First published in 1977, Val Wilmer’s As Serious As Your Life: Black Music And The Free Jazz Revolution, 1957–1977 will be reprinted by Serpent's Tail on 1 March

A Q&A with Elaine Mitchener about her performance piece Sweet Tooth – a visceral, overwhelming indictment of the role sugar and the slave trade played in building the British Empire

The Wire's Deputy Editor talks to the artist about freedom, fragility and his new EP Heute Will Ich Frei Sein

To celebrate the life and work of Mark E Smith, who died on 24 January 2018, we present a selection of articles on the Fall frontman and his group drawn from The Wire’s online archive

Filippo Cicciù speaks to Turkish psychedelic explorers Baba Zula, who're playing in London at the end of January

Read an extract from Matthew Collin's new book Rave On: Global Adventures In Electronic Dance Music, as reviewed by Sophia Ignatidou in the February issue of The Wire

Tony Bevan recalls his years playing – and playing around – with the late free jazz drummer

Algoraves, homemade instruments, mechanical art and horned helmets: AlgoMech celebrates unmaking and experiments with music and technology

The epic scale and contrived angles of many archival box sets threaten to distort the narrative of the music itself

“His smile said: do the unthinkable, the unpredictable. Bring the world with you to a place of peaceful coexistence that celebrates the diversity of ideas and experiences," writes a former president of the AACM

In advance of a major Hyperdub compilation Diggin' In The Carts: A Collection Of Pioneering Japanese Video Game Music, Sara Drake talks to co-compiler Nick Dwyer about a project that sets to give credit where credit's due

“Is it possible we’ve come full circle?” asks Clive Bell, as he observes more than a century of revolutions in recording technology, from Thomas Edison's tinfoil phonograph to pink vinyl in Sainsburys

“His equally radical presence is often missed. This is a mistake.”

Alto saxophonist Seymour Wright pays homage to the lessons learned from the man who helped set the pace of what was to come

Following the recent rework of the legendary Black Ark album Super Ape, David Katz speaks to Lee ‘Scratch’ Perry and Emch Subatomic about how 40 years on, the album holds weight with the youth of today

William Hogan and David Titlow discuss the golden age of CB radio and their new book Eyeball Cards: The Art Of British CB Radio Culture with Deputy Editor Emily Bick

Negative reviews have been sidelined in an era of commercial pressures and microscenes that celebrate themselves, but criticism is sometimes the only way to reflect the full complexity of music. By Britt Brown

Clive Bell takes a look the unlikely musical partnership found in birdsong contests across the globe

As SoundCloud is under threat, technologist Mat Dryhurst explains the potential for a blockchain-based tokenisation system to put the platform in the control of the musicians who use it

Philip Clark delves into the sounds of the Study Room and London's V&A museum to see how the recording space itself can “speak as eloquently as the musical notes”

Held in a cemetery in Sheffield, this first edition featured Nandini Muthuswamy, Oren Ambarchi, Clare Salaman and others. The Wire editor checks out the event's all-night performance schedule