Two fundraising events have been organised for Sheffield based underground electronic music photographer Shaun Bloodworth, who is currently in Northern General Hospital, where he suffered an infection that led to him having his lower leg amputated while waiting for a liver transplant. “Shaun is also self-employed,” explains Claire Thornley, contributor to Sheffield Culture Guide, “so this enforced and lengthy stay in hospital, and subsequent rehabilitiation, is making a bad situation even worse. These events are a chance for his friends to create something positive for Shaun and his family at this awful time.”

Shaun’s photos documenting the electronic music underground have been featured by The Wire, Rinse, FWD, Bleep, Tempa and many others. The first #RaveForShaun will take place in Sheffield on 1 September. It will be followed by #RaveForShaun London at Ministry Of Sound on 15 September. The line-up confirmed for London includes Geeneus, Katy B, Benga, Rustie, Pearson Sound, Lone, Special Request aka Paul Woolford, Toddla T b2b Roska, Illum Sphere, Youngsta, Loefah, Mary Anne Hobbs, Raji Rags, and many more. All money raised will go directly to Shaun and his family, alongside a donation to the UK based organ donor charity Live Life, Give Life. More information can be found at raveforshaun.com. Tickets are on sale now. You can also make a donation via Justgiving.

The second instalment of 3hd festival will take place at various venues in Berlin between 11–15 October. It will also feature an extensive online presence, marking it as “a new breed of hybrid festival, looking at music, performance, and visual art to ask deeper questions about politics, community, economic uncertainty, and communication”. With this year’s theme asking the question “There is nothing but the future?”, the festival aims to go against what it sees as a trend towards futuristic prophecies. Instead it focuses on “potential solutions for addressing the problems of the present”.

Creamcake’s Daniela Seitz and Anja Weigl announce that the line-up confirmed so far includes Wire contributor Adam Harper (whose essay on “violent freedoms and violent oppressions” in Beethoven’s Ode To Joy via Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange is already online), AGF, Aïsha Devi featuring Emile Barret, Claire Tolan, DIY Church, DJ NJ Drone, DJ Paypal, 食品まつり aka Foodman, Inga Copeland/Lolina, Kara­Lis Coverdale, Lisa Blanning, Soda Plains featuring Negroma, ssaliva, Uniiqu3 and many more. The Wire's Deputy Editor Emily Bick will also be there hosting panel talks, details TBC.

3hd takes place between 11-15 October at various venues in Berlin. Tickets are on sale now.

London's Southbank centre is presenting a free ten day series featuring the first major virtual reality presentation from a UK Orchestra. The presentation will consist of two digital installations – a walk-though audio-visual piece based on Holst’s The Planets called Universe Of Sound and a VR backstage 360 Experience. And it will culminate in a concert on 1 October conducted by Esa Pekka Salonen.

“The Philharmonia's Digital Projects have taken place all over the world and I am delighted that we are now bringing Universe Of Sound to our home at Southbank Centre, and to our London audience,” says The Philharmonia Orchestra’s principal conductor and artistic advisor Salonen. “The incredible power of virtual reality is that it is disappointing to leave it to come back to reality. There is no doubt that for classical music virtual reality will be a very powerful, useful medium, and I am very excited to be taking part in this project.”

Various workshops will also be taking place. The series runs from 23 September–2 October.

London based designer Manuel Sepulveda will be publishing the second volume of After Us magazine this September. Sepulveda operates under the alias Optigram, works for labels such as Hyperdub, Planet Mu and Ninja Tune, and hosts Nitetrax on NTS radio.

Featuring future-orientated essays, pictorials, interviews and short fictions about art and developments in technology, After Us Volume Two follows a year after the first issue landed at Bleep.com and London's ICA and Tate Modern bookshops.

Manuel discusses his reasoning behind the magazine via email. “It”s the first time I’ve produced any kind of print publication, but I’m finding a lot of similarities between this and the record label I used to run in terms of working with contributors and getting everything together,” he explains, referring to the Citinite label that recently closed for business following a decade of releases. “It definitely takes up more time though!”

He continues, “The main purpose is to provide writers and artists with a platform to express ideas, at intersections between art, science and politics, that they may not have found an outlet for otherwise. It’s important that the articles don’t feel too academic, or at the other end too journalistic or news-led – I’d like to strike a balance between being approachable but also pushing the reader a little.”

Asked about his statement in the first volume of After Us that contemporary art lacks political engagement, Manuel responds: “I feel most art is geared more towards being photographable and sharable, or being an experience to stimulate the senses, rather than really challenging the viewer to think. There are of course plenty of exceptions – I’ve seen two great pieces just this week – but they feel in the minority to me. I can appreciate that some artists might feel that political themes have already been explored to death by previous generations, but there is definitely scope for artists to communicate deeper concepts as new technologies continue to change our cultures.

“The other problem is that even if a work does have political themes, once it’s posted on Instagram or Tumblr it’s inevitably stripped of all meaning and just becomes an exercise in aesthetics,” he continues. “Many websites are finding ways of giving artists more control of how their work is shown. Certainly once After Us is more established I’d like to be able to provide an online space for this, rather than just sitting here complaining.”

After Us takes its name from a Tumblr site which the designer started around 2014 as a means of gathering articles and images that inspired him. “Topics included robotics, virtual reality, dystopian fiction, hacking, identity, transhumanism, etc,” Manuel recalls. “It got a good response from friends and it occurred to me, rather than collating existing material, why not commission new work and produce a physical magazine that tackled these ideas. It also felt like an opportunity to do something in a similar vein to Omni magazine, which had been a favourite of mine when I was growing up.”

Volume two will include articles such as Jennifer Boyd’s “A Taxonomy Of Explosions”, an interview with Patrik Schumacher, director of Zaha Hadid Architects, and Laurel Halo and Mari Matsutoya on their audio-visual project Still Be Here. Amy Ireland has also contibuted some fiction set on a mining colony in the Kuiper Belt. Illustrations are provided by Lee Gamble collaborator Dave Gaskarth, among others.

It'll cost £5 and is available via Bleep. Manuel Sepulveda chose Prince & The Revolution Around The World In A Day for The Inner Sleeve in The Wire 390 . Subscribers can read that feature via Exact Editions.

More artists have been announced for this year's Unsound Krakow. Amongst those announced, Demdike Stare are set to return to the weeklong event as “part of a post-Brexit focus on UK artists at the festival” according to the press release. Also engaging with this theme is a new site-specific project from duo Emptyset which will feature “self-made instruments, projections and light” and, as previously announced, Felicita working with the newly confirm Polish traditional dance outfit Śląsk Song and Dance Ensemble. Other premieres come from Kyle Dixon & Michael Stein performing works from their score to the Stranger Things TV series and Bill Kouligas collaborating with Amnesia Scanner. Death Grips will also be making an appearance as part of their European tour and The Wire's Editor Derek Walmsley will host talks.

Unsound Krakow takes place 16–23 October. Weekend tickets have now sold out but individual tickets are still available via their website. You can read Unsound founder Mat Schulz's article on the fallout of Brexit's breakaway victory in In Writing.

The first online sound map of the London Underground network has been launched. Put together with the help of the London Sound Survey, it presents recordings and reinterpretations of sounds taken from 55 of the network's 270 stations.

Entitled The Next Station, the project is presented as part of the Cities And Memory website, and lets you listen to sounds of stations that take in Brixton in South London to Finsbury Park in the north, Stamford Brook at the western end of the District Line to Royal Victoria in East London's Docklands Light Railway, and beyond. A team of 95 field recordists and sound artists from across the globe gathered the material, and the map presents raw sounds taken from inside, outside and around the Tube stations alongside reworkings of the same material which attempt to present a reimagined version of London's transport network.

Clicking your way down a tour of the Victoria Line, you can hear the distinctive screech and rattle of a train speeding into Finsbury Park station; running water under the platform at Victoria; the quiet whirr of a train rolling into Pimlico; and the bustling throng of a crowd, with a woman offering free hugs, below the big sign outside Brixton station. A journey on the Waterloo & City line captures a sub-bass rumble as the train passes underneath the city; the metal-on-metal sound of track repairs echoing throughout the partially closed station at Mile End; and a chatting crowd slowly filtering through the cramped old tunnels at Camden Town. The 'reimagined' versions also present chopped up collages and beefed up remixes responding to the history and geography of the Tube.

The City And Memory website is a longrunning project that attempts to present a sound map of the entire world, with a sound from each location accompanied by a reimagined version by way of a remix of the same location. It currently features more than a thousand sounds spread over 55 counties. The Next Station is freely available to explore – no travelcard required – on the City And Memory website.

The London Sound Survey contributed a portal of online listening resources back in 2012, and subscribers can read a feature by Nathan Budzinski on London Sound Survey from The Wire 341 via our online archive.

Intakt have announced the full line-up of their mammoth London festival at The Vortex in April 2017. Many of the Swiss label’s artists have already been announced, including Irène Schweizer, Ingrid Laubrock and Aki Takase, and the new additions include Howard Riley, Evan Parker, Louis Moholo Moholo, Trevor Watts, Maggie Nichols, Steve Beresford, and many more. Events include Alexander von Schlippenbach playing the music of Thelonious Monk on 26 April, sets by Ingrid Laubrock Sleepthief and Sarah Buechi’s Shadow Garden on 22 April, and an evening of performances including Barry Guy on 16 April. However the previously announced opening concert of Barry Guy’s London Jazz Composers’ Orchestra on 15 April is now not taking place.

The festival has been four years in the making, and it follows a previous extended residency at The Stone in New York in 2012. It all takes place at The Vortex from 16–27 April 2017. More details will be available here.

Nate Wooley’s Sound American online zine has launched a new website housing its entire archive, from its first edition, The Gospel Issue, to its newest, which is all about Anthony Braxton, from Ghost Trance Music to now. Sound American has also announced its first physical release – a selection of chamber music tracks by composer Alex Mincek performed by members of Yarn/Wire, Mivos Quartet and Wet Ink Ensembles. A recording of New American Songbook works will follow early next year featuring a first-time collaboration between Ron Miles, Mary Halvorson and Greg Saunier.

Nate Wooley was the subject of a feature by Philip Clark in The Wire 390. Subscribers can read it via Exact Editions.

Adrian Utley and John Parish are collaborating for the first time ever on a piece of music celebrating the long running Bristol gig and community venue The Trinity Centre. Proceeds from the music will go towards Trinity’s fundraising campaign Notes For Notes, which aims to raise £20,000 to cover the cost of essential conservation repairs for the 187 year old Georgian church.

“During the Notes For Notes campaign,” explains the fundraising page, “Trinity will exchange a musical note for every £5 raised. When we reach 4000 musical notes we will launch The Trinity Anthem – a unique piece of music created by artists, musicians and centre users to celebrate the diverse musical heritage of the centre and Bristol communities.”

You can donate by text – ROOF31 £5 to 70070 – or visit the justgiving campaign.

Rough Trade opened its first shop in West London 40 years ago this autumn. The record store and label will be celebrating its 40th birthday with a special concert at London Barbican on 22 October featuring three new collaborations between some of the label’s earliest artists and “similarly adventurous musicians who’ve emerged in more recent years”. Rough Trade veterans The Pop Group will be collaborating with Protomartyr; Scritti Politti (first signed to the label in 1979) with Hot Chip’s Alexis Taylor; and John Grant with new project Wrangler featuring Stephen Mallinder of Cabaret Voltaire (whose Extended Play EP was the label’s first UK release).