Muzak was once the polite chloroform of capitalism - slipped into the bloodstream of offices, factories, and shopping malls to keep you docile while your hours and willpower were siphoned away. It was the aural equivalent of a corporate smile: fixed, bloodless, and slightly menacing. Jasmine Guffond takes that same form, drags it to an Amazon packing station, and lets it marinate in the industrial reverb until the shine dulls and the hypnotic beat slows to a crawl.

Commissioned for the 2024 Dystopia Sound Art Biennial - and performed in proximity to one of Bezos’ techno-feudal fortresses - this piece is less a soundtrack for “getting things done” and more a sonic blueprint for the slow sabotage of the productivity cult. Guffond’s horns, clarinets, and low brass drift through a convolution reverb modelled on an actual Amazon warehouse, but instead of urging your next step, they seem to erase the concept of “next” altogether.

Gawronski’s accompanying essay sharpens the context: in an age of rentier capitalism and “bullshit jobs” (Graeber’s term, not a hyperbolic flourish), most “productive” work is theatre - tasks performed for no tangible societal good, sustained largely to keep people too busy to ask difficult questions. In such a world, Muzak’s original function - calming the worker to increase throughput - mutates into Spotify mood playlists, algorithmic soundtracking for every human activity, ensuring the market has a soft grip on your waking hours and, increasingly, your private ones.

Guffond flips this script. Her so-called muzak is too slow for retail, too melancholic for corporate morale. It breathes, it slumps, it admits discord into its bloodstream. It’s ambient music that’s almost anti-ambient: it refuses to dissolve entirely into the background, instead creating subtle fractures in the flow, moments of quiet disobedience.

Conceptually, it’s the perfect double-agent. To the untrained ear, it could still be background music - but it’s background music for the backgrounding of work itself. It’s the hum of a shiftless day, the imagined sound of a warehouse emptied not by automation but by collective decision.

If old muzak whispered keep working, Guffond’s piece murmurs you could stop now. In doing so, it reframes “unproductivity” not as laziness, but as an act of political and existential hygiene - clearing space for the kind of thought and action that the productivity machine cannot measure, monetize, or control.

Some albums accompany your tasks; this one quietly dares you to abandon them.