You read correctly: the sage Mr Bell buffs his crystal ball (well, his laptop screen), peers into the fogs of 2015 and sees double

The second stop in Derek Walmsley's journey through the jazz that imagined liberation through distant places and spaces, from Africa and the Far East to the cosmos.

Helen Morris braves encroaching tides and shifting sands to attend the Fanø Free Folk Festival, and asks what – or who – “experimental folk” might be?

Clive Bell on plunging one's head into a brazier of burning coals, playing for the angels and the legacy of Ostad Elahi, reclusive tanbour master

Biba Kopf and Keiko Yoshida travelled to Hokkaido for The Wire 370's Global Ear feature, reporting back on the music of northern Japan’s indigenous Ainu people

Philip Clark on JS Bach, Jimmy Lyons's ear for architecture and the poetic metaphor of the line

Yan Jun blows up knock-off speakers, bids Mother Nature farewell and embraces life and death in The Machine era

Wayne Marshall, writer of the Dutch bubbling essay in The Wire 370's Freedom Principle feature, shares online links to the hyperkinetic dancehall variant's stalwarts and their sonic collages

From newly independent nations of Africa to locations in the Far East and remote cosmos, jazz from the mid-1950s onwards imagined liberation through distant places and spaces. In a new series, Derek Walmsley journeys through the sketches of these new worlds. First call: Lee Morgan's "Search For The New Land"

Clive Bell muses on the biwa as vehicle for Japanese epic, and finds parallels in Irish folk ballads and beyond

The guitarist and songwriter looks at solo artists in their most intimate creative moments.

Philip Clark on Deutsche Grammophon's 1970s forays into free improvisation, and the impact of DG's current boss, former A&R pop picker Max Hole

Damon Krukowski on musicians who drop their mother tongue and sing in English – and why it's great to sing in Welsh

Read a short extract from Phil England's four hour interview with Penny Rimbaud, on the suspicious death of underground figure Wally Hope, the Stonehenge Free festivals and the birth of Crass

Ahead of his appearance at our Off The Page literary festival for sound and music in Bristol on 26 September, read an extract from Marcus O'Dair's biography, tracing Wyatt's teenage years through to the birth of his first son

Q: What album was so important that ten million copies of it needed to be pressed at once? A: Songs Of The Humpback Whale. Musician and writer David Rothenberg wonders at the complex beauty of whale song

Kevin Martin (aka The Bug) shares his favourite online hubs to induce modular synth bliss. His latest album Angels & Devils was reviewed in The Wire 366.

Philip Brophy listens in to the occultic meanderings of Ben Rivers and Ben Russell's experimental film and finds the secret power of audiovision.

"Some recordists are like hoarders, bringing home whatever they find outside with little discrimination as to what's worth preserving and what’s not." Derek Walmsley sorts through The Wire's post bag in search of the person behind the mic.

Emily Bick feels the qualitative in the different approaches improvisors and composers take to the sonification of data sets