Change / Future Present
Biblo / Jasmine Guffond

Amongst its other qualities, music is distinguished by its availability to constant listening and re-listening. It is therefore revealing to listen to these two unreleased albums recorded in 2014 by Istanbul-based artist Biblo (Pinar Üzeltüzenci) and Berlin/Sydney-based Jasmine Guffond.

What does it mean for an artist to revisit work recorded earlier, but unreleased? Do such recordings have a ‘use-by’ date? Does rediscovering an older work provoke entirely new possibilities? It could be like re-reading a favourite book five, ten or even twenty years on, as a revelation. All of a sudden what we thought we remembered, what informed our impression of a piece, changes. It changes because memory is in fact unstable, and our current circumstances and attitudes, although influenced by past knowledge and experiences, alter according to our present circumstances and states of mind.

Biblo’s 'Change' and Guffond’s 'Future Present' are available here for the first time. Initially created for the c.sides label, as a follow up to Biblo’s album Absence, the musical attitudes behind each are distinct though highly sympathetic to one another.

Biblo begins Change with an ominously brooding track ‘Bio’ pervaded by synthetic horns and the percussive effects of muted cymbal crashes, interspersed with stuttering electronics. The overall impression is organic, like a storm or an oncoming inundation, something inescapably immersive approaching from the horizon like a plague. By comparison, the title track ‘Change’ is contemplative and sparse, more acoustic but no less challenging. An elegy sung from within a small empty room. The combined effect of Biblo’s release, is insistently spatial. Yet the vast empty spaces it conjures are counter-posed with much closer, more intimate textual effects. It is this alternation between interiority and expansiveness that is perhaps a perfect encapsulation of the perennial war between individual desire and the socio-political events that shape the greater world.

More durational, the tracks of Jasmine Guffond’s Future Present are distinct, but ‘organic’ and inherently spatial like Biblo’s. ‘Somnambulant (Asleep Variation)’ layers elongated synthetic tones, panning across left and right channels. The track retains its pervasive electro-synthetic sound, but it is as though the vaguely machinic had been transformed into something transcendent, warm, almost ancient. It is a deeply contemplative piece that simultaneously forces the listener to consider the fundamental relationship between the acoustic and electronic. And between Guffond’s previous folk-inspired outings as Jasmina Maschina and her more recent, harder, more angular, more experimental electronic offerings like Yellow Bell (2015) and Traced (2017).

Ultimately, Biblo’s Change and Guffond’s Future Present represent a particularly illuminating pairing. Both reflect dark times that are subjective and global. The tracks of each artist, in different and varied ways, seem to concur with Franco ‘Biffo’ Berardi’s 2015 prognosis that ‘the overall aesthetic semiosis of our time is tracing a landscape of imminent darkness: social de-evolution, physical decay and neuro-totalitarianism‘. However, the unarguable melodic aspect inflecting Biblo and Guffond’s albums implies hope. Not the type of hope resuscitated with vacuous regularity to generically excuse all manner of contemporary atrocities, but something more akin to a paradoxical Duchampian hope; the hope that persists because… what else can we do? Especially in dark times.

Alex Gawronski 2018