When I became a regular contributor to The Wire in 2017, I also got a digital subscription, both to be able to read the magazine before it physically arrives in the US and in order to access the archive of the magazine’s back issues. While I regularly consult these archives to see what has been written in the past about the artists I am writing about, I also love to flip through the (virtual) pages and enjoy them for their own sake—the photography, the graphic design, and seeing how other writers approach interviewing artists and describing sounds. I especially value interviews with artists who are no longer living or who have otherwise transformed in ways that could not be anticipated at the time. The following list is in no way comprehensive, but here are ten pieces of writing from The Wire archives that capture particularly pivotal moments in the lives of the artists they feature.

Along came Ra: Graham Lock interviews Sun Ra, The Wire 6 (Spring 1984) and The mysteries of Mr Ra: Graham Lock interviews Sun Ra, The Wire 78 (August 1990)

The Wire’s first decade as a magazine happened to overlap with the final decade of Sun Ra’s tenure on this mortal plane. During this time The Wire ran two cover features on the great cosmic bandleader: in the Spring 1984 issue (The Wire 6) and in the August 1990 issue (The Wire 78). Both pieces were written by Graham Lock, who would go on to write a book examining the utopian currents in Sun Ra’s music. It’s interesting to compare these two interviews as a means to chart not only Lock’s evolution as a writer, but also how that shift reflects the magazine’s editorial voice during its formative first decade. The first time Lock speaks with Sun Ra, his tone toggles between veneration and amusement. Six years later, he’s asking in-depth questions about Sun Ra’s cosmology, while aiming to contextualize Ra’s interest in both outer space and ancient Egypt within broader mid-century cultural currents. In this latter interview, Lock seems aware that he is not just writing for a contemporary audience, but also for the future, collecting information as it flows from the elderly master into a kind of time capsule for posterity.

The idea of north: Louise Gray on Björk, The Wire 177 (November 1998)

Another artist to receive multiple cover features early on is Björk, and once again, they are interesting to compare. The first, written by Avril Mair, appeared in 1993 (The Wire 114), just after the release of Debut. It emphasises the feminist import of Björk going solo during what Mair describes as a watershed year for women artists in indie pop. The second was written by Louise Gray, and appeared in November 1998 (The Wire 177), a year after the release of Homogenic. By this point, there is no need to try to place Björk in conversation with Riot grrrl or PJ Harvey in order to acknowledge her contributions to the field. Instead, she is given free rein to talk about what appeals to her about the music she loves best, whether it’s Boney M or Stockhausen: “It's a surrender to nature, I guess. It's just a place where everything falls into place, where logic doesn't get in the way.”

Enduring love: Edwin Pouncey interviews Alice Coltrane, The Wire 218 (April 2002)

Edwin Pouncey’s 2002 interview with Alice Coltrane is another example of writing for posterity. For this feature, the author visits Coltrane in her California home, which he describes as a “sacred space” filled with musical instruments, recording equipment, and artefacts commemorating her late husband’s career. The remainder of the article provides a compelling primer to the life and work of Alice Coltrane, from her musical beginnings in Detroit to her spiritual journey, which culminated in her pan-religionist vision of Universal Consciousness as a fundamentally sonic phenomenon.

Phew and far between: Biba Kopf interviews Phew, The Wire 234 (2003)

The Wire 234 might have been the first issue of The Wire I ever read, because I was a fan of some of the bands featured in David Keenan’s New Weird America cover story. Almost 20 years later, I found myself revisiting this issue via the digital archive to consult Biba Kopf’s feature on Japanese punk legend Phew. I had been commissioned to interview Phew for a cover feature (The Wire 460), and I wanted to avoid retreading the same ground that had already been covered. Instead, what I found were some fascinating threads I wanted to help extend into the future, particularly regarding Phew’s thoughts on the relationship (or distance) between sound and meaning in different languages.

Potion of sound: Joseph Stannard interviews Broadcast, The Wire 308 (October 2009)

Joseph Stannard’s 2009 interview with Trish Keenan and James Cargill has a charming aura of familiarity, as the three of them bond over shared cultural touchstones in the realm of British sci-fi and psychedelia. With the untimely death of Trish Keenan a little over a year later, this warm conversation would come to feel heartbreakingly bittersweet, while Keenan’s musings on the evocation of memory in the music of Broadcast feel even more portentous and prophetic: “When you go back to a previous musical time, you’re trying to recall a memory that never happened to you, that is not stored, so it would make sense that you hear a fuzzy, dissolving sense of time and place. When you make music in backwards time travel, it’s a shadowy or faint impression, as though you’re looking back through two clouded lenses. One is the time travel portal, the other is a false recollection process”.

She has the technology: Frances Morgan interviews Laurie Spiegel, The Wire 344 (October 2012)

Laurie Spiegel has helped to shape the way we think about computer music, building her own software to achieve a surprising degree of fluidity. In her 2012 interview with Spiegel, Frances Morgan describes the qualities that make the composer’s use of computers so distinctive: “The drone based title track of Spiegel’s The Expanding Universe was devised using algorithms, but to a non-analytical ear it feels immediately different from its number crunching predecessors. Its complex processes are expressed in warm, organic timbres, and hints of melody, like points of light, guide the listener through its 28 minutes in a way that’s subtle and unforced.”

Listen to your heart: Alan Licht interviews Milford Graves, The Wire 409 (March 2018)

Alan Licht’s interview with Milford Graves at his Queens, New York home, just three years before the legendary percussionist passed away, is another beautiful treasure for posterity, as are the accompanying photographs Andreas Laszlo Konrath took of Graves and his studio. Especially fascinating is the conversation around the biomedical aspects of Graves’s work, which views the heartbeat as the basis for all rhythm. “There are so many different kinds of heart rhythms,” Graves tells Licht. “They’re very similar to what we’re doing with ritual drumming… It’s so biological, it belongs to all of us.”

Joshua Minsoo Kim reviews White Boy Scream's Bakunawa, The Wire 437 (July 2020)

In addition to being a contributor to The Wire, Joshua Minsoo Kim is also the editor of the music newsletter Tone Glow. I love his extended review of White Boy Scream’s Bakunawa, in which noise artist and soprano Micaela Tobin channels the Indigenous mythology of the Philippines into a multimedia operatic work. Kim gives Tobin a careful listen, emphasising the role that works of art can play in cultural preservation, even serving as “cudgels against imperialism”.

Raymond Cummings reviews Death Convention Singers and Black Drink, The Wire 438 (August 2020)

Raymond Cummings writes the “Noise, Industrial & Beyond” column in the months where I don’t; he’s also a sound artist in his own right. His dual review of albums by Death Convention Singers and Black Drink (both featuring Raven Chacon) is full of evocative passages that exemplify why I always look forward to reading his writing: “Feedback broods until it klaxons, a panicking kaleidoscope; stapling stickwork seems to cause the sound mass to feast upon itself, then corkscrew into spinning vortexes. A thin, murmuring buzz of effects throbs and rustles; before you’re ready, the music has resolved into something monstrous, accruing torpor by degrees: vaguely mechanical, engagingly junkyard.”

Meta machine music: Daniel Spicer interviews Richard Pinhas, The Wire 466 (December 2022)

I learned a lot from Daniel Spicer’s recent interview with Richard Pinhas, and all of it made me want to drop everything and listen to his music: about Pinhas’s pre-Heldon days as a teenage protester with Molotov cocktails hidden in his coat, about his friendship with Gilles Deleuze (begun at Deleuze’s initiation), about his PhD dissertation “Science Fiction, The Unconscious, And Other Things” (what other things?!), about what happened to his brain when he read Philip K Dick’s Ubik through the prism of “maybe six or seven” acid trips, and finally about his own book on the philosophy of music, which has never been translated into English. When I finally finish writing my own dissertation (which I am now seriously considering calling “A Media History Of Apocalypse And Other Things”), Pinhas’s livre might just be the first book I sit down with for ‘fun’.

Read all these interviews and reviews in full by taking out a print or digital subscription and acquiring access to The Wire's full digital library of back issues.