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
The gift economy enabled by netlabels and free online music platforms can come at great cost to artists like Ergo Phizmiz, who gave up his name to regain his freedom. By DW Robertson
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
The fourth of our series of posts shining a light into the darker recesses of The Wire's online archive of back issues. Derek Walmsley recommends Edwin Pouncey's article from December 2006 on the late saxophonist Steve Mackay.
Daisy Hyde speaks with the Baltimore based producer trying to deconstruct dance music to get the feel-good out – and bring in a new kind of fun
Richard Thomas checks out – but not into – London's boutique Ace Hotel Shoreditch and its Paul Smith-curated, Moog supported experimental music residency series, where he finds Keiji Haino snoozing, chats Polari with cultural engineers while sipping on a Bibi Spritz and more. But was it all a dream? Or a nightmare?
Under pressure from artists, agents, online PR and internet trolls, and inundated with new music, festival organisers must stay true to their principles and curate events that people can believe in, says Mat Schulz
"A dizzying wealth of details of a peripatetic life in art." Daniel Spicer reports back from the first major museum retrospective of Chilean artist, writer, director and counter cultural magus Alejandro Jodorowsky
Stevphen Shukaitis hears the continuing resonance of Joe McPhee’s Nation Time, his 1971 free jazz album rooted in the US black cultural nationalist movement of the 1960s and 70s, and McPhee's later interest in the ideas of management theorist Edward de Bono