JASMIN GUFFOND
Image: Camille Blake.
Jasmin Guffond (AUS/DE) is an artist, composer, and musician investigating the intersection of sound, technology and political infrastructures through live performance, recording, and installation. Research based artistic projects provide sonic experiential platforms to encourage listening as a mode of socio-political investigation and explore what embodied sound and listening may contribute to the production of knowledge. Her work has been presented internationally, including opening for CTM Festival in 2020, a commissioned piece for the Groupe de Recherches Musicales (GRM) Acousmonium, premiered at Présences Électronique in Paris in 2022, and an installation for the Zentrum für Kunst und Medien (ZKM) in 2025. She has also released solo albums with the Sonic Pieces (2015, 2017), Karl Records (2018), Editions Mego (2020), OOH-Sounds (2024), and LINE / Boomkat Editions (2025).
For Sonic Cell, Jasmine will present a spatialised, 8-channel interpretation of her work, Muzak for the Encouragement of Unproductivity (2025) — 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 workplace. Sonically addressing notions of efficient, maximum productivity, inherent to capitalist cultures, and their negative effects from labour exploitation to the impacts of over-production on the environment, Muzak for the Encouragement of Unproductivity aims to provide a reflective space in which to consider the benefits personally, globally and environmentally, of slowing down.
Muzak for the Encouragement of Unproductivity (Line Imprint / LINE_165, 2025).
ROOZBEH NAFISI
Image: Jutta Fischel.
Roozbeh Nafisi (b. 1979) is an Iranian-Austrian composer and Santur player whose family immigrated to the United States around 2000. Roozbeh lived in Japan before settling permanently in Austria in the mid-2010s. His work is deeply rooted in personal, political, and cultural experiences of Iran. Roozbeh’s earliest musical memories are bound up with the bombardment of Tehran during the Iran-Iraq War of the 1980s, and with the sense of cultural suffocation in the early Islamic Republic. Artistic and musical freedom in Iran has since found refuge only within the privacy of the home. Despite these repressions, Roozbeh’s mother facilitated an environment for him to learned and play the Santur, a Persian hammered dulcimer — affectionately known to Austro-Iranians as the “Persian hackbrett.”
Ж IGNASHEV
Image: E Ignashev
Ж Ignashev (RU/AT) is a Vienna-based composer and sound artist known for immersive resonant sonic experiences merging musicality with pure acoustic sensations. Exploring surreal, oneiric, and natural world themes, his work spans acousmatic and live-electronic compositions, sound installations, AV-pieces, and theatre/film. Delving into psychoacoustics, asymmetrical irregular rhythms and gestures, microtonal/spectral techniques, and site-specific spatial sound projections, he intertwines sounds from synthesis, vintage test equipment, audio programming, field recordings, custom-built electroacoustic instruments and extended vocal/instrumental techniques.
Works presented at Ars Electronica, Diagonale Graz, Künstlerhaus Wien, ORF/Ö1, Wiener Konzerthaus, Tresor Berlin; featured in films and contributed to the Apple Design Awards-winning Loóna app; supported by the Austrian Ministry for Arts & Culture (BMKÖS), the City of Vienna, SKE, and others. Co-founder of the punctum collective ensemble/concert series and other exploratory art projects, including ACT (A Certain Trio), W~ARP (Wiener ARP2600 Ensemble), The Kickers, Marie Byrd Land. He studied electroacoustic composition, sound art, electronic media at the University of Music and Performing Arts Vienna (mdw), Darmstädter Ferienkurse, has an early background in cello and audio engineering, and holds a degree in psychology focused on music cognition.
Funded by the Federal Ministry for Housing, Arts, Culture, Media and Sport (BMWKMS), The City Council of Vienna Stadt Wien MA7 Kultur, and the District Council of Josefstadt.
