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

Read an essay by Stewart Smith on the cosmic jazz connection of 2015, as featured in The Wire 383

Frances Morgan ponders communication, movement and technology as Mark Fell presents Recursive Frame Analysis

West Coast funk boss XL Middleton gives Alexander Speetzen a guided tour of G-funk and Californian hiphop

John Foxx explains the reasoning behind his chart selection in The Wire 381

Wagakki Band deploy traditional Japanese instruments at dazzling speed to stay ahead of the future, says Clive Bell

If you can’t mess with time don’t do grime, writes Wire Editor Derek Walmsley in Seismographic Sound: Visions Of A New World, a book recently published by Norient