New Berlin festival Splitter Music takes place this November. A showcase of contemporary orchestral music, the event will feature over 80 artists and is based on two themes: large formations and small collectives. “The central focus of the festival program is the Berlin-based Echtzeitmusik-Ensemble Splitter Orchester,” explains the festival website. “In evolving formats and musical contexts, the orchestra performs anew every day of the festival. However, the composer-performers forming the Splitter Orchester are not the only artists on stage”

The 30-person Swiss group Insub Meta Orchestra will open the festival on Thursday evening with composer Sabine Vogel overseeing the collaboration between them and Splitter. Sven-Åke Johansson will work with Titus Engel in the staging of a 22-person ensemble for his symphony of carboard boxes Harding Greens – Symphonie Für Kartonagen (2010). Also happening at the festival, Hanno Leichtmann will DJ in celebration of releases The CD Creative Construction Set™ with George Lewis and Splitter's spilt release with Felix Kubin Shine On You Crazy Diagram. As counter to these large performance, small collectives will include guitarist Margareth Kammerer working with female collective Les Femmes Savantes and performances from two bands, Transmit and The Still. You can check out the full line up on the Splitter website.

Splitter Music will take place at two venues, Wabe and Ballhaus OST between 24 and 27 November.

London’s Morley College is calling all sound artists to enter the Engine Room international sound art competition 2017. This includes audio and audiovisual pieces, interactive works, performances, installations, sound sculptures and graphic scores. The deadline is 31 January 2017 and submissions will be judged by a panel consisting of The Wire publisher Tony Herrington, and sound artists Janek Schaefer and Annie Mahtani. Selected works will be eligible for a number of prizes and will feature in an accompanying exhibition at Morley Gallery, London, and partner venue Iklectik Artlab from 4 May–1 June 2017.

Chimera Music and Secretly Canadian are set to release 11 reissues of Yoko Ono’s music output from 1968–85. It will mark the 50th anniversary of Indica Gallery’s opening, where John met Yoko in 1966. The first selection of reissues will include Unfinished Music No 1: Two Virgins and Unfinished Music No 2: Life With The Lions (both with John Lennon), and Yoko Ono Plastic Ono Band. They’ll be out on 11 November, with more releases scheduled for 2017. For $75 you can also pick up a Yoko vinyl and T-shirt bundle.

Strut is set to release a massive collection of Sun Ra 45 rpms. Singles: The Definitive 45s Collection pulls together a whopping 64 tracks released between 1952–91. “One-off meteorites from his prolific cosmic journey” is how the label describes them. The majority of records were first released in the 1950s, most of them on the Saturn label. Most were originally pressed in small runs or as one-off magazine giveaways, making this collection an exceptionally rich archive of rare material..

Strut will make the music available either as a single volume three CD box set or two volumes of triple LPs housed in gatefold sleeves, or a 10 x 45s set limited to 500 copies. All formats feature fully remastered tracks, rare photos, poster artwork, sleevenotes by The Wire contributor Francis Gooding, an interview with Saturn Records founder Alton Abraham by John Corbett and detailed track and session notes by Paul Griffiths. It's available for pre-order now.

In other news, Strut has teamed up with Nigerian producer Odion Iruoje and African music record collector Temi Kogbe to launch the new label Odion Livingstone. Based in Lagos, the label is believed to be one of the only Nigerian imprints to specialise in new and back catalogue music from all over Africa. Its first release, set for January 2017, is the 1983 funk set Friday Night by Livy Ekemezie, originally pressed at William Onyeabor’s plant in Enugu. Listen to “Delectation” from the release below.

The new label will go on to explore Africa's “lost back catalogue gems through original LP reissues and compilations”. It also plans to release work from new artists.

Two DIY events presenting a swathe of underground talent from the UK and beyond are set to touch down in West Yorkshire this autumn. Total Inertia happens between 23–25 September at Wharf Chambers in Leeds, with performances from Richard Dawson, Vibracathedral Orchestra, Alan Wilkinson & Paul Hession, a Guttersnipe and Herb Diamante collab, and much more. It’s the first ever instalment of the fest, and it's put together by Leeds duo Guttersnipe and Shakeeb Abu Hamdan of Family Elan. You can find more info at their website.

Meanwhile, West Yorkshire DIY festival Tor Festival returns to the Pennine market town of Todmorden for its second edition, running from 1–3 October. Following 2015’s event, which was organised in collaboration with Was Ist Das?, Tor Press have brought together another weekend of psychedelic, folk and drone sounds, with artists for the weekend including appearances from Belgian guitarist Ignatz, Tom Carter of Charalambides, and East Coast violinist/guitarist Samara Lubelski, plus UK underground mainstays Blood Stereo, Ashtray Navigations, Harappian Night Records and Tor's own Sophie Cooper. DJs for the weekend are Neil Campbell of Vibracathedral Orchestra and Nick Mitchell of Golden Lab Records. The main event takes place on Saturday 1 October at Todmodern’s Unitarian Church, with a Friday warm-up gig and Sunday tape listening and roast dinner session both happening at the Golden Lion pub. You can find more information online here.

Frances Morgan wrote a Primer to Yorkshire Psychedelia in issue 378, featuring movers such as Ashtray Navigations, Vibracathedral Orchestra and many more – subscribers to the magazine can read it via our online archive.

Chicago producer Earl Smith aka DJ Spank-Spank has died, annouced Phuture's Facebook page yesterday. The news comes following a stroke earlier this year, but circumstances of his passing are still unconfirmed. “MGMT:::To our acid house family and music family at large we are very sorry to say that our friend and partner DJ Spank-Spank has passed away,” reads the annoucement. “Spank is (was) a legend. We will for certain continue the work he’s started on his final album project and his innovations in music. Please for now: Pray for his family and DJ Pierre his brother. Allow them time to grieve. We will come back with news. Much love.”

Smith was a founder and constant member in the ever-evolving line-up of the Chicago house outfit Phuture. The group came into being after a DJ Ron Hardy set that Smith and fellow Phuture founders DJ Pierre and Herb J saw at Music Box in Chicago. But it was in 1985 when Spank came across an old Roland TB-303 upon which “Acid Tracks” was built, and out of which acid house emerged. Ron Hardy was the first DJ to play the legendary 12 minute wonder on cassette in 1986. The track got its official release the following year via Traxx Records, and it featured pioneering Chicago house producer Marshall Jefferson in its production credits.

Phuture (as Phuture 303) released their debut album Alpha And Omega nearly a decade after that legendary track. “The theme of Alpha And Omega is that acid started with Phuture, so give us our respect,” Earl Smith told Mike Shallcross in The Wire 170. “Magazines and labels go to all these other producers and talk about acid music, but there wouldn’t be all these other producers if it wasn’t for Phuture. I don’t think there would be techno without Phuture starting the acid sound.”

Though he was the lead drum programmer and main vocalist for Phuture, Smith also worked solo, as well as running the 24/7 internet station Global Traxx Radio with Chicago’s Charles ‘DJ Turk’ Tyler. His music has been released on labels such as Djax Up-Beats, Strictly Rhythm, Emotive and Dance Mania, among others. At the time of his death, Smith was still working on new tracks. “The world has no idea how talented he was and how much I depended on him,” DJ Pierre told Thump. “He texted me last night saying he was working on music and how excited he was to have this opportunity to perform again. We were working on our album project and he was so excited about that.”

Read Mike Shallcross’s article on how Phuture’s “Acid Tracks” triggered the rave phenomenon in The Wire 170.

Strange Attractor Press has published a monograph documenting the English underground titled Skipping To Armageddon: Photographs Of Current 93 & Friends. Featuring a selection of photos by music photographer Ruth Bayer, the collection dates back to 1987 and spans more than three decades up to 2015 and covers Current 93 founder David Tibet, Marc Almond, Little Annie, John Balance, Peter Christopherson, Cyclobe, Shirley Collins, Baby Dee, Steven Stapleton, Tiny Tim, among many others. Strange Attractor sees it as a companion volume to the recently published and updated second edition of David Keenan’s England’s Hidden Reverse, says publisher and Wire contributor Mark Pilkington.

The book includes texts by Bayer and David Tibet, as well as an introduction by novelist Michel Faber. “Like much of the music made by the artists who entrusted her to reflect their mercurial spirits, Bayer’s pictures are magic,” writes Faber.

London based Austrian photographer Bayer’s work has appeared in many music and style magazines over the past two decades, most recently in the 2015 publication The Play Goes On: The Rituals Of The Rainbow Bridge by Jean M Williams and Zachary Cox.

Skipping To Armageddon: Photographs Of Current 93 & Friends will be published in the first week in October, but you can pre-order your copy now via Strange Attractor Press.

Catalan digital arts festival Mira, which focuses “on the intersection between electronic music and live visuals”, returns in November.

The annual festival has been happening in Barcelona and Berlin since 2011. This year's Barcelona edition takes place at Fàbrica De Creació,, and artists confirmed so far include Plaid, Gesloten Cirkel, Alessandro Cortini, Throwing Snow, Pfadfinderei, Lakker, Pauk & Eyesberg, Elysia Crampton, Jlin, Lee Gamble & Dave Gaskarth, Roly Porter & MFO, Death In Vegas, Tim Hecker, Zomby, and many others. As well as live performances, the festival also offers three days of workshops and presentations based on the potential of the 360 degrees of audio-visual content in the Immersive Dome structure.

Mira runs from 10–12 November. Tickets are on sale now.

Rima Najdi and Julian Bonequi are the winners of the CTM 2017 Radio Lab Call. The competition is run by Deutschlandradio Kultur – Hörspiel/Klangkunst and CTM Festival in collaboration with Goethe-Institut, ORF musikprotokoll im steirischen herbst, Ö1 Kunstradio, and the SoCCoS. The open call sought out works that paired radio art with either live performance or installation, plus a focus on next year's festival theme: Fear Anger Love.

Called Happy New Fear, Rima Najdi's winning proposal continues on from her 2014 piece Madame Bomba: The TNT Project, for which the artist performed an intervention featuring herself wearing a fake cartoon TNT bomb around her chest while roaming the streets of her hometown Beirut. It uses audiovisual material sourced from Beirut to tell the story of Madame Bomba and her search to find her lover in the city – a stranger whom everyone is afraid of. It was described by panellist Anne Hilde Neset as “sounding of the politics of fear – which captured the jury’s imagination”.

Mexican artist Julian Bonequi’s winning entry is The Death Of The Anthropocene. Inspired by radio dramas and sci-fi movies, it imagines a series of fictitious encounters between humans and aliens which, according to the description on CTM's website, project less than desirable images of the future. “Julian Bonequi's Death Of The Anthropcene starts from one of the most disturbing moments in radio's history, Orson Welles’s famous radio drama War Of The Worlds, which aired live on Halloween in 1938,” comments panellist Ole Frahm. “Bonequi is less interested in the myth about this broadcast and the panic that it caused (or what the media made out of some reactions), but more in the broadcast text of Welles's adaption [of HG Wells’s original novel] Bonequi's multi-layered, humourous and strange adaption reminds us of the fact that this fantasy is not fiction anymore."

The two winning projects will be premiered at CTM 2017 Festival, and in March they will be broadcast by Deutschlandradio Kultur. As well as that, the works will also be aired by Österreichischer Rundfunk.

The jury consisted of Anne Hilde Neset (Director, NyMusikk), Jan Rohlf (Artistic & Managing Director, CTM Festival), Marcus Gammel (curator, Deutschlandradio Kultur Hörspiel/Klangkunst), Ole Frahm (independent artist, Ligna), and Susanna Niedermayr (co-producer, ORF Zeit-Ton and co-curator ORF musikprotokoll).

CTM 2017 Festival takes place in Berlin from 27 January–5 February 2017

Four decades after seeing The Sex Pistols inspired her to form her own punk group Aunt Sally in 1977, the legendary Japanese singer Phew is set to make her London debut. “I realised [punk] was not something you were supposed to watch, it was something you were supposed to do,” she told Biba Kopf in 2003 (The Wire 234).

Aunt Sally split up in 1979, since when Phew has followed her own ways. On her most recent solo album A New World, however, featuring herself on analogue electronics and vocals, she acknowledged her hardcore punk roots through her cover version of Johnny Thunders’ “Chinese Rocks”.

Phew made her first solo album Phew in Germany with Holger Czukay, Conny Plank and Jaki Liebezeit. In the 1990s she returned to Germany to record the album Our Likeness (Mute) with Chrislo Haas, Einstürzende Neubauten’s Alexander Hacke and Thomas Stern. And the German connection continued in the 2000s when Dieter Moebius collaborated with Phew and Erika Kobayashi on Project Undark’s post-Fukushima nuclear disaster album Radium Girls 2011. In between times and closer to home she has released numerous solo albums, as well as recording and performing with her early 2000s update of a punk group called Most (2000–10), the sampler/electronics duo Big Picture, and also collaborating with Ryuichi Sakamoto, Otomo Yoshihide and ex-Boredoms guitarist Seiichi Yamamoto, among others.

Now performing solo on analogue electronics, Phew plays at London Iklectik on 8 October. The programme also includes Olivia Louvel. Tickets are available here.