Ian Brighton, one of a number of UK guitar improvisors who emerged in the 1970s (others included John Russell and Roger Smith), has returned with his first solo album in nearly 40 years. Called Now And Then, most of the music on it was recorded between 2013–15. His previous solo LP Marsh Gas was released in 1977 by Bead Records. Now And Then follows the 2013 appearance of some of Brighton’s archive recordings on the Tony Oxley A Birthday Tribute album. It was conceived as a way of “getting together with old friends through a recorded medium”, and features contributions from associates Frank Perry and Trevor Taylor, as well as the voice of Derek Bailey from an interview with The Wire’s Brian Morton on its opening track. “All that's wanted now is a couple of gigs,” proclaims Brighton on Facebook.

It is one of a number of releases Mark Wastell’s Confront label has planned for its 20th anniversary celebrations this year.

Room 40 will release a collection of recordings by writer, musician and veteran Wire contributor David Toop this June. His first new album in ten years is called Entities Inertias Faint Beings, and it contains a selection of tracks drawn from three “periods of solitude”. These include recordings made on Tamborine Mountain in Queensland, the same province’s Gold Coast and the UK coastal town St Ives. “The music existed already,” explains Toop. “Spores maybe or dormant clusters of digital files.

”Why would anybody release music in the 21st century?” he ponders, continuing, “In solitude I contemplated death, decay, the gush of life.”

Toop’s new book, Into The Maelstrom: Music, Improvisation And The Dream Of Freedom: Before 1970, sketches a history of, and meditates on the philosophies behind improvisation in music. It will be published by Bloomsbury in May.

Entities Inertias Faint Beings will be released by Lawrence English's Room40 label. You can watch a video for the album track “Compelled To Approach” below:

New York’s Basilica Hudson are set to host their second 24 Hour drone performance series this weekend. Run in collaboration with Utrecht's Le Guess Who? festival, Second Ward Foundation and Wave Farm/WGXC, the series features performances from musicians and sound artists as well as long duration video, interactive art installations and a 24 hour coffee bar. People can either attend for the full 24 hours or buy tickets at $1 per hour.

Artists on the bill include Oneida, Innov Gnawa, Hospital Productions’ Dominic Fernow presenting Drone Block, Camilla Padgitt-Coles, Bonnie Baxter of Kill Alters, Efrim Manuel Menuck of Godspeed You! Black Emperor, Noveller, Christopher Tignor performing alongside Meshell Ndegeocello, and more. Second Ward Foundation will present a series of videos, and the whole event will be streamed live via wavefarm.org and broadcast Saturday through Sunday morning on Wave Farm's WGXC 90.7-FM.

24-Hour Drone: Experiments In Sound & Music starts at 3pm on 23 April. General admission and Drone Survival Kits can be bought via Brown Paper Tickets.

The curator planning an exhibition of artworks inspired by the music and history of Coil has put out an open call for contributions. Called Chaostrophy, the exhibition will feature Coil-related visual and mixed media works, video art, sound performances and live readings.

“We would like to appeal to people, artists and musicians who have worked closely with members of the band or knew them personally to share stories via audio recordings to be played over a special video art work,” says curator Ceven Knowles.

The deadline for submissions is 1 May. Chaostrophy will run at Berlin’s Ludwig gallery from 17 June–24 July.

The next Liverpool International Festival Of Psychedelia will take place from 23–24 September. Now in its fifth year, the festival describes itself as a “pan-continental celebration of audio-futurists, operating at the bleeding edge of today’s psychedelic renaissance”.

Artists on the bill include Super Furry Animals, Demdike Stare, Eartheater, Sliver Apples, Acid Mothers Temple, Ashtray Navigations, Taman Shud, Silver Waves, Cavern Of Anti-Matter, and more. Tokyo based label Guruguru Brain will also present Narrow Road To The Deep Mind, which promises to present some of ”the finest PZYK wunderkinds from across the Asian underground”.

The festival takes place at Camp And Furnace, Blade Factory Liverpool. Tickets are on sale now via the festival's website.

Ethiopian saxophonist Getatchew Mekuria died on 4 April. He was 80 years old. The news of his death was announced by his friends The Ex, the Dutch punk veterans with whom he regularly collaborated during the past decade.

Mekuria’s musical career spanned eight decades, starting in 1949 when he joined The Municipality Band. He went on to play in The Haile Selassie Orchestras, The National Theatre Orchestra, and more. In 1970 he released the album Negus Of Ethiopian Sax,which was reissued as part of the influential Ethiopiques series in 2003. From the mid-2000s onwards he played frequently with The Ex, making numerous appearances at the group’s residencies at London’s Cafe Oto. Before his death The Ex had announced a series of fundraising events to raise money for Mekuria’s healthcare costs.

Tin Angel is set to release Little Annie's first album since her 2013 Baby Dee collaboration State Of Grace. Called Trace, it’s also her first solo set since 2007's Songs From The Coalmine Canary.

Little Annie began the project in 2014 as a crowdsourced fundraiser via Pledge Music. With rewards on offer including limited edition copies, signed merchandise, one-off paintings and the album itself, the pledge reached 113 per cent of its target. The money raised helped pay for flights of those involved in the making of the allbum, along with its production costs.

The majority of Trace’s songs were written and recorded in Toronto with singer and improvisor Ryan Driver. Brooklyn electronica trio Opal Onyx and Little Annie’s longstanding collaborator Paul Wallfisch also contributed to the record.

“I thought I was going to reinvent jazz on this record, but it’s so far off that concept!” laughs Little Annie. “You keep trying to figure what you are,” she continues, “because the world asks you what you are, and all I know is I’m a torch singer, which is all about giving parts of yourself away.”

Trace will be released by Tin Angel on 20 May. in 2013 the label also published Annie’s memoir You Can't Sing The Blues While Drinking Milk – the same year Existencil Press published her book of prose, Sing Don't Cry: I Remember Mexico.

Watch a video for the album track “Midlife Lazarus”

Tony Conrad died on 9 April in Hospice Buffalo, Cheektowaga, after a battle with prostate cancer, reported The Buffalo News. He was 76 years old.

Conrad is often referred to as the pioneer of drone music in the West. But when he moved to New York City in the early 1960s, he also got heavily involved in film. The Flicker (1966), for example, is often cited as a central work in structuralist cinema. But Conrad was a composer and improvisor as much as he was a film maker. He was an early member of The Theatre Of Eternal Music alongside John Cale, Angus MacLise, La Monte Young and Marian Zazeela. Also referred to as The Dream Syndicate, The Theatre Of Eternal Music carried out long duration experiments in sustained noise and just intonation. In 1976 Conrad became a faculty member of the Univeristy of Buffalo's media studies department, where he remained up to his death.

The team behind Tyler Hubby’s documentary film-in-progress Tony Conrad: Completely In The Present posted the following comment on Facebook on 9 April: “Dear Friends, We have learned that Tony passed away today. Although this news is not surprising it is nonetheless sad and unsettling. This is a post we never wanted to write. A world without Tony in it seems inconceivable. He was one of the great stars in the cosmos but sometimes only seen by those who knew where to look. [...] Tony always took us to the edge of reason and now he has expanded beyond that. He will be dearly missed but never, ever, ever forgotten.”

Conrad was born on 7 March 1940, in New Hampshire. He attended music school in Harvard, but ended up receiving a degree in higher mathematics because, as he told Richard Henderson in The Wire 170, “the place wasn’t suitable for anything else”. After graduating, he moved to New York. “I arrived in New York and began to hang out with La Monte Young,” he continued. “I came to find out what the scene was like. There were so many interesting people working there, so I had to be there and find out. I had met La Monte some time before, but I found out about Fluxus when I moved to the city.

Conrad on the cover of The Wire 170

“The people I encountered then were opposed to the institutions of high culture from the ground up. I mean, they were ready to tear the goddamn thing apart and throw it in the trash!

“On the other hand,” he added, “there were artists emerging from 1950s Abstract Expressionism who believed that the art gesture was what led to art in its most expressive and coherent form. [...] In that context, starting off to reinhabit the territory of sound was a way of entering into a cultural scene that had been swept clear in some respects, both by John Cage and by the efforts of diverse artists who were interested in music. [...] To revive the territory of sound took a lot of guts and directness and emotional investment.”

Richard’s feature goes on to explain that Conrad was ”instrumental in introducing [John] Cale to Lou Reed, to the extent of offering a name for the latter duo's new group, culled from the title of a pulp fiction paperback which Conrad had found on a New York sidewalk: The Velvet Underground”.

From 1965 onwards, after leaving The Dream Syndicate, Conrad focused on films. He worked as a technical advisor and sound engineer for the late Jack Smith on films like Flaming Creatures.

In 1973 Conrad collaborated with the German group Faust on Outside The Dream Syndicate. He went on to compose a series of pieces for amplified strings, which can be heard on his albums Early Minimalism Volume One (1997) and Slapping Pythagoras (1995). he has also collaborated with the likes of Charlemagne Palestine, Genesis P-Orridge, Keiji Haino, Jim O'Rourke and C Spencer Yeh, among others.

“By minimal music,” Conrad explained to Richard Henderson, “I'm talking about music that involved tonality and a sense of particular modes that turned up again and again; rhythm as a basis for repetitive metrical form in one of many ways; loops and extended durations; long pieces with middles, but no endings and no beginnings, conveying a sense in the overall structure of the piece that the onset and the climax had much less to do with the music than the conditions in the middle of the piece.”

You can read Richard Henderson’s cover feature about Tony Conrad over at Exact Editions.

Conrad is survived by his wife Paige Sarlin and son Ted Conrad.

Boxcutter's Barry Lynn has released the video for "Sunset Induction" from Esalen Lectures, the second album by his cultish new age alter ego The Host. Created by Niadzi Muzira, the video features synthesized and filtered footage that was originally used as the backdrop to a live performance in Italy.

Esalen Lectures was released by Touch Sensitive in late 2015. According to Lynn, the album was inspired by "think tanks and flotation tanks, psychological research, 2012 mythology, 1960's social planning, stoned apes, elite transhumanism, and the counter-culture". In addition to the new video, Lynn has shared an outtake from the sessions for Esalen Lectures, an alternative version of album opener "Begin".

The outtake and video coincide with a limited sale on Esalen Lectures from both the Touch Sensitive shop and selected retailers. Subscribers to can read Dan Barrow's review of the album in The Wire 380 via the online archive.

Long sought after by completists, J Dilla's Jay Love Japan was inspired by one of the pioneering producer and rapper's favourite tour locations. Following his death in 2006 the album attained mythic status, circulating in bootleg form until the 2008 release of an official CD (now out of print).

To mark Mother's Day in the US, Dilla's mother Ma Dukes is to reissue Jay Loves Japan via her label Vintage Vibez Music Group. The 11 track collection of instrumentals and vocal tracks – the announcement of which follows news regarding the release of Dilla's lost vocal album The Diary – features appearances from Blu, Miguel, J*Davey, Ta'Raach, Exile, Baatin, among others. Listen below to an exclusive bonus track from the 7" flexi-disc to be included in the deluxe edition alongside the album on CD and vinyl plus an exclusive Jay Love Japan T-shirt.

J Dilla's Jay Love Japan will be released by Vintage Vibez Music Group on 6 May. Read an exclusive online feature on J Dilla here. Subscribers to The Wire can read Jordan Ferguson's J Dilla Primer via the online archive.