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The Portal

ICES 72 and Harvey Matusow Portal

January 2012

Find out more about Harvey Matusow, American ex-Communist and McCarthy collaborator-turned-avant garde impresario. Matusow promoted the International Carnival of Experimental Sound (ICES) at London's Roundhouse in 1972. ICES 72 – which involved AMM, John Cage, Cornelius Cardew, Annea Lockwood, Steve Beresford, Lol Coxhill, David Bedford, Charlotte Moorman, Penny Rimbaud and many more – is featured in an article by Julian Cowley in The Wire 336.

The Mire

Lou Reed & Metallica: Why all the #WTF?

Sitting conspicuously at #9 in our 2011 Releases of the Year chart was Lou Reed and Metallica's Lulu , one of the most hated albums of the year. Reactions to its charting have ranged from noisy retching to charges of conspiracy. What's struck me, looking after The Wire 's various digital channels, is the nature of these reactions - it's not the fact that hardly anyone likes Lulu that's unnerving, but that the response has been so over the top. A few readers were bemused by the fact that James Ferraro's Far Side Virtual was our album of the year, but the reaction was rather more considered to say the least. As a result of Lulu 's Top 10 placing, we have been accused of constructing the chart purely as a hyper-ironic statement, received an email (on Christmas day) that referred to it as a "piece of shit", and...

Essay

Collateral Damage: Terre Thaemlitz

January 2012

Don’t confuse online culture with digital culture, argues Terre Thaemlitz, whose latest project pushes the MP3 format to its absolute limits.

Essay

Collateral Damage: Terre Thaemlitz

January 2012

Don’t confuse online culture with digital culture, argues Terre Thaemlitz, whose latest project pushes the MP3 format to its absolute limits.

The Portal

Linder's Portal

January 2012

Linder, author of The Wire 336 Epiphanies article on the work of artist Barbara Hepworth, shares her top picks of the web.

The Portal

Claudia Molitor's Portal

December 2011

Read about Claudia Molitor's choice picks of the web. The London based German composer is featured in The Wire 335 in an article by Philip Clark.

The Mire

Suffering through suffrage: Compiling The Wire's Rewind charts

Consensus is mendacious. A composite of multiple, often conflicting individual realities, consensual reality projects an image that doesn’t exist. Which is another way of saying that all democratic processes are predicated on the paradox that they will produce a result that few of its individual participants will recognise, in terms of it being an accurate reflection of their own reality, but which most will agree to collectively believe in, or at the very least, to live with(in) its fabricated image. And with that thought I commend to you The Wire ’s Top 50 Releases of the Year for 2011, which arrives as a consequence of a democratic process in which an electorate made up of the magazine’s staff and contributors were franchised to vote for their top ten individual releases of the year across all known forms of sound and music activity, votes which were then collated into the chart that is enshrined in the annual Rewind feature...

Essay

Collateral Damage: James Kirby

December 2011

Bulk giveaways of music online make it impossible for listeners to make any sense of an artist’s work, argues James Kirby

Essay

Collateral Damage: James Kirby

December 2011

Bulk giveaways of music online make it impossible for listeners to make any sense of an artist’s work, argues James Kirby

The Portal

Public Information Portal

December 2011

Read about the Public Information label's top picks of the web. The label, which focuses on archival releases and the "pre-digital soundworld" is featured in The Wire 334 in an article by Dan Barrow. Their next release is an anthology of work by the inventor and amateur electronic musician Fred Judd.

The Mire

Danielle De Picciotto: Rock and a hard place

It might be a city built on sand but going underground in Berlin lands you between a rock and a hard place: on one side, the raw, existential rock-soul-noise drummed up by Einstürzende Neubauten and any number of unstable units permed from the small pool of artists, chancers and nay sayers they started out with in early 1980s West Berlin; on the other, the precisely calibrated monochrome Techno ricocheting off reinforced concrete walls in subterranean bunkers and abandoned industrial plants in the lawless grey zones opened up in the Eastern sector when the Berlin Wall was breached and brought down in 1989-1990. Of course, much else has happened before and after and around these two black hole energy fields in the 30 years since Einstürzende Neubauten launched in 1980, especially after the Wall came down and made Berlin the default destination for outsider types from all over the world, among them former DDR artists...

The Portal

Grouper Portal

November 2011

Grouper is the subject of a feature by Nick Richardson in The Wire 334. A I A: Dream Loss/Alien Observer is out now, self released by Harris and available here.

Essay

Collateral Damage: Marcus Boon

November 2011

The culture of copying is intrinsic to all music, argues Marcus Boon. So get over it – copyright buccaneers are roadtesting creative alternatives to obsolete capitalist models.

Essay

Collateral Damage: Marcus Boon

November 2011

The culture of copying is intrinsic to all music, argues Marcus Boon. So get over it – copyright buccaneers are roadtesting creative alternatives to obsolete capitalist models.

The Portal

Paul Gilroy Portal

October 2011

Paul Gilroy's Epiphanies article on two 1970 performances from The Voices Of East Harlem choir at the Isle Of Wight Festival and Albert Hall is featured in The Wire 333. Gilroy's latest book is Darker Than Blue: On The Moral Economies Of Black Atlantic Culture (Harvard University Press). On the cusp of the 1990s Gilroy wrote about jazz-funk and fusion for The Wire, in reviews and a regular column called New Fusion.