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The Mire

Otomo Yoshihide & FEN: Reader ticket offer

Readers of The Wire can get a special ticket offer from London's Cafe Oto for their forthcoming two day residency with Otomo Yoshihide and friends, 4 - 5 February. FEN, or Far East Network, is a collaboration between Otomo Yoshihide, Yan Jun, Yuen Chee Wai and Ryu Hankil; well known figures in the experimental music scenes of their respective home cities Tokyo, Beijing, Singapore and Seoul. This will be their first UK performance together. Regularly, tickets are £10 in advance and £12 on the door with a £18 two day pass also available. Readers of The Wire get a special price of £8 per night. To buy tickets click on the below links: Day one, 4 February, 8pm Day two, 5 February, 8pm Check out Cafe Oto's website for more information on FEN and the artists.

The Mire

The Wire At CTM

The Wire will be in active attendance at the Club Transmediale festival in Berlin in February. On 3 February Tony Herrington will be moderating a panel on Interface and Instrument Design: How Technology Affects Music featuring Takuro Mizuta Lippit, Robert Henke, Yutaka Makino and Christopher Salter. The panel is at 19:00 at the HBC venue. On 4 February, Tony Herrington and Biba Kopf will host the magazine's weekly show on Resonance FM live from the festival. Finally, on 5 February The Wire Sound System will play a late night listening set at the WMF Lounge between 23:00-03:00. In the meantime, the festival has released the CTM.10 Audio Compilation as a free download. The compilation features tracks by Hildur Gudnadottir, Aoki Takamasa, Guido Möbius, Glass Candy, Etienne Jaumet and Scuba, among others, plus a trailer for the film Making CONTAKT about Richie Hawtin's CONTAKT project.

The Mire

Destroy All Monsters: Hungry For Death

Ann Arbour [Arbor] , Michigan's Destroy All Monsters collective are having a show of their posters, flyers, photographs, blueprints, drawings, banners, magazines, records, and various other ephemera culled from their archive and exhibited at London's Space gallery 22 January - 20 February. Accompanying the exhibition will be Freek Summit, a gathering and discussion featuring poet and former MC5 man John Sinclair, The Wire 's own Savage Pencil, DAM member Cary Loren and other guests on 23 January. Places are limited so contact Paul Pieroni: paul.spacestudios.org.uk to book.

The Mire

Weird Tales For Winter

Jonny Mugwump of Resonance FM's excellent Exotic Pylo n show emails with news of an intriguing radio event happening towards the end of the month, something between a hauntological radio play and A Book At Bedtime . Looks well worth checking out. Each is broadcast at midnight (so you might wanna double check those dates nearer the time to avoid confusion). Here's what he says: I've curated 8 pieces of weird fiction with sonic backdrops to be broadcast on Resonance 104.4fm from the 25th January to the 1st February that is something of a hauntological dream project. Do tune in as the pieces are absolutely extraordinary and have been recorded specifically for the project and have never been heard before There is a webpage which is in the process of becoming a fully blown site here 25/01/10 – Moon Wiring Club- Minuke by Nigel Kneale 26/01/10 – West Norwood Cassette Library and Matthew de...

The Mire

I've started to so I'll finish

UK readers may be interested to know that Stewart Lee, comedian, improv fan and sometime contributor to The Wire , was on the BBC's Celebrity Mastermind the other day, answering questions on Derek Bailey. You can still view the programme (in the UK at least) on the BBC's iplayer service. .

The Mire

The Ex & Brass Unbound on camera

Check out footage of the Ex's unreleased track "Double Order" put together as a teaser for their UK tour, 29 January – 6 February. http://vimeo.com/moogaloop.swf?clip_id=8060711&server=vimeo.com&show_title=0&show_byline=0&show_portrait=0&color=ffffff&fullscreen=1 Tour supported by The Wire and produced by Qu Junktions featuring the veteran Dutch group, combining their precision-honed punk with the brass weight of Mats Gustafsson, Roy Paci, Ken Vandermark and Wolter Wierbos. Video by Emma Fischer. Full tour info here .

Book Extract

Cathi Unsworth: Dirty Old Town

December 2009

Read an exclusive extract from The Not Knowing (Serpent's Tail 2005), Cathi Unsworth's debut novel, in which she evokes Gallon Drunk's Camden as referred to in her Epiphany

The Mire

Into The Vortex on Resonance FM

Edited highlights of The Wire 's Into The Vortex festival will be broadcast on Resonance FM between 10pm-1am GMT on 3 January 2010. The festival took place last October at East London's Vortex venue and featured live sets by Richard Youngs & Heather Leigh, Astral Social Club, Alexander Tucker, Alasdair Roberts & Gordon Ferries, Thomas Ankersmit, Broadcast, The Caretaker, The One Ensemble and The Band Of Holy Joy.

The Mire

Netmage

Bologna's Netmage festival has posted various film clips online of works by artists appearing at this year's event, including Cluster & Canedicoda , Carlos Casas , Rachida Ziani & Dewi de Vree and André Goncalves . They are worth a look, if yr interested in tracking current trends in AV culture, electronic arts, gallery films, etc.

The Mire

The Wire Review

Subtitled The Most Powerful Review Of The Most Powerful Magazine In Experimental Music , The Wire Review blog doesn't quite do what it says on the tin. Thankfully, what it does do is much funnier and more entertaining than that. We feel unable to comment further, other than noting that we are, of course, flattered once again by such close attention, and urging you to check it out...

The Mire

Black Metal Theory

A 6 hour Black Metal theory symposium, called "Hideous Gnosis: A gathering dedicated to the mutual blackening of metal and theory", happened 12 December in Brooklyn. Ben Ratliff, who wrote a Primer article on Tropicalia for us – recently reprinted in The Wire Primers book (Verso) – has this summary in New York Times. Meanwhile, Dominic Fox's Cold World, The Aesthetics Of Dejection and The Politics Of Militant Dysphoria, examining, among other things the music of Burzum and Xasthur, has just been released on Zero Books. Burzum's first new release in 11 years will be released in March 2010, called Belus. Varg "The Count" Vikernes, the group's leader, was released from Norwegian jail this summer after serving 16 years for murder. He now lives in rural Telemark, Norway.