Join Derek Walmsley on his journey through the jazz that imagined liberation through distant places and spaces, from Africa and the Far East to the cosmos.

Derek Walmsley picks six columns from our archives by Kodwo Eshun in which the future Turner Prize nominee forged a new style of writing about dance music and club culture

Clive Bell ponders the fragmented London music audience

Derek Walmsley journeys through the jazz that imagined liberation through distant places and spaces

Biba Kopf guides us through some of his Round Up The Usual Suspects columns from the 1980s, in which industrial culture's most wanted were tagged and bagged

Richard Thomas on minted petit-bourgeois pugilists, the end of year chart and the class politics of Black Friday

"The marketing narratives laid down by the likes of Red Bull and similar have helped beckon forth an enveloping haze of meaningless positivity, creating a world that’s happy yet contentless, adult but toothless." Nathan Budzinski assumes the lotus position, breathes deeply and becomes mindful of Eternal Bliss™

Films on experimental music need to nuance the relationship between sound and image in order to communicate emotion and provide a true cinematic rendering of their subjects, says Stewart Morgan

Yan Jun gets more questions than answers when he asks himself what happened in 2014

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.