Pan Sonic founder Mika Vainio has scored the soundtrack to Mika Taanila’s new feature length film. Called Mannerlaatta aka Tectonic Plate, it’s a 74 minute lettrist film made entirely without a camera, and it's about the fear of flying, security checks and crossing time zones. “After returning from a trip to Tokyo,” states the synopsis, “the nameless protagonist is inexplicably stuck at a hotel near the Helsinki airport. The attention and activities of the individual are divided into several directions at once. The use of various technical devices slivers the time management and modifies the jetlagged consciousness.”

“The film consists of three different visual elements,” explains director Taanila. “Photocopying various documents connected to air travel, such as boarding passes, airport maps, on-board safety instructions directly on clear 35mm film; Photograms executed directly on 35mm black and white reversal film by placing objects directly on the film surface in a photographer’s darkroom; and finally, the text, which was written for the film by poet Harry Salmenniemi (the original version in Finnish).” Vainio composed roughly 50 minutes of music to accompany the film’s imagery. “Mika composed and recorded the music at quite an early stage of the two and a half year project, so it dominated much of the editing rhythm of the visual narration,” Taanila adds. “For inspiration I sent Mika two of Harry’s books, the text for this film and some samples of photocopy/photogram materials.”

This is Vainio’s third film collaboration with Taanila – they previously worked together on the short A Physical Ring (2002) and last year's documentary Return Of The Atom.

Translating as Tectonic Plate, Mannerlaatta premiered on 15 February at Berlinale Forum Expanded. The film will also be screened at Kiasma Museum of Contemporary Art in Helsinki (31 March–2 April) and Tampere Biennale (14 April), with more showings to be confirmed for later in the year.

You can watch a trailer of the film below:

Hamburg label Bureau B is set to release a nine album Cluster box set this spring. Documenting the groups output after founding member Conrad Schnitzler left, and the remaining duo – Hans-Joachim Roedelius and Dieter Moebius – swapped the K for a C, Cluster 1971–1981 includes the eight albums released during this time, plus a previously unreleased album of two live recordings made between 1972–77. All the albums have been remastered by Willem Makkee, and Asmus Tietchens has contributed notes about the evolution of the outfit,with essays about each individual album. Releases include: Cluster 71, Cluster II, Zuckerzeit, Sowiesoso, Cluster & Eno, Eno Moebius Roedelius: After The Heat, Grosses Wasser, Curiosum and the previously unreleased Konzerte 1972/1977.

Pressed in limited runs of 1000 vinyl and 1500 CD copies, the set will be released on 8 April. You can listen to a selection of tracks below.

The former Issue Project Room artistic director Lawrence Kumpf has started a new curatorial platform called Blank Forms. “Dedicated to the presentation and preservation of time-based performance practices”, the project will kick off with a series of events dedicated to the work of the late sound artist Maryanne Amacher (1938–2009). Called Labyrinth Gives Way To Skin after one of Amacher's works, the first event will be held on 4 March and in collaboration with the Maryanne Amacher Archive. Robert The and Bill Dietz will be presenting a seminar investigating Amacher’s work on the psychoacoustic dimensions of perception, followed by a listening session comprising entirely of unpublished audio, images of scores, notes and texts selected from the archive. According to Kumpf, the project is set to continue for the next two years, with two concerts in preparation for this autumn.

Labyrinth Gives Way To Skin: Seminar 1 will take place on 4 March at New York Emily Harvey Foundation, 3pm. Tickets are available here.

The French imprint Lenka Lente has published a slim volume of poetic couplets by the late US composer, instrument inventor and street musician Louis Hardin aka Moondog. Called 50 Couplets, the 40 page bilingual pamphlet includes the original English and French translations of Moondog’s words of wisdom, which he typically expressed in two line rhymes.

“I discovered Moondog’s poetry for the first time by listening to his first recordings, especially More Moondog, which contains the “Moondog Monologue”,” says Lenka Lente’s Guillaume Belhomme via email. “I found more about his poetry on Moondog’s Corner, the great website run by Wolfgang Gnida, including the original version of 50 Couplets, and I thought it would be great to translate it into French.” Moondog’s 50 Couplets is the latest in Lenka Lente’s series of French language texts of 20th century avant garde writings, which ranges from Italian futurist Francesco Balilla Pratella to US saxophone pioneer Jackie McLean.

Moondog’s discography is relatively small but his music grabbed the imaginations of wildly different musicians, including US minimalists like Steve Reich and Philip Glass, and UK jazz composer Kenny Graham. However, his poetry preceded his music records. “We always read about Moondog as a poet – blind and dressed like a Viking, of course, to catch the attention of possible new listeners,” states Belhomme. “In the 1940s, about ten years before Tony Schwartz first recorded him, he used to photocopy and sell his sarcastic poems in the streets of New York – he had some problems with the police for that.” The pieces making up 50 Couplets mark a progression from those earlier writings. Belhomme calls them “small fairy tales, love stories or even insults that tell about philosophy, history, environment, politics, economy… We could think of Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau, as Moondog often refers to nature – reminiscences of his childhood maybe, fishing, hunting, riding horses in Wyoming. But, indeed, it’s possible too that Moondog had one and only one influence: himself.

“Poetry and his music share a same interest for rhythm,” he argues. “That said, his couplets – a poem of two lines, of the same meter, that rhyme – can remind of the canons he has been inspired by for his music. As one of the couplets declares: ‘I find the greatest freedom in the stricture of a form/That paradoxes abnormality within a norm’.” 50 Couplets is published by Lenka Lente.

A new collection of essays and writings from cultural critic, musician and producer Greg Tate is set to be published this September. Drawing from works spanning the last 30 years of Tate's writings on African-American culture and music, The Greg Tate Reader: Flyboy 2 is divided into five sections: “The Black Male Show”, covering artists such as Wayne Shorter, John Coltrane, Lonnie Holley, Rammellzee, Miles Davis and Gil Scott-Heron; “She Laughing Mean and Impressive Too” discussing the likes of Azealia Banks, Joni Mitchell, Sade, Kara Walker and more in essays with titles like “All The Things You Could Be By Now If James Brown Was A Feminist” and “Mean, Queer, And Impressive”; “Hello Darknuss My Old Meme” about hiphop, Wu-Tang Clan and Outkast; “Screenings”; and “Race, Sex, Politricks And Belle Lettres”

Previous publications from Tate include Flyboy In The Buttermilk: Essays On Contemporary America, Midnight Lightning: Jimi Hendrix And The Black Experience, and Everything But The Burden: What White People Are Taking From Black Culture.

The Greg Tate Reader: Flyboy 2 will be published by Duke University Press this September.

The Glasgow Short Film Festival 2016 has commissioned a new audio-visual project incorporating footage of Scottish Highland folk singers filmed nearly 60 years ago by the Glasgow socialist film making collective Dawn Cine Group. Setting out to document the musical and cultural heritage of the Scottish Highlands through folk song and personal testimony, the collective started filming in July 1956. But the film, with its working title of Lost Treasure, was never completed. The Dawn Cine Group had managed to collect 40 minutes of footage, which will now be given a new lease of life by film maker Minttu Mäntynen and musicians Drew Wright (Wounded Knee) and Hamish Brown (Swimmer One), who have created an audio-visual accompaniment in response to the unfinished film. “With its unintentionally apt title, the abandoned film is in itself a reflection of the Scottish Highlands,” states Glasgow Short Film Festival, “much of it either neglected or exploited by absentee landlords, and its people, so many of whom have been forced off the land in one way or another. With land reform in Scotland as hotly topical now as it was in the 1950s, Lost Treasure has enduring relevance.”

GSFF Director Matt Lloyd adds, “After last year’s hugely successfully 30th anniversary screening of Clyde Film at GSFF, we wanted to look back even further, to the group who inspired the makers of Clyde Film. The Dawn Cine Group were way ahead of their time, socially committed and ambitious film makers. Lost Treasure was to be their biggest project, and in revisiting it on the 60th anniversary of its shoot, we’re paying tribute to some of Scotland’s unsung heroes of film in a unique way.”

You can listen to an excerpt from the soundtrack below:

The ninth annual Glasgow Short Film Festival will run from 16–20 March.

The Estate of James Yancey has revived the late J Dilla’s record label company PayJay to release the revered beatmaker’s ‘lost’ vocal album The Diary in conjunction with New York rapper Nas’s imprint Mass Appeal.

Originally intended for release in 2002, the album represents the final batch of unissued material Dilla had assembled during his lifetime. The Diary features vocal performances by J Dilla, Snoop Dogg, Bilal, Kokane, Frank N Dank, Nottz and Boogie, with production by Dilla, Madlib, Pete Rock, Hi-Tek, Nottz, House Shoes, Supa Dave West, Bink! and Karriem Riggins.

The Diary was assembled over a ten year period from two-track mixdowns and multitrack masters found in J Dilla’s archives following his death in 2006. Its completion was overseen by The Estate of James Yancey’s Creative Director Eothen Alapatt, long term general manager of Stones Throw Records. Alapatt previously oversaw the 2008 expanded edition of 2003’s Ruff Draft EP. The Estate of James Yancey is overseen by California’s Probate Court on behalf of Yancey’s four heirs – his mother Maureen ‘Ma Dukes’ Yancey, his brother John ‘Illa J’ Yancey and his two daughters Ja’Mya Yancey and Ty-monae Whitlow.

Commenting on The Diary, Eothen Alapatt said; “In the ten year period preceding the liberation of this album, I reminded myself of one thing, over and over again: Dilla wanted The Diary released. Dilla was a singular genius – a polarising figure. He was a man I knew, but he is now approaching mythical status. It was one of the biggest honours of my life to work with Dilla, and this moment, the release of this album, though heavy, is also uplifting and the celebration of a moment, a man, and a vision.”

Listen to “The Introduction”:

Oddball composer, performer, poet, inventor and all-time maverick Bruce Lacey died on 18 February, his family has told The Guardian. He was 88 years old. “His legacy and his influence can be seen through other generations of artists,” his family said in the news story published on 20 February. “At times, he may have flirted with fame but he was never seduced by it. Others may emulate, but there will only ever be one Bruce Lacey.”

Noting the multifaceted trajectory that his work had taken through more than six decades of art, music and performance, Lacey was not afraid to poke fun at the arts establishments. “I’m basically a bit of a piss-taker,” he acknowledged to Julian Cowley, who interviewed him at his Norfolk home for a feature in The Wire 368. “But someone I’d known at the Royal College of Art, where I studied as a painter, told me there was a new art movement called Assemblage, making things from all sorts of junk. ‘You’re a sculptor,’ he said. So I had two exhibitions, in London galleries, in 1963 and 1965, and quite by accident I was hailed as one of Britain’s leading sculptors.”

Lacey attended Hornsey School of Art in North London at the end of the 1940s, following a stint of training with the Fleet Air Arm at the end of the Second World War. It was there that he acquired skills in electrical engineering, developing an interest in machinery that would continue throughout his career. Indeed, this interest in machinery could be read as a marker for his politics. “Lacey is vigorously opposed to those regimented and coercive forms of social organisation that so often arise when mechanisation takes command,” Cowley noted. “In his book Bomb Culture (1968), Jeff Nuttall captured a sense of Lacey’s complex relationship with machinery, describing his remote-controlled automata as ‘magnificent hominoids’, sick, urinating, stuttering machines constructed of the debris of the century, always with pointed socialist/pacifist overtones but with a profound sense of anger, disgust and gaiety that goes far beyond any simple political standpoint’.”

In 1962 Lacey performed for the first time with a pair or electronic robots at The Establishment jazz venue in London's Soho. During the 1970s he got into making his own synthesizers, and his electronic improvisations can be heard on The Spacey Bruce Lacey compilation released by Trunk Records in 2014. He also worked on a series of films, including Everybody’s Nobody (1960), which he co-directed with his friend John Sewell, How to Have a Bath (1971), A Homage To The Earth Goddess (1982) and The Reawakening Of My Ancestral Spirits (1987).

Much of the above information can be found in The Wire 368. You can read more about Bruce Lacey’s life and career in Julian Cowley's feature via our archive.

The trailor below is from Jeremy Deller and Nick Abraham’s 2012 film The Bruce Lacey Experience

This spring the Vienna based Trost label is set to release a four CD box set of Swedish sax player Mats Gustafsson playing live with a variety of friends and associates. Called Peace And Fire, the recordings were made during Gustafsson's 50th birthday celebration, which was held over a three day period in October 2014 at Vienna's Porgy & Bess venue. It draws on 16 shows with a roll call that included Gustafsson's Fire! Orchestra, Klangforum Wien, The Thing, Sven-Ake Johansson, Anna Högberg, Ken Vandermark, Sofia Jernberg, Didi Kern, Christof Kurzmann, Fake The Facts, and more. Produced by Micke Keysendal, Peace And Fire includes a booklet compiled by Lasse Marhaug featuring photos by Žiga Koritnik and Petra Cvelbar, and accompanying essays.

More information can be found here. Mats Gustafsson was featured on the cover of The Wire 349. Subscribers can read that article via The Wire's online archive.

The second edition of Women in Sound/Women on Sound will take place this April at Lancaster Institute of the Contemporary Arts. Following on from last year's conference, which highlighted the invisibilty of women working with sound, this time the focal point will be set towards education. “Despite the long and effective history of women working in and on sound, the numbers involved have not risen,” says the WISWOS mission statement. It goes on to ask: “What impact does the current education system have on young girls to deter them from moving into the fields of science, technology, the arts and engineering with sound? How can it be improved?”

The Women in Sound Women on Sound Forum: Educating Girls in Sound will take place on 22 April, with talks and performances supported by Cumbria's Octopus Collective to be announced later this month.