Tickets have gone on sale for this year’s Donaufestival. Now in its 12th year, the festival takes place in Krems, Austria, over the course of two weekends in spring: 29 April–1 May and 5–7 May. Artists on the bill include Mbongwana Star, Hieroglyphic Being, RP Boo, Shackleton presents Powerplant, DJ Koze, Tim Hecker, and more. “Super-reduced early bird weekend festival passes”, going for €72, will be on sale until 9 February. The full programme will be announced on 3 March.

The new 7" single from Mongrels (UK rappers Kid Acne and Benjamin) serves as a quasi-reunion of fondly remembered US psychedelic hiphop outfit New Kingdom. “You Dig Raps? (Part One)” features guest vocals from NK’s Sebastian Laws (aka Sebash) while the flip features a remix of “Combat Divers” by producer Scott Harding (aka Scotty Hard) with whom the duo collaborated on 1993’s Cheap Thrills and 1996’s Paradise Don’t Come Cheap. Also worth noting is that the Emu SP-12 drum machine/sampler Harding used for his remix is the original machine from Calliope Studios, circa 1989, used by numerous artists including A Tribe Called Quest, Brand Nubian, Jungle Brothers, Gang Starr, De La Soul and Ultramagnetic MCs.

More information can be found on Kid Acne's blog

The Wire is looking for a full time advertising sales person. The job will involve working as a member of the three-strong advertising team, selling advertising space in the print magazine, as well as on The Wire website and in its newsletters, to labels, distributors, festivals, promoters, venues, shops, universities and other organisations dealing in the kind of music covered by The Wire. Experience managing databases, and using Excel, email, Facebook, Twitter and Instagram is essential. Sales experience and use of online marketing tools (eg Mailchimp, Google AdWords) would be preferred, and an empathy with the kind of music cultures covered by The Wire would be an advantage.

For a full job description write to ads@thewire.co.uk. Closing date for applications: Monday 25 January.

Free jazz pianist Cecil Taylor will be taking up a ten day residency at the Whitney Museum of American Art during the New York museum’s Open Plan: Cecil Taylor exhibition. Mounted in the Neil Bluhm Family gallery, New York's largest column-free gallery space, Open Plan: Cecil Taylor will run from 26 February–14 May, and will showcase Taylor solo and playing alongside a selection of friends and fellow musicians. The exhibition also includes a retrospective of Taylor’s career including videos, audio, notational scores, photographs, poetry and other ephemera. Taylor plays at the exhibition from April 15–24. Other participants include installation and performance artist Andrea Fraser (26 February–13 March), painter Lucy Dodd (17–20 March), sculptor Michael Heizer (25 March–10 April), and video and film maker Steve McQueen (29 April–14 May).

David Bowie has died aged 69. His son Duncan Jones, announced on Twitter this morning, “Very sorry and sad to say it's true. I'll be offline for a while. Love to all.” Bowie died on Sunday 10 January, just two days after the release of his latest album Blackstar on 8 January (the day of Bowie's 69th birthday). The official statement posted on Bowie's Facebook this morning read: “January 10 2016 – David Bowie died peacefully today surrounded by his family after a courageous 18 month battle with cancer. While many of you will share in this loss, we ask that you respect the family’s privacy during their time of grief.”

Bowie's career spanned five decades. He released 27 studio albums (including two with the group Tin Machine) and numerous other live sets, compilations and EPs. In 1976, Bowie moved to West Berlin, where he completed the album Low (1977). The first of three collaborations with Brian Eno, it was followed by “Heroes” (1977) and Lodger (1979). Bowie also collaborated with Queen on the 1981 track “Under Pressure”, while the 90s saw him reunite with Eno for 1995's Outside. From his earliest days as a pop performer, when he was heavily under the influence of mime artist Lindsay Kemp, Bowie was always as much a chancer as he was a dabbler in chance operations, William Burroughs's cut-up methods and other strategies to keep refreshing his work. On 1997’s Earthling, he explored contemporary club music; he was also one of the few mainstream rock artists to embrace the potential of the internet. Indeed, his 1999 album Hours… was the the first complete album to be made available as a digital download. In 2013, Bowie co-curated a major international retrospective of his life and work at London’s Victoria & Albert Museum.

Read The Wire Deputy Editors Emily Bick and Joseph Stannard reflect on David Bowie's life and work.

Pierre Boulez has died aged 90. Le Monde reported that the French composer and conductor died on Tuesday 5 January at his home in Baden-Baden, Germany. An ardent purveyor of the 12-tone technique – a compositional method devised by Arnold Schoenberg – the revolutionary composer later developed a freer style of writing music.

Boulez was born in Montbrison in the Loire region of France in 1925. Growing up in St Etienne, as a child he sang in the Catholic school choir and began taking piano lessons. He went on to study in Lyon, but in 1942 dropped his plans to study engineering and moved to Paris to study music at Paris Conservatoire, taking lessons from Olivier Messiaen and Schoenberg pupil Rene Leibowitz. In 1946 he composed his first 12-tone composition, First Piano Sonata. Focusing on sounds as they occur and the listener experience, he advocated listening to the sounds as they decay before introducing new elements. Later on he worked with methods of improvisation, controlled chance and electronic music. At the beginning of the 1970s, he was invited by French president Georges Pompidou to open up a centre for research and music. It led to Boulez founding IRCAM – the Institut de Recherche et Coordination Acoustique/Musique, which opened in Paris in 1977. During his lifetime Boulez was a prolific conductor. He was appointed as the first Principal Guest Conductor of The Cleveland Orchestra in 1969, and in 2014 he received the eighteenth annual Cleveland Orchestra Distinguished Service Award. Following his New York Philharmonic conducting debut in March 1969 with Debussy’s Jeux and La Mer and Varèse’s Intégrales, Boulez held the position of music director with them from 1971–77. He was also principal conductor of The BBC Symphony Orchestra from 1971–75.

“To watch Boulez conduct Edgard Varèse or Olivier Messiaen or, best of all, one of his own masterpieces, such as Le Marteau Sans Maitre (1955), Pli Selon Pli (1962), Eclat-Multiples (1965) or Repons (1981) is to observe someone whose physical presence is dedicated to realising sounds that have never before been brought forth. His arm shoots out and a cascade of dizzyingly varied percussion results, as if a musical Jackson Pollock is throwing paint across the auditorium,” stated Ben Watson in his article about Boulez in The Wire 84.

Paul Bley has died aged 83. On 4 January, reported Ottawa Citizen, his daughter announced: “Dear Friends, I’m deeply saddened to tell you that my father passed yesterday [...] He was at home and very comfortable with family at his side. Thank you, Vanessa Bley.”

Born on 10 November 1932 in Montreal, Canada, Bley started studying music as a five year old. When he was 13 he formed his first group called Buzzy Bley Band, and at 17 he replaced Oscar Peterson at the Montreal jazz club Alberta Lounge. The young bop pianist went on to found the Montreal Jazz Workshop, where he invited Charlie Parker to play, and in 1950 he moved to New York to study at The Juilliard School of music. In New York he worked briefly with the aforementioned Parker, Lester Young and Charles Mingus. In 1957 he moved to the West Coast, where he met Ornette Coleman, Don Cherry and his future wife Carla Bley, all three of whom he later worked with. By now he was moving towards free jazz. In the early 1960s he was a member of Jimmy Giuffre’s trio. Over time he would also play with Ben Webster, Sonny Rollins, Charlie Haden, Paul Motian, Lee Konitz, Pat Metheny, Jaco Pastorius, and many others. As Vanessa Bley wrote, “He is considered a master of the trio, but as exemplified by his solo piano albums, Paul Bley is pre-eminently a pianist’s pianist.”

In 1964 Bley worked with Albert Ayler and helped launch the New York avant-garde co-operative, Jazz Composers Guild. In 1967 he married vocalist, improvisor and composer Annette Peacock, with whom he recorded eight albums. Interviewed by Andy Hamilton in The Wire 283, Bley talks about experimenting with Bob Moog's synthesizer in 1969: “I was fortunate to be privy to the Karlheinz Stockhausen studio in Cologne at the time, which filled an entire room, from floor to ceiling, with modules [...] When I heard that Moog had added a keyboard, I was very intrigued as to whether his design was compatible with improvisation.

“He was only too happy to put his instrument through the test of an authentic improvising musician,” Bley continued, “to see what it could and what it couldn’t do.” In that feature, Hamilton states, “Bley’s crucial role in the development of early free jazz is at least as neglected as his synthesizer period.” Reassessing those times, he places two figures at the head of his free jazz pantheon: Ornette Coleman and Jimmy Giuffre. Bley was working at the Hillcrest Club in Los Angeles in 1958, when he invited Coleman and Cherry to sit in. The duo’s impact on him was radical and life-changing, Andy states, elaborating, “Bley is one of the handful of pianists – others are Joachim Kühn and Geri Allen – to have worked with Coleman successfully. Pianists can’t ‘comp’ behind Coleman, although they can play against him. This was less of a problem for Bley, who has a horn player’s attitude to harmony.”

In 1988, Bley reformed his 1960s outfit The Bley Trio with Gary Peacock and Paul Motian, releasing the album Not Two, Not One. In 2008, Bley was named a member of the Order of Canada for “his contributions as a pioneering figure in avant garde and free jazz, and for his influence on younger jazz pianists”.

Read Andy Hamilton's interview with Paul Bley in The Wire 283.

"Belgium, or perhaps Brussels, is kind of a no-man's land", says one of the interviewees on a promotional video for a new app about Belgian underground music. Given the country’s interconnected scenes, from new beat and new wave to underground rock and noise, and the linguistic divisions of the country, perhaps that's why a new project has taken the unlikely move of making a smartphone app to try and to map the country’s music of the last four decades.

The amount of data contained in the app – details of bands, venues, record shops, as well as images, interviews and links to music – is extraordinary, and browsing it is a little like accidentally falling into the back end database of Discogs. When you open it up, you're faced with a multicoloured cloud of dots representing artists, labels and bands. Over here, there's a purple block representing microlabels; look a little closer and you find lines linking the 1970s avant prog of Univers Zero with the underground scene of today. You can listen to music from many, perhaps most of the hundreds of dots on the screen, and spend hours lost in tiny niches of Belgian independent music.

A geographic option offers an even more scrambled take on Belgian music. Hitting the map button throws up maps of Brussels, of its surroundings, and of Belgium itself, with nodes on the maps representing venues, record shops and other important places (though finding out which is which is a charmingly confusing experience). There are articles in various languages buried in several of the entries, alongside the odd video interview and information on the locations (it's not always clear if the information is new or old).

Browing the Belgium Underground app feels like a lucky dip – articles pop up in different languages, instructions are minimal, and you run into some dead ends. But if you take the casual surfing approach it throws up some intriguing connections. Dipping into the prog scene of the 1970s, you find the name of Marc Moulin coming up frequently. Follow the various links, and you end up at Vincent Kenis, producer of both Tuxedomoon and Konono No 1.

The app is a project of Belgian organisation PointCulture, is available on both iOS and Android, and claims to have entries for "3000 cornerstones of the Belgian artistic scene: musicians, labels, producers, graphic designers", from the punk era up to the present day. It's available on the iTunes store, and more information can be found online.