latter passage, driven by steadily intensifying oscillations, is then interrupted with an unexpected flurry of pitch shifting. This kind of complex technical movement features more prominently at the start of ‘Serge & Maxine Variation Three’, which then gradually shifts into a gentler ebb and flow of rising and falling frequencies.

Angled slightly differently and residing on the B side of the album, 15-minute quiet epic ‘Serge & Maxine Variation Two’ bookends a louder passage of synth work with serene, sustained notes that ring out a sort of hymnal melody. Throughout, the movement in the music evolves in subtly modulating, hypnotic, ways, but there are also unexpected turns or melodic diversions which feel much more incongruous. In its closing stretch, the notes dart around more freely as though played by hand, but it’s hard to be sure whether these shifts in the otherwise delicate tonal music were a human conceit or a programming by-product. In the end, the two inputs logically become one.

As Guffond says herself, “More-than-human logics emerge, a kind of alien intelligence that questions an assumed central position of human subjectivity in socio-technical assemblages and considers the philosophical, socio-political and cultural implications beyond music practice in an increasingly technologically mediated world.”

As AI creeps into art as much as other aspects of modern life, Guffond applies her playful instinct to the theme of these works by reconsidering machine intelligence as ‘alien’, crediting its contributions with a more robust yet enigmatic identity in the creative process, leading to an end result which is far from artificial.

A1 Jasmine Guffond  - Serge & Maxine Variation, One [OOH-040]

Jasmine Guffond - Useful Knowledge

Elephant from the album Yellow Bell 
released on Sonic Pieces 2015

Elephant

Music For An Incidental Audience
Arles sur Tech, Pyrenees Orientales France, January 2010
Using recordings we made of a XVII century organ at the local Saint Mary Abbey, and field recordings of the river Tech, we composed a series of two to four minute sound pieces. These were transmitted every half hour through the loudspeaker announcement system located in the streets of the town centre of Arles sur Tech for a duration of ten days. We thereby transmitted the sound of the historic organ for the first time into a public space outside of the abbey and also outside of conventional listening environments where a strictly focused listening experience is intended. This allowed the audience (passersby) the freedom to choose to focus their listening on the music as either foreground or background. It was my intention that the music played back quietly through the loudspeakers would be as easily ignorable as interesting, and that the borders between the natural sounds of the environment and the music become blurred.

Orgue

From the album 'Muzak for the Encouragement of Unproductivity' , DDL out on LINE, 2025 
Vinly available via https://boomkat.com/products/muzak-for-the-encouragement-of-unproductivity

'Muzak for the Encouragement of Unproductivity' is a poetic inversion of Muzak’s traditional role in stimulating seamless productivity in the workplace. Beginning as a pre-radio music distribution network (1934, U.S.), Muzak was transmitted along electrical wires with the intention of being at once ubiquitous and indiscernible, always present yet easily ignorable. As a pseudo-science the aim was to capitalize on the potential of music to have a psychological effect on listeners, and with the goal of maximum productivity, was employed as a sonic disciplinary force in the work place.

Previously installed for Dystopia Sound Art Biennial (2024), at the Amazon Packing Station located before HAUNT-Frontviews in Berlin, '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, further developed as an album, 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.

Reverb, essential to the Muzak aesthetic, is programmed (using convolution reverb) with the dimensions of the Berlin Amazon fulfillment centre, DBE2. Amazon fulfillment centers are global contemporary factories, promising a consumer utopia of next day delivery of almost any product imaginable. Inspired by Sam Kidel’s concept of “mimetic hacking”(1), the reverberation characteristics of the DBE2 facility perform a symbolic sonic break-in to the guarded Amazon fulfillment center, a trespass to the flow of production

Muzak For the Encouragement of Unproductivity

Muzak for the Encouragement of Unproductivity 3 (LINE/Boomkat Editions, 2025)

from the album YELLOW BELL, Sonic Pieces, 2016

Core Notions

RR Variation

Recorded live at Teatro Manuel Doblado, León, Mexico, 26th Nov. 2016
Thanks to Ilan Katin for visuals!

Somnabulant Live Mexico 2016

Degradation Loops was a 16 day composition that gradually and completely 'bit crushes' my 2015 album Yellow Bell. Produced for a group show at the 55 Sydenham Rd, Marrickville gallery in Sydney, a process of sonic destruction unfolds in response to visual artists destroying and reassembling their work, to create new work, and to question the dominance of commercial imperatives within art. Here is a 14'48" time lapse edit of the 16 day composition, 2016.

Degradation Loops_55 Sydenham Rd Marrickville

From the album TRACED. Sonic Pieces, 2017
http://sonicpieces.com/pattern004.html

Vision Strategy Coordinators

From album 'TRACED', Pattern 04, Sonic Pieces, 2017

Traced

Post Human

From 'TRACED', Pattern 04, Sonic Pieces, 2017

Swan Song

From TRACED, Sonic Pieces, Pattern Series, 2017

Boundless Informant

Sonic Voyeur is an excerpt from a recording made on the 17th of February, 2019 at 21:30. It is the real-time sonification of the meta-data from the twitter accounts of well-known public entities: Donald Trump, Narendra Modi, Justin Bieber, Rihanna, Taylor Swift, Lady Gaga, YouTube, CNN, the BBC.

Sonic Voyeur

Taken from the album 'Microphone Permission' released as LP and digital.

Microphone Permission

Jasmine Guffond 'Forever Listening' (EMEGO 273)

Sound: Jasmine Guffond
Video: Ilan Katin

Ana X is a site specific installation that utilizes projections and sound to form a dialog between us and the presence of those who may have once occupied the space, and perhaps still do.

Being aware of the historical significance of the building, we used light and sound as a method for touching the walls and columns of the room, allowing it to enter into a dialogue with the space.

video documentation: https://vimeo.com/58576082


Ana X

Bookings: MO@MEDIA-LOCA.COM
Electronic composition across music and art contexts.

Jasmine Guffond

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