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

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?

"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

"They return transformed into insects, examples of voices with the power to sever the link with their human bodies and appetites".

Writer Matthew Collin presents a selection of links based around his new book Pop Grenade: From Public Enemy To Pussy Riot: Dispatches From Musical Frontlines

"This foreigner has taken us to a beautiful place but he hasn’t bought us lunch yet". Clive Bell looks at the endangered music of southeast Asian hilltribes and John Moore's Indigenius label

Ian Maleney visits a new interactive sound installation in Dublin, with contributions by David Blamey, FM3, Mattin, Sarah Pierce, Steve Roden, Wolfgang Voigt, Mark Peter Wright, Miki Yui and others

"As Big As The Sky is essentially a 21st century comedy of errors, an ideal genre to portray such a grotesque reality." Marinus de Ruiter attends a premiere of an opera eight years in the making