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The Mire

Off The Page: A further digression (in the form a competition) #2

Everyone attending this weekend's Off The Page festival will get a free copy of a special souvenir booklet that has been produced in a one-time-only hand-made edition of just 200 copies. For the booklet, all the festival’s speakers, delegates, guests, etc were asked to select a favourite piece of writing or thinking on sound or music. The resulting selections range from the philosophical musings of Ernst Bloch to a poem by Philip Larkin, David Bowie prognosticating on the future economy of music to Ian Penman riffing on Bryan Ferry, Lester Bangs hymning Van Morrison to Alex Ward analysing Derek Bailey. The booklet in which all these and more are now reproduced has been designed and assembled by The Wire 's art director Ben Weaver. We are holding back five copies of this one off document in order to offer them as prizes in a competition, just in case you want one (and believe me, you...

The Portal

Portal 07/02/2011

February 2011

Explorative audio lab and sound design studio, with examples of their experiments with contact mics and circuit bending alongside their commercial work.

The Mire

The Grime Historian

I've been alarmed recently to see how Grime's history is fading away, at least in the digital domain. Aficionados are probably familiar with how some of the most important tracks never even got a release. "Headquarters" by Essentials, the original version of their track "State Your Name", is a paradigm case, a posse cut Grime track where each MC would state their name and location before spitting 16 bars of lyrics – when time came to release the track commercially, the track's big name MCs such as Kano and Crazy Titch mysteriously disappeared. Perhaps it was contractual obligations, but either way, commercial releases seemed just an echo of the real music. In retrospect it's easy to see why - some tracks were just CD-Rs sent to DJs to play on air, or in the case of Essentials, thrown into the crowd at shows. This stuff circulated quick, but old tracks would get left on old harddrives,...

The Mire

Tape Crackers

I'll be doing a Q&A with film maker Rollo Jackson and pirate radio tape hoarder Michael Finch at the screening of Jackson's film Tape Crackers at London’s ICA tomorrow. The doc is an oral history of Jungle, told through Finch’s tapes which he recorded while growing up in Islington, North London, but it's also an untold (or more accurately unheard) history of UK underground music of the last 10 years – Jungle, Garage and Grime are all knitted into the story through the MCs and DJs who manned the decks and mics. Movers of the underground today such as Riko Dan and B Live are on some of the tapes played in the film. The D90s might be dusty but this music still sounds ultra-crisp. Warning, may contain: late days of Dream FM, middle days of Kool FM/MC Ruff and DJ Uproar on Dream FM/MC Fize and DJ Swiftly/Riko Dan on Pressure FM/Evil...

Interview

Local Hero

January 2011

The unedited transcript of Biba Kopf's interview with Robert Wyatt. A feature based on this interview appeared in issue #163 of The Wire

The Mire

RIP Rolf Julius

[caption id="" align="alignnone" width="460" caption="photo by Jens Schumann"] [/caption] The artist Rolf Julius has died. According to the label Western Vinyl, "Julius had a chronic illness, which we were aware of, but his sudden passing on Friday 21 January was unexpected." Julius was born in Germany in 1939 and studied fine art in Bremen. In the mid 1970s he began using sound alongside his visual practice. Later he moved to Berlin and became an important figure in that city's budding sound art scene, participating in Für Augen Und Ohren (1980), one of Europe's first major sound art exhibitions. Over the course of a 30 year career Julius's performances and low-volume, minimal sonic sculptures and installations developed an approach highly influential on a younger generation of sound artists.

The Portal

Portal 14/01/2011

January 2011

A transcript of an interview with Ornette Coleman by the French philosopher Jacques Derrida...

Essay

Quiet storms: Toshiya Tsunoda

January 2011

Read an extended version of Will Montgomery's Cross Platform article on Japanese sound artist Toshiya Tsunoda, master of the art of field recording.

The Portal

Portal 12/01/2010

January 2011

The comprehensive survey also includes sections focusing on historical sounds of the city, its wildlife, and travels further afield up the Thames estuary to the Hoo Peninsula in Kent.

The Portal

Andrew Nosnitsky's Portal

December 2010

Try and follow whatever bits and pieces of Lil B's sprawling mindspray actually proves intelligible, be that "rare and secrete [sic]" links to new songs or cat care tips.

The Portal

Joseph Stannard's Horror Portal

December 2010

In addition to its atmosphere of ‘backwoods horror’ BMT’s recent album Black Goat Of The Woods (Aurora Borealis) exudes an air of cosmic menace which can be traced back to the Weird Fiction of Arthur Machen and HP Lovecraft, conjecturing an aesthetic located on the membranous threshold between Shub Niggurath and Gunnar Hansen.

The Portal

Portal 15/12/2010

December 2010

Lukatoyboy is Luka Ivanovic, who was featured in Global Ear: Budapest & Pécs in The Wire 322

The Mire

50 Records of the Year on air

The German radio show Borderline: Musik Für Grenzgänger (which seems to roughly translate as 'Music For Border-crossers') will once again be playlisting selections from our 50 Records of the Year chart in a series of dedicated shows to be broadcast over the Christmas and New Year period. The shows will be broadcast between 5-6pm (WET) on five consecutive Fridays beginning on 17 December. If you live in Northesse, Germany you can tune in on 105.8FM. Otherwise, the shows are streamed live at http://www.borderline-extra.de , where you will also find full details of all the broadcast dates and times.