Composer Peter Maxwell Davies has died at the age of 81. He was diagnosed with leukaemia in 2013. Along with Harrison Birtwhistle and Alexander Goehr, Davies belonged to the Manchester School of Composers, which came together when he was studying at Royal Manchester College of Music in the 1950s. Inspired by both the tonal music of Arnold Schoenberg and the electronic and tape approaches of Karlheinz Stockhausen, the Manchester school created a new strain of musical theatre in UK contemporary music. Works like Davies’s Revelation And Fall (1966) and Birtwhistle’s Punch And Judy (1968) were deemed subversive, brutal and frequently controversial. At a 1970 US staging of Davies’s Eight Songs For A Mad King, for example, the US minimalist composer Julius Eastman in the title role was directed to tear a violin from the grip of a performing musician and then destroy it. The piece, which was heckled at its UK premier a year earlier, went on to become one of Davies's most performed works.

Together with Birtwhistle, Davies co-founded the chamber music ensemble The Pierrot Players principally to perform Arnold Schoenberg’s Pierrot Lunaire. The group later morphed into The Fires Of London, the ensemble that went on to give premier performances of many of Davies’s future compositions.

In 1971 Davies moved to the Orkney Islands, some 16 kilometres north of Scotland, a life change that significantly affected his music. On occasion, the local school orchestra were called on to premier a new Davies composition in the Orkneys. “They have got huge potential as people who improvise and create marvellous music,” the composer told Brian Morton in The Wire 75 in 1990. “When I used to be in a classroom situation I didn't care what they did so long as they were directing all their person, all their being, towards making music.”

Life on the islands wasn’t always easy. Davies reputedly lived there for long spells without electricity or running water. In 2005 he had a bizarre run-in with the law, when the police cautioned him for cooking a dead swan that had flown into power lines. “I had to give a statement. I offered them coffee and asked them if they would like to try some swan terrine, but I think they were rather horrified,” he told the BBC. His tenth and last symphony, partly composed from his hospital bed after he was diagnosed with leukaemia in 2013, was inspired by the Roman architect Borromini, who stabbed himself to death with his own sword in 1667.

Brian Morton interviewed Peter Maxwell Davies for The Wire 75, read it via our online archive here.

The UK launch of Norient’s new collection of globetrotting music essays Seismographic Sounds: Visions Of A New World will take place at London’s Rough Trade East next month. Thomas Burkhalter, one of Seismographic Sounds’ editors, will moderate an audiovisual panel featuring researcher Martin Stokes, musician Nkisi and The Wire’s Louise Gray and Derek Walmsley, all of whom contributed pieces to the anthology. The event will conclude with a DJ battle between Nkisi’s Non Records and DJ Ritu.

The launch takes place on 25 April. The book is out now on Norient. Read Derek Walmsley's contribution to the book, Deconstructing Violence In Grime, in our Book Extracts section.

The Wire Contributing Editor Frances Morgan will be hosting two talks at this year’s Counterflows festival in Glasgow. Presented in association with the Glasgow Women’s Library, the talks include a discussion with Áine O’Dwyer about her recent releaase Music For Church Cleaners Vol I And II and her work in unusual environments such as a Victorian tunnel under London's River Thames; and Zeena Parkins on the process of building and refining electric harps, as well as the numerous collaborations she has undertaken for film, dance and the visual arts. Both O'Dwyer and Parkins will be perfoming at the festival. Also on the bill are Inga Copeland, Sensational, Graham Lambkin, Billy Bao and many more.

Counterflows takes place between 7-10 April at various Glasgow venues.

Japanese sound artist Akio Suzuki has created a set of new works for his solo exhibition at Brooklyn’s Southfirst Gallery. Curated by Aki Onda, and co-organised by Maika Pollack and Audio Visual Arts (AVA), the exhibition is called pa chin ko, referencing the 75 year old Suzuki's site-specific installation involving an interactive overflowing room-size version of the pachinko machine seen and heard in game arcades across Japan. Suzuki's installation features four interactive sculptural walls and a procession of metal balls dropping onto a series of nails. A live performance of the sound works will be performed by Suzuki at the opening event on 23 March. Justin Luke of AVA explains, “Suzuki grew up near Nagoya, Japan, where pachinko, a traditional Japanese arcade game, was created. Stumbling into a pachinko parlour one afternoon as an adult, Suzuki encountered strange parallels to his practice as a musician. The idea of dropping a series of metal balls into a randomised field of materials and following their chaotic decent is a playful return to a legendary piece Suzuki created in 1963. In this work Suzuki threw a bucket of junk down a flight of stairs at the Nagoya train station. The goal was to observe and listen to the rhythm of the stairs.”

As well as the exhibition, Suzuki will be presenting a series of performances called Conceptual Soundwork: 1978–1986 at Issue Project Room on 18 March.

pa chin ko runs from 23 March–8 May at Brooklyn’s Southfirst Gallery.

Tokyo’s PSF Records, the label responsible for key Japanese underground releases by Nanjo’s original psychedelic speed freaks High Rise, Keiji Haino and Fushitsusha, White Heaven, free jazz saxophonist Kaoru Abe and more, has made a deal with the new US imprint Black Editions that will bring several “lost classics” back into circulation.

From its Los Angeles base, Black Editions states that it acquired the rights to the PSF catalogue in 2014, and its first run of releases will include Fushitsusha’s 2nd Live, High Rise’s High Rise II, the Tokyo Flashback compilation, and Che-Shizu’s A Journey. Plus, “through a special arrangement with the artist”, Keiji Haino’s solo debut album Watashi-Dake?, originally released in 1981 by the Pinakotheca label and reissued by PSF in 1993. Each record will be remastered from the best available source, and some of them will be pressed on vinyl for the first time.

“The albums of the PSF catalogue have achieved a legendary status,” continues Black Editions’ news announcement. “Ranging from psychedelic rock, folk and punk to jazz, free improvisation and the avant garde, the PSF catalogue has been defiantly eclectic and uncompromising.

“As the label founder Hideo Ikeezumi told us: ‘I only wanted to release music on PSF that refused to limit itself to genres, that had zero commercialism, that possessed kokoro (heart), and that had a feeling of freedom. In that sense, I was heavily influenced by Masayuki Takayanagi. I was very much affected by something he said when I was 19 – that an artist should put their life on the line in order to express themselves’.”

The full list of titles in the Black Editions catalogue can be found here.

PSF, meanwhile, is still championing different kinds of Japanese music, releasing guitarist Hideaki Kondo’s second album and saxophonist Makoto Kawashima’s Homer Sacer, both in 2015.

nyMusikk’s Only Connect festival will be collaborating with Tectonics Festival for its fifth edition. Taking place in May, the Oslo event launches with a concert premiering Sweet Pieces, a specially commissioned work by Norwegian composer Øyvind Torvund, performed by The Oslo Philharmonic Orchestra conducted by Tectonic founder Ilan Volkov. The Philharmonic will also perform Jim O’Rourke’s Come Back Soon. Other highlights include Christian Marclay’s Screen Play and the pianist Maya Dunietz playing short pieces by Ethiopian composer Emahoy Tsegué-Maryam Guèbrou, and much more..

Only Connect happens between 20–21 May, Oslo Sentralen. The full programme can be found at nyMusikk's website.

To celebrate its 25th anniversary, the Bad Bonn music venue in Fribourg will publish a songbook with contributions from some of the approximately 1500 bands who’ve played there. Called Bad Bonn Song Book, it has been in the making for the last two and a half years, with artists adding anything from sheet music to lyrics, guitar tabs, photos and drawings. The book runs to 528 pages and it includes the work of 264 artists. “You have 264 songs that you can 'practice',” enthuse the book's graphic designers/editors Katharina Reidy and Adeline Mollard. “As we are not the best at archiving stuff, we decided to create a song book instead of a conventional historic book," the pair explain over email. "We asked artists who played at Bad Bonn to give us the score of one of their songs on paper. Beside the fact that these contributions are all great testimonials of the artists for the Bad Bonn, we were also very interested in how musicians write down their music and in the action of capturing sound on paper. As the project went on, we realised that most of the musicians who played at Bad Bonn don't write their music at all, which makes the book even more interesting.”

Mac Demarco “The Stars Keep Calling My Name” (left), Sleaford Mods “Bronx In A Six” (right)

Participating artists include: Goat, Jandek, Arto Lindsay, Panda Bear, Maja Ratkje, Shabazz Palaces, Shangaan Electro, Sleaford Mods, and more. But that's not all. “We also have a Website,” add Katharina and Adeline. “It works as a web archive where the bands recorded a tutorial video to show the reader how to play their song. The reader can then play its own version of it and upload it to the website.”

R Stevie Moore “Sort Of Way” (left), Jandeck “Lilac Garden” (right)

Bad Bonn Song Book is published by Edition Patrick Frey. You can watch a whole host of these tutorials online at Bad Bonns website. See Bardo Pond's lesson below

Update: list of contributors has been corrected. Some of the artists previously mentioned (Aphex Twin, No-Neck Blues Band, Battles, Clark, Marc Ribot,
 Jim Jarmusch, Killl, Death Grips, Sunn O))), Lasse Marhaug, David Grubbs, Psychic TV and Nisennenmondai) are not featured in the book.

A major sound art exhibition is currently underway at Lima Contemporary Art Museum. Claiming to be the largest of its kind in Latin America, the exhibition focuses on Peruvian artists. “This exhibition seeks to offer an overview of sound art in Peru. For the first time ever, more than 40 works are given a space to bear testament to the ever-evolving relationship between sound culture and the visual arts in our country,” states the gallery. “Although the expression ‘sound art’ is used to talk about a limitless number of sound related practices tied to experimental music, in this exhibition we use the term to refer to an art in which sound is the principal vehicle for the production of meaning.”

Artists whose works are on display include Jorge Eduardo Eielson, Manogo Mujica, Francisco Mariotti, Abel Castro, Gabriel Castillo, Jaime Oliver, José Carlos Martinat, José Luis Martinat, José Ignacio López, Karla Ramírez, Luis Alvarado, Luisa Fernanda Lindo, Macarena Rojas, Manuel Larrea, Martín Jiménez, María Gracia Ego Aguirre, Mario Montalbetti, Maya Watanabe, Nicolás Lamas, Omar Aramayo, Omar Lavalle, Pablo Hare, Paola Torres, and many more.

Hacer La Audición (Hear Here): Encounters Between Art And Sound In Peru runs until 9 April. Watch a short film of the exhibition below.

As reported back in November, Cuba will be hosting an international electronic music festival from 4–6 May. The kickstarter-funded Manana will take place in Santiago de Cuba. Artists so far confirmed include A Guy Called Gerald, Nicolas Jaar, Plaid, Adrian Sherwood & Skip McDonald, Sofrito Tropical Discotheque, Obbatuké, Soundway DJs, Gifted & Blessed, Compañía Ballet Folklórico de Oriente, DJ Khalab and Soul Of Hex and others, with more still to be announced. The festival has also planned a series of collaborations between Cuban and international artists. It has taken over the Museo de La Musica for the ten days leading up to the event, turning it into an artist hub with fully equipped rehearsal rooms, translators and relaxation spaces. “We are also working with the local community and Cuban government to give unprecedented access to the culture of the city,” say the festival organisers. “Every night we will be taking the collaborators deep into the city's artistic core to visit rumba courtyards, Yoruba ceremonies, conga processions and reggae street parties.”

Tickets are on sale now, with accommodation and flight packages also on offer.

The legendary Berlin techno club Tresor celebrates its 25th anniversary this year, marking the occasion with a series of dedicated events and the release of a new Tresor compilation. In a press announcement of its upcoming celebrations, the club states: “A quarter-century of Tresor means over 5000 club nights, about 30,000 different DJ sets and countless awakening experiences for DJs, artists, guests and contributors. When Tresor opened on 13 March 1991 in a shack on Potsdamer Platz, beneath which the vault of the Wertheim department store lay, no one would have thought that from there would arise an institution that one day would celebrate 25 years of existence. The venue had only been licensed as an art gallery and received a lease of just three months.” Talking of the events in store for the techno club and label, founder Dimitri Hegemann remarks, “The message from 25 years of Tresor is just as its always been, and as topical as ever: give young people space to realise their ideas. Say yes to their experiments. Let it happen.”

Setting off the jubilee will be a launch night on 12 March featuring DJ Pete, Pacou, Sleeparchive and Vainqueur; plus, new to the Tresor roster, Claudia Anderson, Zadig, Psyk and JC as well as UK producer Steve Bicknell. The Tresor 25 Years Festival will run between 21–23 July (acts yet to be confirmed), and a new Tresor compilation will be released in October. Celebrations also include Tresor’s first ever event in Detroit on 28 May. Event details can be found over on Tresor's website.