More than 70 artists will be participating in the month-long international radio art festival Radio Revolten in Halle (Saale), Germany in October. The festival includes two major exhibitions titled Invisible Waves: The History Of Broadcasting And The Attempt At Its Appropriation In Halle (Saale) and Das Große Rauschen: The Metamorphosis of Radio, as well as a temporary 24/7 radio art station (99.3 FM, 1575 AM, online), daily performances and concerts, three conferences and three workshops.

“In 2006 the festival coincided with the 1200 year celebrations of the city of Halle (Saale),” says Radio Revolten director Knut Aufermann via email. “The theme then was the future of radio. The host of the festival was and is Radio Corax, a free radio station in Halle, and one of the leading examples in Germany of what a third tier (besides commercial and public), non-commercial local radio station could be like. Radio Corax has a grassroots democratic underpinning.

“Rather than speculating on the future of radio as in 2006, we want to make a statement on the current state of our art,” continues Aufermann. “We declare radio art as a distinct form of art, and Radio Revolten as the result of our attempt to represent all variations of it.

“Radio art has come of age,” he declares. “It is time to take stock of all the initiatives that have taken roots in so many different subsoils, be it community, campus or public radio stations, galleries and biennials, communal listening events or staged performances. My feeling in general is that people are open to spend time listening to and engaging with challenging sound.

“For want of a better word for it,” Aufermann enthuses, “radio has magic. Radio is the most exciting medium: ephemeral and deep. Perfect for art.”

Contributions from 70 participating artists will be presented at 15 locations across the city. Other highlights include Radio Oracle (Marold Langer-Philippsen) broadcasting daily from a studio flat inside a church tower 45 metres above the market square, Radio For Plants installation and performance at the Botanical Gardens by Sun Ra alumnus Hartmut Geerken, and a Radiophonic Picnic that features Julia Drouhin spinning records made from chocolate.

Running from 1–30 October, Radio Revolten 2016 is co-curated by newcomers Aufermann, Anna Friz, Elisabeth Zimmermann and Sarah Washington, as well as its 2006 organiser Ralf Wendt. On air, the festival will broadcast on the FM frequency 99.3 MHz in Halle. 35 radio stations across the globe will be broadcasting selections from the programme, with Brighton's Resonance Extra documenting the entire event. Artists involved include Resonance Radio Orchestra, Alessandro Bosetti, Joyce Hinterding, Tetsuo Kogawa, and others.

Knut Aufermann surveyed the decade-long boom in creative broadcasting for a special feature on radio art in The Wire 320. Subscribers can read that feature via Exact Editions.

Regent Street cinema will host the London premiere of Huw Wahl's Action Space film in December. The documentary, which was first shown at Flatpack festival in Birmingham last April, is part of a project about the radical inflatable art collective that was set up by the director's father in the late 1960s.

“Founded by my father Ken Turner and his wife Mary Turner in 1968, Action Space used large inflatable sculptures to create interventions into public spaces,” says director Wahl. “By bringing together artists, performers, dancers, painters and musicians, the movement sought to produce cultural democratic spaces for art, education and creative play outside of the restrictive space of the gallery system. This film looks at those years between 1968 and 1978, exploring contemporary and pertinent issues around public/private space, individual/collective creativity, community and responsibility, emancipation and play.”

Though it focuses on the making of a new inflatable sculpture, the film features archive footage and interviews, plus a soundtrack by AMM and Phil Minton, plus material from the Action Space archive.

Watch an exclusive extract of footage of AMM performing at Blackheath Hall in south London.

Action Space will be screened on 14 December at Regent Street Cinema. The documentary was directed by Huw Wahl, produced by Wahl and Amanda Ravetz. Video by Wahl, Ravetz and Grant Gee with sound design and recording by Simon Connor.

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The Hastings born folk singer Shirley Collins is set to release a new album this November. The announcement comes two years after David Tibet coaxed her back on stage, and 32 years after the diagnosis of the speech disorder dysphonia put the breaks on her performing.

Lodestar is said to be a collection of English, American and Cajun songs dating back to the 16th century and was recorded at her home in Lewes by Stephen Thrower and Ossian Brown of Cyclobe, and produced by Ian Kearey.

You can listen to “Cruel Lincoln” from the release below, a track that Collins describes as “an ancient ballad, found only rarely in England. The theory is that Cruel Lincoln was a mason who was not paid for the work he did for ‘The Lord of the Manor’ and so extracted a terrible revenge.”

In other Shirley Collins news, the long awaited documentary The Ballad Of Shirley Collins is still in production and a follow up to her first memoir America Over the Water (2004) is also said to be in progress.

Lodestar will be released on 4 November on Domino and will include a 24 page booklet featuring notes by Collins and sleevenotes by Stewart Lee. Subscribers to The Wire can read Mike Barnes's feature on Shirley Collins from issue 219 over at Exact Editions.

Wheels of steel supergroup Invisibl Skratch Piklz have released their first album in nearly 30 years since the Bay Area crew formed in 1989. Founded by Qbert, DJ Apollo and Mix Master Mike, the turntablist crew grew to include A-Trak, Shortkut, Yogafrog and D-Styles. The album, entitled The 13th Floor, follows a 16 year hiatus, aside from a reunion performance from Qbert and D-Styles at 2011’s Low End Theory event, and was put together by Qbert, Shortkut and D-Styles.

You can listen to the album track “Fresh Out Of FVUKS” below

The 13th Floor is out now on Alpha Pup. The trio have lined up a tour to mark the release.

This week on Adventures In Sound And Music writer, thinker, listener, musician and longterm associate of The Wire David Toop joins Derek Walmsley to discuss improvisation and his long awaited book Into The Maelstrom. This first in a projected two-part history examining the rise of free music in Europe and beyond outlines its genesis in such disparate movements as dada, experiments in post-bop, postwar art, modernist literature, Japanese gakaku, live electronics, free rock and more. David will be in the studio to play rare recordings, talk about his book, and to improvise a discussion about improvisation.

Adventures In Sound And Music will air on Thursday 9pm. Tune in on London 104.4FM or stream at resonancefm.com

New Zealand guitarist Roy Montgomery is about to release his first album in more than a decade. Called RMHQ, it’s a four LP box set of all new material. The Christchurch based musician worked with various NZ bands throughout the 1980s, including The Pin Group, Dadamah, Dissolve and Hash Jar Tempo. In the late 1990s Montgomery played solo when he wasn’t collaborating with the likes of Flying Saucer Attack, Bardo Pond and, more recently Liz Harris, with whom he released Roy Montgomery/Grouper in 2010.

Written over a short period, RMHQ – in full, Roy Montgomery Headquarters – emerges as a four-part box set containing the albums R:Tropic Of Anodyne, M:Darkmotif Dancehall, H:Bender and Q:Transient Global Amnesia. The albums will be released separately in vinyl and CD formats, or together as a limited edition box set.

Listen to a track from each new release below:

R:Tropic Of Anodyne “If And Only If”

M:Darkmotif Dancehall “Six Guitar Salute To Peter Gutteridge”

H:Bender “A Guitar Called Boomslang”

Q:Transient Global Amnesia “Last Alarm (For Brad Fletcher)”

RMHQ will be released by Grapefruit on 21 October.

Two of the co-founders of veteran German dance institution Kompakt, Michael Mayer and Wolfgang Voigt, are set to release major projects this autumn.

Voigt's Gas Box compiles the four albums he released under the name Gas in the late 1990s – Gas, Zauberberg, Königsforst and Pop. The box will present each record in its original form alongside a book of Voigt's art. This new package follows a previous Gas box set released in spring 2008 when Voigt graced the cover of The Wire. The vinyl edition of the set includes a number of previously unreleased edits of his recordings. Meanwhile his Kompakt associate Michael Mayer is set to release a brand new album on the !K7 label. Titled simply &, it consists entirely of collaborations with Roman Flügel, Hot Chip’s Joe Goddard and Voigt himself, among many others. The release date for Voigt’s Gas Box and Mayer’s & is 28 October.

Parisian soul music representatives JAW are set to continue their tenth anniversary celebrations with special events in Paris and Berlin to mark a family reunion bringing together new and more familiar acts. The reunion will kick off in Berlin on 8 November at the Young African Art Market with a double bill featuring Blue Note’s The Robert Glasper Experiment and New Orleans trumpet player Christian Scott aTunde Adjuah. Blue Note jazz troupe Gogo Penguin will join them at Bi Nuu on 11 November. They follow their Berlin dates a week later with four consecutive nights of shows beginning at La Machine in Paris on 17 November with Henry Wu's project Yussef Kamaal and JAW regular Theo Parrish. Between 18–20 November the series returns to Berlin for a three night run at Prince Charles with acts including Floating Points, Theo Parrish (again), Motor City Drum Ensemble, Hunee, Red Greg, Gilles Peterson, Sadar Bahar, The Pyramids, Carlos Niño, Rabih Beaini and Jameszoo.

JAW Family Reunion takes place in Berlin and Paris on various dates between 8–20 November.

The legendary jazz recording engineer Rudy Van Gelder has died at the age of 91, The New York Times reported.

Van Gelder, an optomistrist by trade, began making recordings in a makeshift studio in his parents' house in Hackensack, New Jersey. He was recommended to Blue Note Records in 1952 and the following year took over responsibilities for recording engineering at the label. The painstaking detail of his recordings came to define the sound of jazz. Richard Cook, former Editor of The Wire, called Van Gelder's method of recording and mixing the piano “as distinctive as the pianists' playing itself” in his book Blue Note Records: The Biography. Electronic producer Kirk Degiorgio, interviewed in The Wire 160, declared that “before Blue Note you couldn't really hear a cymbal on a jazz record. Rudy Van Gelder pioneered that whole idea of the importance of the recording.” But Van Gelder himself, however, was deferential: “the Rudy Van Gelder sound is really the Alfred Lion sound,” he said, crediting the Blue Note producer.

Van Gelder was so prolific in the 1950 and 60s that putting a precise figure on how many albums he had a hand in is almost impossible – including engineering, mastering and remastering, the total runs into thousands. He recorded all styles of jazz, from bebop to fusion to free jazz, and worked not just for for Blue Note but for Verve, Prestige and Impulse!. It was for the latter that he recorded John Coltrane's A Love Supreme in 1964.

Performance artist, musician, poet and Gong co-founder Gilli Smyth has died. She passed on 22 August. “Gilli died at mid-day in Australia surrounded by loved ones,” Planet Gong reported on 23 August. “She had been admitted to Byron Bay hospital with pneumonia a couple of days ago. She was 83 and also ageless.

“Her unique stage presence and vocals manifested and determinedly represented a vital, deeply fundamental feminine principle within the Gong universe. She last performed with the band in 2012.

“The two images of Gilli that spring to mind when I think of her are reading a newspaper, feet up on a tour bus, in our kitchen, in 100s of dressing rooms - she was never without a newspaper whatever country we were in, or laughing – a little Gilli semi-supressed chuckle at the absurdity of pretty much everything.

“We will miss her. Love to the Good Witch and all who feel her loss.”

Smyth was born on 1 June 1933. At the age of 12 she was expelled from the convent Catholic school she attended for, according to Plant Gong, “writing 'heretical' and erotic poetry”. She studied three degrees at Kings Collage London and worked as an editor for the collage's magazine Kings News. She moved to Paris in the 1960s and began teaching at Sorbonne University. In 1966 Gilli published a book of poetry Nitrogen Dreams Of A Wide Girl. It was in Paris that she met the late Daevid Allen (founding member of Soft Machine with Robert Wyatt, Kevin Ayers and Mike Ratledge), occasionally travelling with the group as a performance poet. In 1967 she founded the psychedelic rock group Gong with Allen and released their debut album Magick Brother in 1970. In Gong she often performed under the name Shakti Yoni with a vocal style which had her develop the concept of the Space Whisper singing style. As Planet Gong notes ”This became part of the unique sound of Gong as part of the concept of Total Space Music that they had heard in their mind's ears. Gilli played a central role in the creation of the Gong mythology, being responsible for much of the radical political inerity of the band and was often credited as being the 'invisible' leader.”

Smyth left Gong in July 1972 and following a brief period in Spain with her children went on to form numerous other project including Mother Gong releasing her first solo album Mother in 1978. That was followed by several albums written with Harry Williamson such as Fairy Tales (1980), the Robot Woman trilogy, The Owl And The Tree, and others. Gilli went on to release albums throughout the 1990s (including two with her son, Orlando Allen, as Goddess Trance/Goddess T) and 2000s, including reunions with Daevid Allen and 2012's Paradise.

Watch her perform “Witches Song, I Am Your Pussy”