The songs Prince made under a female alias are the pinnacle of his career, says Derek Walmsley

DJ and producer Kirk Degiorgio talks with Detroit’s finest to uncover the inspirational influence of Prince on techno

Cartoonist Hazel Newlevant discusses Wendy & Lisa’s contribution to Prince’s legacy

Alan Licht surveys the late composer and artist Tony Conrad’s film work, which ranged from structuralist classics to public access TV

Hanging loose with Tony Conrad, composer Mario Diaz de Leon learns that tuning is a political issue

Jaan Altosaar and Ethan Benjamin explain their one-stop, browser-based app that creates sample clusters from your MP3 or SoundCloud files. Interview by Emily Bick

To accompany Jordan Ferguson's J Dilla Primer in The Wire 386, contemporaries and disciples of the revered producer and rapper select their favourite Dilla productions

“I know when I’m capturing the raag and when I’m not,” declares Sangi Rangi website founder and sarangi archivist Nicolas Magriel, talking up the instrument considered the black sheep of India's musical heritage. By Clive Bell.

New York Times music critic tells Emily Bick how to relate to sound in an era of streaming platforms and downloads

To accompany his essay about radical music for church organs in The Wire 385, Philip Clark presents a user's guide to the most avant garde of organ players

Read The Wire contributor Nathan Budzinski's report on last year's Dark Ecology trip, a five day cultural tour put on by Amsterdam's Sonic Acts festival.

Read an excerpt from David Keenan's Furfur: Sideways Into England's Hidden Reverse, an additional, limited edition publication accompanying the new hardback edition of England's Hidden Reverse.

Tony Allen talks about his and Fela Kuti’s early group Koola Lobitos, four-limbed drumming, the necessity of hi-hats to Afrobeat, his favourite jazz drummers, and how Black Panther Sandra Isidore politicised Fela. Interview by Francis Gooding, February 2016

The all singing, all action drummer formerly of This Heat celebrates other percussionists who take to the mic

Member of the Swedish drone rock explorers discusses Anthology’s forthcoming retrospective of 1970s live recordings

Cheap recording technology and freely accessible distribution platforms threaten to make the record label redundant. But there are still ways for labels to survive and thrive, says Britt Brown

Joseph Stannard offers a personal reflection on David Bowie's later career from Tin Machine to Blackstar

Emily Bick perceives the collapse of possibilities in the wake of Bowie's death

Has the trend towards cautious messaging drained our culture of art that confronts us with the brutal reality of the choices we face? asks Phil England