Editions Mego – Editions Mego 273
Editions Mego is proud to release the new album by Australian producer
Jasmine Guffond. Developed over a two year period, Microphone Permission
is an unsettling musical journey utilising contemporary tools of
communication to display Guffond’s ongoing research into online
surveillance and sound as a method of investigation.
Source material on Microphone Permission are from various projects
Guffond has been working on; a commission to sonify the data of the city
of Melbourne, a dance performance about the future sounds of an extinct
forest, an installation that sonifies Twitter meta data in real time, a
job as a composer for a theatre work about music and feminism by five
young female identifying performers in Western Sydney and a site
specific installation at the Linachtalsperre dam that employed the
harmonic frequencies of electric currents.
The results are a stark, brooding, disorientating journey into a
paranoid musical field that sits somewhere between ambient club music
and a dystopian soundtrack. Elements of techno, classical music and
sound art form a dark intriguing masterwork that questions the nature of
invasive, algorithmic and computational listening practices.
For example Microphone Permission refers to the consent we routinely
give when installing various apps. onto our smart devices. Inspired by a
2018 scandal in which fans of Spain’s most popular soccer team were
effectively turned into unwitting spies by granting the La Liga
application microphone permission. No matter which make or model, all
smart devices are built with a microphone that is by default, forever
listening. Listening in these situations often takes on an algorithmic
form that enables tech developers to bypass public response to what is
intuitively considered invasive practice, that is, traditional modes of
eavesdropping such as using the microphone to listen and record audio.
Guffond’s investigative measures invites the public to experience her
new album whilst considering the implications of computational
listening.
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