Bloc Weekend has announced a new collaboration with London Electronic Music Event. Taking over the on-site cinema venue in the main arena, LEME will present a two day programme of panel discussions, demonstrations and talks with artists, including Carl Craig, Andrea Parker and Billy Nasty.

Festival goers can also see a series of on-stage demonstrations with Carl Craig, Ansome and Defekt presented by London Modular. The event includes a debate called Equal Representation In Electronic Music, with panellists Jane Fitz, Lauren Martin (RBMA), Ashley Maks and Gabriel Szatan (both of Boiler Room). Resident Advisor will be talking to DJ Bone, and the art of DJing will be discussed by John Scheffer aka Intergalactic Gary, Andrea Parker, Billy Nasty and Raj Chaudhuri (also of Boiler Room). Other events providing refuge from the gory films being shown on Bloc TV include Sofia Ilyas from the international female collective shesaid.so discussing diversity in music event programmng, Alan Miller on the impact of legislation on electronic music culture and The Wire's Derek Walmsley in conversation with Mute records founder Daniel Miller.

Bloc 2016 runs from 11–13 March at Butlins, Minehead. With Jeff Mills, Holly Herndon, Optimo, Ben UFO, Steve Davis, Helena Hauff, Laurel Halo, Sandrien, Dasha Rush, Kowton, Shanti Celeste, Mr Mitch, Debonair, and more.

Bloc are offering one of our readers a chance to win two weekend passes (incl. accommodation). Retweet to enter.

Guitarist John Russell and pianist Paul G Smyth have co-founded Weekertoft, a new label dedicated to improvised music. Its first release will be Making Rooms, a four CD box set documenting the 2013 UK tour of Russell’s London club night Mopomoso to other cities in the UK. Mopomoso brings together UK improv players Evan Parker, Pat Thomas, John Edwards, Alison Blunt, Benedict Taylor, David Leahy, Kay Grant, Alex Ward and Russell. The tour was also co-promoted by Sound And Music. On 5 February a launch event for the box set will feature performances from all the musicians playing on it, apart from Pat Thomas, currently in Antigua, who will be represented by a short film of Thomas in action made by Helen Petts.

The box set can be pre-ordered via Weekertoft's bandcamp before the end of January at a special early bird price of £25 plus shipping. The early bird ticket also includes free entry to the launch event.

Diamanda Galás will be headlining Rituals For The Blind Dead Part One at Roadburn festival in April. She’ll be performing Death Will Come And Have Your Eyes on the first night, while Schrei 27, a film she created with Italian film maker Davide Pepe, will be shown at Rituals For The Blind Dead Part Two the following day. The screening will be followed by a Q&A with the artist. “Dark seems like a trivial word to use when describing her music,” explains Lee Dorrian, the former Napalm Death and Cathedral vocalist who curated Rituals, “but dark she undoubtedly is at the most extreme level. When Cathedral were working on Forest Of Equilibrium, her records were a lurking soundtrack to the anxieties we faced and the darkness we were aiming for. No one has ever really captured the true spirit of epic, operatic darkness as she. She is the true master of the art.”

Noise artist Russell Haswell will also be performing at Rituals For The Blind Dead Part Two.

Roadburn takes place between 14–17 April in Tilburg, The Netherlands. Rituals For The Blind Dead runs from 15–16 April. Tickets are on sale now. Diamanda Galás was featured in The Wire 190.

Following 2014's afterlife excursion You're Dead!, Steve Ellison aka Flying Lotus continues his journey into the macabre with FUCKKKYOUUU, a grisly (and NSFW) short film by director Eddie Alcazar.

FUCKKKYOUUU stars actress Noomi Rapace (Prometheus, The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo) for whom he scored 2014's A Portrait Of Noomi Rapace and features an original soundtrack by Ellison.

Watch the full film, which premiered earlier this year at Sundance's NEXT Fest, below. Subscribers can read Britt Brown's interview with Flying Lotus in The Wire 344

Now-Again Records have compiled a two volume album and book set documenting the Nigerian rock scene that developed after the Nigerian Civil War of 1967–70. Called Wake Up You!: The Rise & Fall Of Nigerian Rock 1972–77, it tells “the story of this time, pays homage to these now forgotten musicians and their struggle, and brings to light the funk and psychedelic fury they created as they wrestled free of the ravages of the late 1960s and created thrilling, original Nigerian rock music throughout the 1970s”, says the label.

Both volumes of Wake Up You! were compiled by musicologist and researcher Uchenna Ikonne, who previously oversaw the 2013 Luaka Bop release Who Is William Onyeabor?. Both volumes will be available in either hardback book plus CD or paperback book and double LP. The first volume will be released on 15 April 2016, with the second following in May.

Listen to Ify Jerry Krusade’s “Everybody Likes Something Good” from Wake Up You!:

Antye Greie-Ripatti aka AGF has curated a female:pressure campaign called #Rojava to raise awareness and show solidarity to the cantons of Rojava, a de facto autonomous region in northern Syria that promotes social, racial and ethnic justice, religious freedom, ecological principles and gender equality. Female:pressure will also be presenting “Music, Awareness & Solidarity For #Rojava” as a panel discussion at Berlin’s CTM festival at Kunsthaus Bethanien on 6 February. Panellists include Hevî, Ipek Ipekcioglu, Sky Deep, Annie Goh and AGF.

“With a series of music, media and sound art to listen, dance and fight to, we would like to send our love and strength to these women and spread a positive message in support of their efforts,” explains the collective.

The call for submissions of works supporting the campaign has now closed, and the final publication of entries for the project is planned for International Women's Day on 8 March 2016. A selection of 25 entries can be heard via Soundcloud.

“Thoughts On Rojava” by AGF, featuring Zeynep Kurban, Dilar Dirik, Zaher Baher, Havin Guneser and Memed Aksoi

“Woman & The Gun” by Sky Deep, featuring Hevî

More information can be found at female:pressure.

An expanded edition of library music compendium The Music Library is set to be published by Fuel. Interest in the area is as strong as it's ever been, as demonstrated by recent compilations of the work of South African producer Tom Mkhize, the esoteric sample sources of the Demdike Stare’s music, and producers like Shackleton and Mordant Music being commissioned by contemporary library music companies to make new pieces designed for use as off the shelf soundtrack scores. To satisfy the appetite for library sounds a second, massively expanded edition of The Music Library, edited by Jonny Trunk, is set to be published this April.

“Masses of obscure labels have come to light in the last decade,” he notes. “Especially from Italy. Some of these labels produced just one or two LPs. Also, for this new edition we’ve included some early 1980s library companies as their output seems to be coming far more relevant these days.”

The first edition of The Music Library, published in 2005 and long out of print, attempted to provide an overview of library music, with information on dozens of labels and reproductions of numerous sleeves. But rather than putting a full stop at the end of a fad, its publication marked the start of an intense new flurry of interest in the area. “The web has thrown up all sorts of new information,“ he explains. “And I think the first book was a real catalyst – it acted as a jump-off point for finding new and at the time hidden information, artists, labels and sounds. Blogs, forums, the usual sales avenues and social media sites have all led to a greater understanding and appreciation of the genre.”

Despite the fervent interest in library music – and the astronomical prices of some LPs – Trunk argues music in this area is still underappreciated and underused. “Library has always been a rich and practically untraceable source for sampling – see Stereolab, Jay Z, Jurassic 5, Gnarls Barclay, Showbiz & AG, The Chemical Brothers, etc” he notes. “But I don’t think anyone has used it in any kind of fascinating way – there have been straight reissues, compilations, bootlegs. But I don’t think anyone has really stepped out of the box. I wish people would come to me for help to score films with it – think about what George Romero did with library music. If you have a good collection of this material it is amazing what can be done commercially with very little budget – you can have Brian Eno, Morricone, John Barry all scoring your film for peanuts!”

Aside from information on hundreds of library music labels, much of the book is given over to reproductions of over 600 sleeves, which makes for a wide-ranging survey of album design over the decades. “I am a fan of this hand drawn one on the Al Capone label,” he enthuses. “All the track descriptions are handwritten and each cue has a little drawing to go with it, in a vague attempt to suggest what you might use the music for – a Buddah, buildings, a bike. I also love the one issued by the label Pinciana. It is orange. It has a white circle on the front. Nothing else. No type, No nothing. Get in there.”

The Music Library will be published in April by Fuel, who have previously released a collection edited by Trunk on the work of Sainsbury supermarket’s design studio. The first 500 copies come with a 10" record of library music pieces – there’s a standard hardbook version available also.

“One side is all KPM – cues like “Image” by Brian Bennet that was originally composed for a Radley Metzger sex film, amazing – beautiful symphonic jazz, plus more obscure classics like the theme from Mary, Mungo And Midge. The B side is all cues from the Selected Sound library and includes music from groundbreaking LPs such as Time Signals by Klaus Weiss.

“I was sad enough to do a tot up recently,” Trunk admits, “and worked out that if you wanted to but the original LPs it would set you back about £800. Insane really. But that’s library music.” Jonny Trunk wrote an Epiphanies column on the pleasures of library music in The Wire 298.

London based artist Hannah Sawtell is set to guest edit the next edition of the biannual arts journal The Happy Hypocrite. Called #ACCUMULATOR_PLUS, the journal will be published as both a book and a radio show. “I have proposed that we make this issue different,” explains Sawtell, “I am asking for writing (as usual) for their printed publication... but my request for this year is to also make a callout for sound, which will be made into a radio programme, performed live by myself after the publication is completed.”

As part of her callout for submissions, Sawtell is offering up a stream of hashtags and inviting applicants to respond in the form of sound or text. The hashtags on offer—some already used by Sawtell in her exhibition at New York New Museum in 2014—include: #IMAGEOBJECTSKIN #NASCENTSURPLUS #DECELERATEDAFFECT #DIALECTICADDICTION #EXTREMEWORKPLEASURE
#PRODUCTIONREPETITIONISM

This is the ninth edition of The Happy Hypocrite, which will be published by Book Works in September 2016 and then broadcast online as a radio show. Deadline for subsmissions is 1 February 2016. You can find out more at the Book Works website.

Hannah Sawtell was featured in The Wire 357. Subscribers can read the article by Jennifer Lucy Allan on Exact Editions.

Danish electronic composer Else Marie Pade died on 18 January, reported the Politikan. She was 91 years old. A student of Pierre Schaeffer, Pade also worked with the likes of Stockhausen and Boulez. Though she pioneered electronic music in Denmark, her work received relatively little attention until a radio documentary about her was broadcast in 2001. A number of record releases has since bought Pade some long overdue recognition.

Pade was born in 1924 in Aarhus. Ill health forced her to spend much of her childhood in isolation from her peers. “I have been searching for sounds all my life,” Pade explained to Anne Hilde Neset in The Wire 354. “In my childhood I was sick with a recurring kidney infection [...] I lay in bed for so long, but I could lie and listen to the sounds outside.” In a 2001 Danish Radio feature, she had elaborated on the theme: “It might be the sound of children playing in the garden or the sound of my mother’s friends visiting. When they were all talking at the same time in the next room, it sounded exactly like a large aviary with cackling birds… Early in my life, I got a very close relationship to radio plays and their special way of using sounds.”

During the Second World War Pade was an active member of the Danish resistance until 1944, when she was detained by occupying German troops and imprisoned in Frøslev prison camp. After the war ended, she took up piano studies at the Royal Danish Conservatory in Copenhagen. Inspired by a radio programme about musique concrète and Pierre Schaeffer, Pade travelled to Paris in 1952 to learn more about the subject. Her research brought her into contact with Schaeffer, who took her on as a student. In 1955 Pade premiered her first concrète composition En Dag På Dyrehavsbakken (A Day At The Fair), which she made for a TV documentary. The work led to further commissions to sonically illustrate a radio play and a selection of children's stories, including Hans Christian Andersen’s The Little Mermaid. In 1958 her Syv Cirkler (Seven Circles) became the first electronic piece in Denmark to be performed on the radio.

In 2013 Pade released Svævninger in collaboration with Jacob Kirkegaard on Important Records. Anne Hilde Neset interviewed Else Marie Pade for The Wire 354. You can read the feature over at Exact Editions.

Following the release of his Machine mixtape late last year (as reviewed by Daniel Neofetou in The Wire 383) London based artist Gaika has released a video for the track "Bohdy Knows At 90", directed in collaboration with audiovisual artist Diogo Lopes.

"The song is a prayer for fallen angels," says Gaika. "Watch Point Break (the original) and you'll get it. THIS SONG IS FOR THE THRILL. Sometimes it's like society and culture are just functions of hedonism, guilt and the resulting tension. British people love to profusely apologise and then beat nine bells out of each other in an instant. I wanted to write a song that tackled that in a rap way. I wanted to make a high brow hood anthem, I find things that are at polar opposites often complement each other. To me this song is the sound of wilding out when I was living in Amsterdam, its museums next to brothels and all that good stuff."

Subscribers can read Daniel Neofetou's review of Machine in The Wire 383