Light In The Attic are about to reissue the only three records South London trio This Heat produced during their lifetime. Formed in Brixton, London, in 1976, the trio consisted of Charles Bullen, Charles Hayward and the late Gareth Williams. Light In The Attic’s reissue programme includes their 1979 debut album This Heat and its 1981 sequel Deceit, plus their Health And Efficiency 12" from 1980.

Set for vinyl release on 22 January 2016, the three records will include a booklet with notes and archival photos.

For more about This Heat, Wire subscribers can read Mike Barnes’s 2005 feature about the trio’s intense rehearsal and recording sessions with producer Dave Cunningham at London’s Cold Storage studio in The Wire 258.

The Glasgow based film maker Luke Fowler has collaborated with the Sheffield’s producer-cum-choreographer Mark Fell for an exhibition about computers and music making. Taking place at London's Whitechapel Gallery, the multimedia exhibition uses sound, text and image in order to “examine the development of early computer music languages that have been obscured by more commercially viable options”, says the Whitechapel website. The exhibition looks at how music has been shaped by experimenting with unfamiliar programs and computer coding, and users’ interactions with them.

Last month saw electronic producer Fell make his debut as a choreographer with a new light, sound and performance work Recursive Frame Analysis at the Experimental Media and Performing Arts Center in Troy, New York.

Fell was featured on the cover of The Wire 377. Computers And Cooperative Music-Making will run at London Whitechapel Gallery until 7 February 2016.

The rapper, musician and activist Saul Williams is set to release his first album since 2011's Volcanic Sunlight on Sony. Called MartyrLoserKing, it is being marketed as a concept album based around a central character living in Burundi who hacks under the alias MartyrLoserKing. The album was announced earlier this year with the release of the track “All Coltrane Solos At Once (feat Haleek Maul)” via Soundcloud, which was accompanied by an essay described by Williams as “an annotated middle finger” to a system that doesn’t look after the best interests of the majority. He explains, “What is the perspective of those who ‘#staywoke’, who resist? It is a mixture of seeing through the lies and deception used to keep common folk, the non-questioning/active participants, in a state that defeats the commoner with hopes of one day entering the elitist one per cent while killing unions and widening the wealth gap, and the desire to engage more people to speak up and out against the powers that be.”

Two videos from the album are up online: “Burundi” and its sequel “Horn Of The Clock-Bike”

MartyrLoserKing will be released on 29 January 2016 by Fader and Caroline International. He will also be touring various cities in the US throughout November and December.

A new history of the BBC Radiophonic Workshop and its key associates has been published by Obverse Books. Written by veteran music promoter and writer Ned Netherwood, whose Was Ist Das? blog is an important node in the the Yorkshire underground scene, An Electric Storm: Daphne, Delia And The BBC Radiophonic Workshop covers the group from its inception in 1958 through its 1990s dissolution up to its modern reincarnation under the guidance of Matthew Herbert. Netherwood gained access to the archives of key workshop members Daphne Oram and Delia Derbyshire, and interviewed surviving members Brian Hodgson and Elizabeth Parker, as well as notable Workshop archivists such as Pete Kember aka Sonic Boom, and Clive Graham of Paradigm Discs, who issued the landmark Oramics compilation in 2007.

The first half of the book provides a “story of the people” behind the Workshop, while in the second half Netherwood attempts an in depth disography of both the workshop and its members. “The most fascinating for me are the extremes”, he enthuses. “On one hand, their collaborations with avant garde poet Lily Greenham are the most exhilaratingly strange work they carried out and then at the other end of the spectrum there’s Paddy Kingsland’s disco based project Swag. A binge through their discography has plenty of variety.”

Material in the various Workshop-related archives provides several major themes in the book. “The most striking thing in Delia’s archives were the plans she made for her music. Vast intricate sheets of numbers and equations that looked more like advanced chemical formulae than music plans. Music and maths really were indivisible for her,” he explains. Even after numerous recent reissue projects, “the amount of unreleased Radiophonic Workshop music in the archive is mind-boggling. There just does not seem to be much of a will at the BBC to do anything with it.”

Obverse Books is primarily known for its sci-fi publishing. But there’s more to the Radiophonic Workshop connection than just kitsch memories of their Doctor Who theme tune. “I’ve been surprised by just how many leading luminaries of the British experimental music scene are hardcore Doctor Who fans,” notes Netherwood. “ Since I announced I was doing the book, I’ve found myself in chats with artists who regularly grace the pages of The Wire. Although my publisher is better known for science fiction, the guy who runs it is really into bands like Nurse With Wound and Can. I was asked to do it because he liked what I do with Was Ist Das?.”

The book attempts to pack both a history and a complete discography into a volume that’s a relatively short 272 pages. But for Netherwood this is an important addition to the relatively scant literature on the group. “The 1983 BBC book was very accessible but is long out of print and, for obvious reasons, does not cover as much of a timescale as I have,” he argues. “Also nobody has gone into such detail about the music commercially released.” For the members he talked to, revisiting work that is in some cases five decades old still conjours strong feelings. “[They] seem proud of their achievements, although pleasantly surprised by the enduring legacy of their work,” he reports of Hodgson and Parker. “Also as both of them were there when changes at the BBC meant the end of the Workshop, they both still carry a lot of very strong feelings about how they were treated.”

Ned Netherwood’s An Electric Storm: Daphne, Delia And The BBC Radiophonic Workshop is published by Obverse Books

Baltimore’s cleanest electronic duo Matmos have finished their new album. Called Ultimate Care II, it’s composed entirely out of sounds generated from a washing machine. The release is the duo’s follow-up to The Marriage Of True Minds, their parapsychological debut released by Thrill Jockey back in 2013, which saw Drew Daniel and MC Schmidt attempt to telepathically communicate with the experiment’s subjects. The sonic components on Ultimate Care II were created from their own Whirlpool Ultimate Care II model washing machine, crafted from the sounds the machine emits in full cycle. Matmos also treated the washing machine as an instrument in its own right. Friends like Dan Deacon, Max Eilbacher (Horse Lords), Sam Haberman (Horse Lords), Jason Willett (Half Japanese) and Duncan Moore helped in the playing, sampling and sequencing of Matmos’s washing machine. In addition some of them even used it for its intended purpose. Matmos’s Ultimate Care II will be released by Thrill Jockey Records on 19 February. The pair plan to take their washer on tour with them some time in 2016.

Listen to a track from the release:

Yoshimio and Ikue Mori will perform their collaborative project Twindrums at Roulette in Brooklyn in December. Yoshimio, who is a longtime member of Boredoms as well as the founder of her own group OOIOO, will provide vocals for the New York based drummer and composer Ikue Mori. Since the pair first met in the 1980s in Boredoms’ home city of Osaka, Japan, they have collaborated on various projects. They started Twindrums in Brooklyn in 2013, but they initially performed under that banner in Japan the following year. Their sound is described by Roulette as “Electric jungle. Enigmatic noise. Tribal resonante”. Twindrums will take place at Roulette, Brooklyn, on 9 December.

More information can be found on the Roulette website. Yoshimio was the cover star of The Wire 365 and Ikue Mori joined Zeena Parkins on the cover of The Wire 248.

Guitar innovator and algorithmic artist Remko Scha has died in the Netherlands at the age of 70. Scha explored methods of making music without direct human intervention, most notably on his 1982 album Machine Guitars, where guitars are played by sabre saws or rotating wire brushes. Recorded in Eindhoven and New York, it was described by Byron Coley in The Wire 231 as one of "the definitive modern NYC guitar work[s]", and its influence can be heard in the music of Eli Keszler, Alan Courtis and many more. Scha later went on to 'form' The Machines: a group of motors, drills and electric saws which played a collection of electric guitars.

Scha had a longrunning involvement in the arts in the Netherlands. Alongside Paul Panhuysen he founded Het Apollohuis, a former cigar factory in Eindhoven which became a space for performance, art and music in 1980. It played host to performers such as Ellen Fullman, whose The Long String Instrument LP was recorded there in the venue’s first year. Scha had been based in Amsterdam since the late 1980s, where he was Professor of Computational Linguistics and a member of the Institute for Logic, Language and Computation at the University of Amsterdam. He also founded the Institute of Artificial Art Amsterdam. The IAAA produced a performance of Scha's mechanical guitars in the Netherlands town Leiden this November, and intends to keep the instruments on the road in the years to come.

The first wave of acts has been announced for Bloc 2016. Artists so far confirmed for the festival, scheduled to happen at Butlin’s, Minehead, between 11–13 March, include Thom Yorke, Four Tet, Jeff Mills, Carl Craig, Ben Klock, Nina Kraviz, Omar-S, Holly Herndon, Helena Hauff, Demdike Stare, Powell, Shanti Celeste, and more. Also in the line-up is the UK snooker player Steve Davis, who’ll be playing a DJ set.

The 2016 edition of Bloc Weekend will be the second to run at the British holiday resort since Bloc Festival London left the business bankrupt in 2012.

Early bird tickets have already sold out, but you can find other ticket options at Bloc's website.

Allen Toussaint has died aged 77. The flamboyant New Orleans vocalist, composer, producer and keyboard player suffered a heart attack following a concert at the Teatro Lara in Madrid, Spain, and was pronounced dead on his arrival at hospital.

Widely credited for his crucial influence on the development of New Orleans R&B, Toussaint’s career in music began as a teenager in the 1950s. Inspired by blues pianist Professor Longhair, his piano playing gained early recognition from Fats Domino’s producer Dave Bartholomew. He would go on to write seminal R&B sides such as “Working In A Coal Mine”, “Get Out Of My Life, Woman”, “Play Something Sweet” and “Ride Your Pony”. Another of his songs, “Fortune Teller”, was much covered by UK groups in the mid-60s, including The Who, The Rolling Stones (who, like Otis Redding, also covered “Ruler Of My Heart” under the title “Pain In My Heart”) The Hollies and The Merseybeats.

Toussaint established the popular Sea-Saint studio in the 1970s. He arranged horns for The Band’s Cahoots and Rock Of Ages albums, as well as Martin Scorsese’s film of their farewell concert The Last Waltz. He teamed up with the New Orleans funk ensemble The Meters for Dr John’s albums In The Right Place (1973) and Desitively Bonaroo (1974). In 1975, Toussaint released Southern Nights, an album tribute to his childhood in Louisiana, which featured substantial contributions from members of The Meters. MOR king Glen Campbell scored a hit with his jaunty interpretation of the title track in 1977 and ex-Little Feat frontman Lowell George opened his 1979 solo album Thanks I’ll Eat It Here with his version of “What Do You Want The Girl To Do?” Memorably, Southern Nights received an honourable mention from Ian Penman in his 1994 interview with Massive Attack in The Wire 127.

Toussaint continued to write, record, produce and perform up until his death. His most recent release was 2013’s Songbook, comprised of intimate solo versions of his best known songs. He is survived by his son Clarence, daughter Alison and several grandchildren.

Watch Allen Toussaint live at Billboard Live, Tokyo

The Crown Prosecution Service has decided to drop all remaining charges against Roy Harper. Harper was put on trial at Worcester Crown Court back in January 2015, charged with 10 counts of sexual abuse and indecent assult. In February he was acquitted of indecently assaulting an 11 year old girl, however the case was put on hold with regards to the other charges due to insufficient evidence. The CPS have now decided to drop the remaining charges because there is not "a realistic prospect of a conviction". More information can be found at the BBC News website.