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

What does it sound like when two black holes collide? Stefan Helmreich tunes in to how scientists listen to such cosmic cataclysms

Revisiting his 1989 Wire interview with Geri Allen, Urpeth salutes the composer, jazz pianist and educator

Derek Walmsley vists Ina GRM’s Paris festival to find the venerable institution branching out

To coincide with Kammer Klang's season finale at Cafe Oto, read an exclusive essay by the late Danish electronic music pioneer Else Marie Pade, courtesy of her estate, whose music is featured alongside Henning Christiansen’s at tonight’s show

Musician Anton Nikkilä and filmmaker Mika Taanila talk to Jennifer Lucy Allan about archive recordings by their high school six piece, Swissair

Writer and musician John Pietaro on the “post-modern experimentalist embedded in the jazz tradition” who co-founded Ornette's Prime Time

Ex-Wire staffer Frances Morgan selects her favourite articles from just some of The Wire's themed issues

Andy Hamilton picks five articles from The Wire archive that cast some light on the art of improvisation – pieces which, he says, have helped him “develop a view of improvisation that involves an 'aesthetics of imperfection', in dynamic opposition to composition but, as Rohan de Saram comments, ‘making its own laws’.”