The sixth edition of the experimental music festival El Nicho happens this May. Taking place at various venues in Mexico City, the festival spans free jazz, improvisation, noise, live cinema and workshops.

This year, the festival is also seeking to cover its production, promotion and operation costs by raising money through a local crowd-sourcing platform. At the time of writing, the campaign has reached £6,387.17, that's 67 per cent of the desired amount, with 14 days to go.

So far, the line-up includes The Thing, Mats Gustafsson/Paal Nilssen-Love/ Ingebrigt Håker Flaten, Mazen Kerbaj, Lori Goldston, Akira Sakata, Mike Cooper, Kassel Jaeger, and many others. It takes place between 11–15 May.

Staubgold is set to release a collection of works by the New York based UK music writer and musician Vivien Goldman. Focusing on Goldman's three musicial formations over a three year period, Resolutionary (Songs 1979–1982), includes tracks from her solo career, her work with The Flying Lizards, and as one half of the Parisian duo Chantage alongside Eve Blouin.

Most of the tracks were produced by Adrian Sherwood, and they feature contributions from PiL’s John Lydon, Keith Levene and Bruce Smith; Steve Beresford, David Toop, The Raincoats’ Vicky Aspinall, Robert Wyatt, The Slits’ Viv Albertine, Neneh Cherry, and others.

Resolutionary (Songs 1979–1982) will be released by Staubgold on 20 May.

Listen to “Launderette”, originally from Dirty Washing (1981) and now included on the forthcoming Resolutionary set.

George Lyle, who has died at the age of 76, is an unsung great of the double bass, and a giant of Scottish jazz and improvised music. While his profile may have been relatively low outside Scotland, in his home city of Glasgow he was a hero. “Everybody loved George,” says saxophonist and Glasgow Improvisers Orchestra co-director Raymond MacDonald. “An incredible musician and a gentle and wonderful man.” Living in London in the 1960s, Lyle was present at the birth of British free improvisation, and his lifelong commitment to free playing made him an inspiration to younger musicians.

For The Wire contributor David Keenan, who played with him in the punk-primitive free-jazz trio Tight Meat, Lyle was “the single greatest free improvising bass player in the UK”, whose tactile and complex style drew from “a buncha schools but [was] never fully resident in any of them”.

After hearing Lyle play with Daniel Carter and Fritz Welch at last year’s Counterflows festival, a friend described the bassist as “an organic machine”. That vigorous yet zoned quality is echoed in GIO bassist Una McGlone's description of Lyle’s “brilliantly clear, driving sound”, and the “beautiful economy in his note choice and phrasing”.

Sharply dressed, with a warm presence, Lyle was, as Keenan puts it, “old school hip” with “a very personal sense of time” that was reflected in the “casual, loping” way he walked. Music could often be heard coming from Lyle’s flat on Glasgow’s Belmont Street, where he would play bass and piano, and jam regularly with friends. Inside, the flat was a model of bohemian living, with books, records and musical instruments everywhere. He even had congas set up in the kitchen so he could play while waiting for the kettle to boil.

Lyle began playing the bass when he was 16 and discovered the avant garde via Schoenberg’s piano and violin concertos. Moving to London in the early 1960s, Lyle shared a house with fellow Scots Maggie Nicols and the bassist, tubaist and poet Lindsay Cooper (no relation to the Henry Cow bassoonist). He would frequent the city’s jazz clubs, where he saw the likes of Joe Harriot, Tubby Hayes, Albert Ayler, Peter Kowald and Barry Guy. While Lyle was playing regularly with friends, public performance was not a priority for him. As he told me in an interview last year, “I was there listening.” He did play one gig at John Stevens’ Little Theatre club, but as he recollected with a smile, “it was totally deserted”.

Lyle’s social circle in London included Caetano Veloso and Gilberto Gil, then exiled from Brazil. “I met them through the guys I used to practise with a lot, Roland Chiswick, Chris Barton,” he recalled. “I did play a wee bit with Gilberto Gil, but not very long. They were all amazing people, amazing.”

Upon his return to Glasgow in the 1970s Lyle played in a number of bands, including Birth, who supported Chris McGregor’s Brotherhood Of Breath at the city’s McLellan Galleries in 1973. A video of the concert was recently digitised for a Glasgow School of Art project and despite the degraded quality, Lyle can be clearly heard taking a remarkable solo around the 13 minute mark.

Lyle also played with the playwright and pianist Tom McGrath, and in 1975 joined the radical 7:84 Theatre Company. In 1979 Trevor Watts invited him to tour Greece and Italy in an incarnation of Amalgam that included AMM’s Keith Rowe on electric guitar and Liam Gennockey on drums. This group can be heard on the FMR box set Wipe Out.

In the 80s, Lyle was a lynchpin of the Glasgow scene, often playing in the pick-up bands for visiting musicians, and developing a sadly undocumented trio with saxophonist John Longbotham and drummer Nick Weston. Joining George Burt and Raymond MacDonald’s band in the mid-90s afforded Lyle more freedom as an improvisor, and the relationships forged in that group led to the founding of Glasgow Improvisers Orchestra in 2000. MacDonald saw Lyle as “a hugely influential member of GIO. His approach to improvising [was] always warm and inviting, gently encouraging others into new places.”

A short film about Glasgow Improvisers Orchestra

In 2003, Lyle and several GIO cohorts contributed to David Byrne’s Lead Us Not Into Temptation, the sound track to David MacKenzie’s film of Alexander Trocchi’s Young Adam. Four years later, Lyle joined Tight Meat for a tour with legendary saxophonist Sonny Simmons. As Keenan said “They hooked up so strong, both with a really weird, tangential relationship to blues which was profoundly future-focussed.”

Tight Meat with Sonny Simmons, Portand Arms, Cambridge, 2007

Lyle’s most recent project was a duo with percussionist Fritz Welch, who he met through GIO. Their Bandcamp release Fortified Echo was reviewed in The Wire 381. It’s a fitting testament to a musician who, as Alex Neilson puts it, was “always totally open to hearing new things and moving in new directions”.

George Lyle & Fritz Wech – Fortified Echo

The sound artist, acoustic ecologist and field recordist Jed Speare has died, the Family Vineyard label has announced. The Indianapolis label released the double disc set Sound Works 1982–87 in 2008.

Speare was born in Boston in 1954, and inspired by R Murray Schafer’s environmental sound manifesto The Tuning Of The World, attended Schafer’s World Soundscape Project in Vancouver to study. He moved to San Francisco in 1980, and played with groups including Ultrasheen and Research Library – “pursuing my own notions of acoustic communication, ecology and design”, as he told Dan Warburton in The Wire 289 – both of whom released music on San Francisco hardcore label Subterranean. In 1982 he learned that San Francisco’s famous cable car network was due to close for repair work, and set about preserving its unique sounds for posterity, from the grinding of the gears and the ringing of the bells to reminiscences from drivers and passengers. Cable Car Soundscapes sold out quickly, and was subsequently reissued by Folkways in 1983.

Speare explored speech recordings further in a project that followed soon after, At The Falls, where he used sounds culled from roaming the corridors of a psychiatric hospital in Mirecourt in northeastern France. A similar interest in documenting the sound life of insitutions led to Sleep Tight, a collaboration with Barbara Duifjes presented in New York in 1983, which used recordings made at the Montefiore Medical Center Sleep Clinic in the Bronx.

In the early 1990s Speare became an occupational hearing conservationist, advising factory workers in hearing protection. His longstanding interest in acoustic ecology led to community-based projects in Massachusetts and Toronto, and in the 2000s Speare ran the Boston venue Studio Soto, which hosted performances, screenings, exhibitions and more, and championed improvisors including Howard Stelzer, Vic Rawlings, Greg Kelley and Bhob Rainey.

The compilation Sound Works 1982-87 was released in 2008. “We both expected the collection to sell like hot cakes,” writes Eric Weddle of Family Vineyard. “It didn't… But a lot of people took notice and I believe it clearly made the case for Jed's standing in contemporary sound art. It also laid bare the utterly human emotion he could amplify/construct through rumblings, cracks, bellows, howls, scree, murmurs, clangs and all those many voices.” A second compilation of Speare’s work, The Wounds of Returning: Sound Works II – 1974–1983, was released by Far Point Recordings in October 2015.

Speare died on 22 March. Dan Warburton interviewed him for The Wire 289. You can hear excerpts from At The Falls here.

A new book lifts the lid on life inside The Butthole Surfers, one of the most chaotic yet original rock groups of the 1980s. James Burns’s Let's Go To Hell: Scattered Memories Of The Butthole Surfers is the culmination of over two decades of gathering information on the Texan band, much of which was originally collated on Burns’s The Anal Obsession website. The book is now available in a new paperback edition, which follows Burn’s self-published first version of last year.

“Music journalist Charles M Young had the idea for the book a long time ago,” Burns recounts. “But being friends with the band meant they would endlessly lead him on wild goose chases about their origins, making up fake bands that supposedly existed in the early San Antonio ‘scene’.” Burns, a New Yorker, picked up on the band years after their records were released. “I am probably the only person who was able to get any factual information,” he argues. “By actually not knowing the band, being so far removed, that is the only way I was able to write.”

The problem with documenting the career of The Butthole Surfers, a group who soaked up psychedelic drugs and cultivated their reputation as merry pranksters, is separating fact and fiction. They were notorious for bizarre interviews, notably conducting one in bed surrounded by beer and pizza while seemingly tripping on acid. “The Anal Obsession web page documents nearly all of their concerts, so I had the frame of reference of where they were and when,” Burns says. “I had been in contact with many of their friends and former band members, and often heard similar stories, so I pieced them together in to some semblance of the truth.”

In the 1990s The Butthole Surfers were hailed as precursors of grunge. “There were a few years between, say, 1987–91, if it wasn’t for The Butthole Surfers filling that void, I am not sure what would have happened,” says Burns. The Surfers' use of tape editing, loops and vocal manipulation has also exerted a strong influence on noise music, as well as psychedelic explorers of various shades, in the decades that followed.

The group never officially split up, but its members have followed separate paths in recent years. “I had been asking questions via their online forum, and Paul [Leary] and King [Coffey] were answering questions like that,” Burns explains. “We chatted at length... Jeff [Pinkus] and Teresa [Nervosa] too… as well as all the members of past incarnations. They all hate talking about the band. It’s the one thing they all have in common.”

The notable absence from the book is Gibby Haynes, perhaps the main driving force of the group. “They have been misrepresented in the press so often, it was understandable they were a bit squeamish about the idea of a book,” Burns concedes. “Gibby never did agree to speak to me, but I completely understand where he was coming from. Paul Leary, however, really is a genius when it comes to equipment and recording and production techniques. The last half of the book goes into their discography and I was able to finally get the sleevenotes missing from their albums... Here’s a scoop: the Ibanez DM1100 digital delay holds many of the secrets.”

The Butthole Surfers’ last studio album was released in 2001, but a live album Live At The Forum London emerged in 2008. “The band will never be ‘broken up’,” states Burns. “There is a bond much stronger than just friendship. We may get an another studio album one day, another tour is much less likely, but who knows for sure? One thing I can say after all these years of following them is to never try to predict what they might do next.”

Let's Go to Hell: Scattered Memories Of The Butthole Surfers is out now. More information is available at The Anal Obsession website.

Rapper Malik Isaac Taylor, better known as A Tribe Called Quest's Phife Dawg, has died. He was 45 years old. Taylor had been suffering health problems for several years; he was diagnosed with Type 1 diabetes in 1990 and received a kidney transplant from his wife in 2008.

Taylor grew up in Queens, New York, where he founded A Tribe Called Quest with school friends Q-Tip and Ali Shaheed Mohammed. The group released their debut album People's Instinctive Travels And The Paths Of Rhythm in 1990 to considerable critical acclaim. The album kicked off a trilogy – continued by 1991's The Low End Theory and concluded with 1993's Midnight Marauders – that is widely recognised as one of the greatest and most influential album sequences in the history of hiphop. Parallel to this, the group formed the Afrodelic collective Native Tongues with De La Soul and Jungle Brothers, whose cultural impact can still be felt today in the work of artists like Shabazz Palaces, THEESatisfaction and Open Mike Eagle.

Though often overshadowed by the charismatic and hyperactive Q-Tip, Taylor was appreciated by fans for his sharp wit and earthy preoccupations. The MC was unafraid to flip his own health issues into an artful boast, dropping the line "When's the last time you heard a funky diabetic?" on 1993's "Oh My God".

A Tribe Called Quest's last two albums, 1996's Beats, Rhymes And Life and 1998's The Love Movement, were co-produced by Detroit beatmaker Jay Dee, later known as J Dilla, who alongside Pete Rock ahd Hi-Tek worked on Taylor's only solo album, 2000's Ventilation: Da LP. A follow-up with the working title of MUTTYmorPHosis was reputedly in the works.

The Set Ensemble member and rambling sound artist Patrick Farmer is set to release his 2014 publication Wild Horses Think Of Nothing Else The Sea as an audiobook. Written during a six week walk across the Welsh coast, Wild Horses was originally published by Saru and Farmer's own imprint Compost And Height, which he runs with Sarah Hughes.

The double cassette tape will be released by Ben Owen's Windsmeasure imprint in April. Readers include Antoine Beuger, Jeph Jerman, Bruno Guastalla, Sally Ann Mcintyre, Holly Pester, Daniela Cascella and Michael Pisaro. Designed and printed by Owen, it features a letterpress inner and outer sleeve. There is also a limited edition version available that includes a page from Farmer's original handwritten text.

Listen to extracts from the release:

A fund-raising campaign has been started to help US industrial culture pioneer Z’EV pay his hospital bills after he was hurt in a Kansas train accident on 14 March. The metal percussionist and poet was returning from a gig in New Mexico when the train he was travelling on derailed just before midnight. The crash left Z’EV with serious chest injuries. At the time of writing he is in hospital in Amarillo, Texas.

“Finally got to Z'EV's bedside this morning,” his friend Barbara Barg reported on the campaign site. “He's completely off the ventilator. He has five broken ribs (I thought it was four before) and a punctured lung. It will be six months to a year before he can do gigs again, because he won't be able to lift and use his drummer arms till the ribs are healed.

“I set up my computer and he was able to scroll through the great messages from people,” she added. “He was blown away with the outpouring of love and generosity. We're keeping this campaign going, because he's going to need a lot of assistance in the next six months, and he has not insurance. Thank you all so much.”

Donations can be sent through the gofundme.com website.

One Love Books are currently touring In Fine Style: The Dancehall Art Of Wilfred Limonious, Christopher Bateman and Al ‘Fingers’ Newman’s book and accompanying exhibition that celebrates the pioneering dancehall illustrator and cartoonist Wilfred Limonious (1949–99).

“For the past five years,” says One Love Books’ founder Al Newman, “Christopher Bateman and myself have been documenting Limonious' extensive body of work, primarily for a book (due out this summer) but also for this exhibition which is currently touring the UK.”

Jez Riley French, Katie English aka Isnaj Dui and Nigel Morgan have been commissioned by Fresh Yorkshire Aires to produce a new series of photographic scores. Though it’s part-funded by Leeds College of Music, the project has started a crowdfunding campaign to help finance the publication of a limited edition book and prints of the scores, as well as performances of the four pieces by Matthew Bourne and Philip Thomas in Leeds Munro House (16 June) and Sheffield Bank Street Arts (30).