Zemi17 is a musical project that Aaron Taylor Kuffner created in 1997. Zemi in Japanese means cicada. The 17 references the 17-year lifecycle of the periodical cicadas found in the northeast of the United States. This musical project over the last decade and a half has taken on many forms - but has remained routed in the ideals of co-opting the music and culture surrounding electronic dance music in an effort to cross it over to a wider mystery. Zemi17's music is heavily influenced by the sounds of nature and often incorporates both field recordings and algorithms from the insect and bird kingdoms into its production. He performs both as a DJ and Live PA sets in a genre titled Space Haus. His new works have been almost exclusively created for custom built surround sound systems.

As a recording artist Zemi17 began by releasing a series of 17 mix tapes as the musical wing of Cicada Enterprises, and later pressed 7" and 12" records in the late 90s with Europa Disk, Blackkat Sound and Havoc, all of which are sold out. In 2003, he self released a special spool set of 25 original recordings both from studio sessions and live sets created between 1998 and 2003 entitled The New York years. In Indonesia he produced 2 volumes of The Orchestra Jangkrik dan Gamelan Listrik Aneh in 2005 and 2006 respectively, which fused the motif structures of gamelan with cadences of insects. In 2007 he release a minimal techno album entitled The Backdoor to Wisma Langit (Hotel Sky) that was created entirely with gamelan and found samples. Two tracks (Impressions, and Rangda) from Wisma Langit are scheduled to be released in July 2014 on The Bunker NYC label on vinyl and for digital download.

As a performing artist Zemi17 has toured the world several times over from the strangest of underground venues from Siberia to Sofia to San Francisco, as well as Live and DJ sets at Portugal's largest electronic music festival Boom and Ireland's largest music festival Electric Picnic.

In addition to Zemi17, Kuffner is the principle artist behind the Gamelatron Project (gamelatron.com), creating sound producing kinetic sculpture featuring instruments from Balinese and Javanese gamelan orchestras retrofitted with robotic mallets. He also performs on electronic wind instruments with Dok Gregory and Peter Principle as the trio called Zero Gravity Thinkers (zgt.me).