San Francisco festival Other Minds has launched a website to keep track of a host of events set to mark 2017 as the centenary year of US composer Lou Harrison. Taking place next spring, Other Minds 22 will be dedicated to the maverick composer, whose “pioneering work both in his personal life and artistic output [has acted] as a guiding spirit” to the festival.

The Lou Harrison Centennial Website focuses on events hosted by Other Minds as well as information about Harrison concerts in Portand, Santa Cruz, San Francisco and Berkeley. Suggestions can be emailed to lou100@otherminds.org.

BBC Radio 3 and Sound And Music have announced the Manchester ensemble Distractfold as the next in line to curate Cut & Splice. Last year the sonic arts event relaunched after a four year hiatus. with a three day programme curated by composer Joanna Bailie.

Founded by Mauricio Pauly, Sam Salem, Rocío Bolaños, Linda Jankowska, Alice Purton and Emma Richards, Distractfold have been performing instrumental, electroacoustic and mixed chamber music since 2011. The project is part of Sound And Music's Composer-Curator support programme and will culminate in two evenings of live events and broadcasts on BBC 3's Hear And Now show.

Cut & Splice 2017 will take place in Manchester next year. More information is available via this website.

Watch a video of the ensemble perform in August 2015

Vibraphone pioneer Bobby Hutcherson has died, reported the SFJazz website. He was 75. Hutcherson was one of the longest serving musicians on Blue Note records. He appeared as sideman or leader on scores of releases between 1963–77, which ranged from straightahead bop with Dexter Gordon and soul jazz with Big John Patten, to sessions with Blue Note’s most adventurous musicians including Eric Dolphy, Jackie McLean, Sam Rivers and Andrew Hill.

Hutcherson began his long association with Blue Note after making two decisive life-changes. He grew up in Los Angeles and originally studied piano. Then came a switch of instruments to vibraphone and a move to the East Coast after a 1961 date with his ensemble at Birdland. His first recording was as part of a pianoless quintet on Jackie McLean’s One Step Beyond, which revealed him to be such a skilful musician that he effectively replaced the keyboard player. He fulfilled a similar role on McLean’s Destination… Out!, Eric Dolphy’s Out To Lunch and Grachan Moncur III’s Evolution. Hutcherson’s playing – alongside his lesser known contemporary, Walt Dickerson – redefined the vibraphone from a supporting instrument to a vehicle for the musician’s freedom of expression. On sessions such as Out To Lunch, he had few rhythmic responsibilities, leaving him free to explore the full sonic range of his unwieldy instrument, experimenting with sharply percussive playing, extended use of sustain and sudden drops into silence.

His first release as leader was 1965’s Dialogue, which boasted an all-star line-up featuring Sam Rivers, Freddie Hubbard, Andrew Hill, Richard Davis and Joe Chambers. The compositions for the album were mostly written by Hill and Chambers, but Dialogue was one of the most innovative Blue Note albums of the era, described by AB Spellman an “essay in free group improvisation in which no one lays an apparently set role, in which there are no extended solos, but in which there is a mass evolution around some felt key”. Hutcherson went on to record prolifically in the middle part of the decade, but like Hill, many of his significant Blue Note albums only emerged years after they were recorded, among them 1963’s The Kicker, 1967’s Oblique and 1968’s Patterns.

In 1967, Hutcherson returned to Los Angeles and started a new quintet with Harold Land, beginning a lengthy association with the saxophonist. By 1970 he had moved to San Francisco, and the album named after the city saw him delving into fusion territory. By 1977 he signed to Columbia Records and later ended up on Verve, but he would sporadically reappear on Blue Note alongside former associates such as McCoy Tyner; in 2014 he recorded Enjoy The View, his final album as leader for the label. Hutcherson also had a brief career as an actor, appearing alongside Jane Fonda in Sydney Pollack’s They Shoot Horses, Don’t They (1969) and saxophonist Dexter Gordon in Bertrand Tavernier’s Round Midnight (1986).

Derek Walmsley wrote about the music of Bobby Hutcherson, Andrew Hill, Jackie McLean and other adventurous musicians on Blue Note in The Wire’s Freedom Principles issue in December 2014.

It is now 35 years since musician and sound engineer Colin Potter founded ICR. To celebrate, the record label, studio and distribution service has organised a showcase at London’s Cafe Oto featuring solo sets from Michael Begg (Human Greed, Fovea Hex), Jonathan Coleclough, Andrew Liles (Nurse With Wound, Current 93), Clodagh Simonds (Fovea Hex), Paul Bradley (Monos, Twenty hertz) and Colin Potter (Nurse With Wound, Monos). ICR started out as a bedroom studio in a small village in Yorkshire, before shifting operations to Preston. It is now based in London. To date ICR has released over 80 albums.

ICR: 35 will take place on 30 September.

The East Sussex multidisciplinary music festival Fort Process goes underground for its second edition. Spread across various unusual venues, including tunnels, chambers, boltholes, radio shacks and laboratories, its one day programme features site specific sound installations, talks, films, poetry and workshops by Pierre Bastien, Toshimaru Nakamura, David Toop, Sarah Angliss & Laura Cannell, Aura Satz, Audrey Chen, Eva Bowan, Carla Bozulich, Evan Parker and more.

Fort process happens at various venues in Newhaven Fort in East Sussex on 3 September.

A new electronic album taps into the esoteric field of radionics, the frequency therapies of the early and mid-20th century explored by pseudoscientists and alternative medical practitioners such as George de la Warr. On his Radionics Radio album, Daniel Wilson uses frequencies selected by users of a dedicated radionics website to build brand new radionic-inspired compositions.

You may well ask: what exactly is radionics? “It's comparable to dowsing, especially map dowsing, where the dowser would hold a pendulum over parts of a printed map to locate gold, and watching for any pendulum wobble, ” explains Wilson, who began his researches into radionics after working at Goldsmith‘s Daphne Oram collection, which contains numerous radionics related items, in the early 2010s. At Oxford’s De La Warr Laboratories in the 1950s and 60s, these methods were transposed to light and, notably, sound. Boxes of numbered dials were used to find runs of numbers or rates that supposedly correspond to bodily or emotional conditions. “They were responsible for what could be viewed as the weirdest synthesizer (of sorts) ever built,” claims Wilson, “the Multi-Oscillator.”

Radionics Radio contains a 1968 recording of the Multi-Oscillator, which the practitioners at Delawarr Laboratories used to build up chords of tones that they believed had a mental or physical resonance. The rest of the record, however, is based on new compositions using frequencies submitted to a radionics website (put together by Wilson and Jonny Stutters) which went live in 2014. As Wilson explains, users of the website were encouraged to try and forge new connections between thoughts and particular frequencies. “The app was designed for users to simply increase the frequency of an oscillator while concentrating on any thought of their choice,” he adds.

Many proponents of radionics, including De La Warr, faced accusations of fakery, and even had to go to court to defend their work. “It would be unfair to dismiss it as quackery,” remarks Wilson in their defence. “Practitioners were generally very sincere in their beliefs. It's all connected to faith healing I suppose.”

Perhaps some users of the radionics website had misplaced faith? “Most users sent in wishes: ‘Win lottery’, ‘Stephanie to love me’, ‘I am a television and movie star’, etc,” he reports. “The thought ‘mental clarity in the face of despair’ was an early one. The sound of that chord with its odd tuning is now unmistakable to me as ‘mental clarity in the face of despair’. Of course, to anyone hearing it anew, it just sounds like a low, out-of-tune drone.”

But Wilson hints that radionics might not be all smoke and mirrors. “Someone sent in a thought frequency set: ‘my cat humphrey to return home’,” he reflects. “I did my duty of loading all the frequencies into my custom software to combine them as a chord, then played it on Resonance FM. It wasn’t a very musical chord – a bit headachey, some 3kHz ear-irritant zinging in there – but a few weeks later I got an email from the lady who submitted the thought: the cat had returned safely!”

Find out more about radionics and Wilson’s project by watching this film by Toby Clarkson. Radionics Radio is out now on Sub Rosa, and you can find much more on Daniel Wilson’s projects can be found here.

Rotterdam’s WORM Institute for Avant-Garde Recreation has created the WORM Pirate Bay – a no-fee lending archive with an online database and a screening room. The archive has an online and offline presence, allowing users to browse the archive online and receive notifications when requested items are ready to collect. “This offline presence is both an answer and a credo,” states the open access library. “It is WORM's response to the growing need for tangibility, something that the digital revolution has paradoxically brought about. Moreover, it comes from acknowledging that format is organic to the aesthetics of certain artworks.”

At its Rotterdam base, WORM has amassed a collection of more than 5000 films, music, books, magazines and other cultural paraphernalia. The launch party will take place on 9 September at Boomgaardstraat 71-73, Rotterdam.

Cosey Fanni Tutti is writing an autobiography. Out in April 2017, Art Sex Music covers the life and work of this famed musician and one part of the Nicholas Fairbairn iconically declared “wreckers of civilisation”. “It is the story of her work as a pornographic model and striptease artiste which challenged assumptions about morality, pornography and art,” says the press. Pre- publication events include a Q&A with Andrew Weatheral at Portmeirion’s Festival No. 6 (1–4 September), and one at London ICA with Maria Fusco on 26 October. The latter will coincide with an exhibition of Cosey’s original ICA prostitution magazine Actions and a screening of COUM Transmissions film After Cease To Exist.

Robert Beatty aka Three-Legged Race has published his first monograph, Floodgate Companion, comprising a collection of his works as a musician and artist. The Hair Police member has produced sleeve artwork for Tame Impala, Neon Indian, Oneohtrix Point Never, Peaking Lights and Real Estate. Floodgate Companion, however offers a parallel reality by going public with his previously unseen works.

“All of the work in the book is new and unpublished, created over the past four years or so, no record covers or commissioned images are in the book,” declares Beatty. “The main inspiration behind the book Film and TV Graphics volumes one and two [published by the international journal of visual communication Graphis] which showcase stills of animation, commercials and experimental film from the 1960s and 70s. That was the starting point at least, but there’s a lot more that went into it!”

Published by Floating World Comics, it comes in a foil embossed clothbound hardcover with a signed and numbered limited edition version that includes a one-sided flexi-disc 7" containing exclusive new music by Beatty. It ships on 11 October.

The Brooklyn based reissue label Anthology Recordings has launched a book publishing arm, Anthology Editions. Its founders promise “kitschy, high quality coffee table books that cover everything from 50s sci-fi occult culture, dystopian backyard pool photos to famed skater Tino Razo, photos of the Bronx in the 70s, and more”. The publishing arm will be run by Anthology co-founder and Boo-Hooray gallery curator and record collector Johan Kugelberg and Anthology/Mexican Summer co-founder Andrés Santo Domingo.

“We’d like to see how the countdown to cultural oblivion is reversed here,” declares Kugelberg. “The 20th century is so chaotic and complex, and with the advent of the internet as a premiere focus for cultural consumption, I think one desperately needs not only curators, but also gatekeepers. Our audience has an event horizon of fascination and open minds in their cultural reach.”

The edition’s first three titles are a UFO pulp fiction cover art collection Flying Saucers Are Real! featuring a commentary by Jack Womack, an enhanced collectors’ edition of the Rizzoli publication God Save Sex Pistols, and skateboarder Tino Razo’s Party In The Back (A Brief History Of Suburban Decay).