Riot Grrrl outfit Bikini Kill have announced the reissue of their 1991 demo tape Revolution Girl Style Now. Coming out two years before their 1993 debut album Pussy Whipped (Kill Rock Stars), the cassette was the Olympia, Washington group’s first publicly released recording. Revolution Girl Style Now follows on from the reissue of The CD Version Of The First Two Records (which comprised of the Bikini Kill EP and tracks from Yeah Yeah Yeah Yeah) by their own Bikini Kill Records imprint in June 2015. Featuring three previously unreleased tracks, Revolution Girl Style Now will be released on 22 September, in vinyl, CD and download formats, as well as a limited edition cassette. Pre-orders are available now from their website.

HT: Pitchfork

Film maker William Davenport has made two documentary films about a generation of musicians and artists who emerged out of the 1980s punk scene. One, called The New Punks, documents the progression of noise and industrial music, and it features footage and conversations with artists including GX Jupitter-Larsen of The Haters, Sue Ann Harkey of Audio Leter, Borbetomagus’s Jim Sauter and Donald Dietrich, Negativland’s Mark Hosler, Peter Conheim and Don Joyce, Beth Custer of Club Foot Orchestra, and more. The other, The Great American Cassette Masters, focuses on the DIY cassette culture that sprang up in the early 1980s, with contributions from DAS of Big City Orchestra, Zan Hoffman, Don Campau of The Living Archive Of Underground Music, Debbe Jaffe of Cause And Effect and Master Slave Relationship, Joel Haertling of Architects Office, and more.

“The films were inspired by the magazine I published from 1983–87 called Unsound,” explains Davenport. “The series is about the longevity of the creative process, as well as about how these creators paved the way for the following generations. Before the internet and at the beginning of desktop publishing, they created magazines, fanzines, flyers, custom LP and cassettes packages. I did not want to make films about the nostalgic past, but to focus on musicians and artists that have continued today.”

The series will be concluded by a third and final film, currently being edited, called Memories Of Music. More information on The New Punks and The Great American Cassette Masters can be found at the Talk Story Films website.

Wire contributor Ken Hollings will release a cassette on the London based tape label The Tapeworm. Called Works For Magnetic Tape, it features three texts read by Hollings, two of which include sonic backgrounds composed by Mark Pilkington and 808 State’s Graham Massey. The opening text is “There Must Be Something Wrong With This, Sally”, which Hollings adapted from a piece first published in MIT Press’s Leonardo Electronic Almanac in 2014. The second track, “Ideas Are One Thing, And What Happens Is Another”, was edited and mixed by Massey. (Hollings and Massey were both members of the 1980s group Biting Tongues.) The title is taken from a John Cage quote, and the piece itself was originally commissioned as part of a performance celebrating Cage’s centenary in 2012. The concluding track “Parasitic Infestation” is a recording of Hollings’s launch party reading of the essay he contributed toThe Art Of Worms, a book about The Tapeworm’s cover art. It’s included here “in memory of a remarkable evening”, says Hollings. You can read the text for "Parasitic Infestation" here.

The Tapeworm plans to release the cassette in October; in the meantime, a new release from Mark Van Hoen is out at the end of August, as well as one by Mark Fell with Rhodri Davies and Okkyung Lee.

A new edition of Cut & Splice, the London based experimental music and sound art festival, will take place in September at Cafe Oto, featuring works by Henry Cowell, Luc Ferrari, Michael Pisaro, Clara Iannotta, Peter Ablinger, Alvin Lucier and Hildegard Westerkamp, among others.

Curated by composer Joanna Bailie and co-produced by Sound & Music and BBC Radio 3, the festival’s two evening programmes are themed Fields/Machines and Space/Translation/Device. These themes reflect the festival’s concern with the relationships between sound, music and the environment, as exemplified in works ranging from Cowell’s Aeolian Harp to Westerkamp’s soundscapes. Performing these works will be Ensemble Plus-Minus, the new music ensemble co-founded by their artistic director Bailie. The last Cut & Splice, which was launched in 2003, took place in 2010. As in previous years, 2015’s festival will be broadcast on Radio 3’s Hear & Now programme. Cut & Splice takes place between 25-26 September at London’s Cafe Oto. More information can be found here.

Soul Jazz Records have added to their ever-expanding catalogue of compilations with a new release that charts the links between reggae and Rastafarianism. Entitled Rastafari: The Dreads Enter Babylon 1955–83 the compilation documents the growth of the religion within reggae over a period of nearly 30 years. The tracks include one of the earliest mentions of Ethiopia in music hailing from Jamaica with Lord Lebby And The Jamaican Calpysonians’s “Etheopia” from 1955, as well as music from the 60s, 70s and early 80s from artists such as the figurehead Rastafarian drummer Count Ossie with tracks from his Rasta Family and Mystic Revelation Of Rastafari, the latter a group he formed with saxophonist Cedric Brooks, Laurel Aitkin, Earth & Stone and others.

Rastafari: The Dreads Enter Babylon 1955–83 comes in CD or vinyl with a 40 page booklet containing photography and historical sleevenotes. For information can be found on the Soul Jazz website.

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The Norient organisation is set to publish a new book, Seismographic Sounds: Visions Of A New World, this month. The volume collects essays and interviews by writers in more than 50 countries discussing music scenes and movements below the radar of mainstream media. Contributors include The Wire's Louise Gray, Derek Walmsley, Adam Harper and Wayne Marshall, and the topics covered range from Ukranian noise to Syrian metal.

The Norient organisation, based in Switzerland, is a publisher, promoter, festival organiser and online platform dedicated to seeking out new sounds across the world, and Seismographic Sounds focuses especially on the new spaces and possibilities opened up by the internet. The collection is edited by Theresa Beyer, Thomas Burkhalter and Hannes Liechti, and can be ordered direct from the Norient website. The book will be complemented by a Seismographic Sounds exhibition at the ZKM gallery in Karlsruhe, Germany in October, and at Berlin’s Transmediale festival next February.

Dedicated to the German electronic musician and performance artist Conrad Schnitzler, this year's Con-Mythology festival is up and running throughout August at various venues across New York. Programmed by Ken Montgomery, co-founder of Generator Sound Art, the festival pays homage to the life and works of the former Tangerine Dream member and founder of the original Cluster line-up (when they were Kluster), who died in 2011.

Events include a photographic exhibition, running until 31 August, of Schnitzler's early days as a sculptor. After training under Joseph Beuys, Schnitzler abandoned his own artwork in a field. The photos on display are believed to be the only known images of Schnitzler’s lost sculptures.

Performances include Montgomery playing Schnitzler's Rot on multiple cassette decks at Academy Records (8 August), and an ‘octophonic’ cassette concert staged by Jonas Asher, Roe Enney, Daren Ho, Daniel Neumann and Aki Onda, plus an eight speaker homage to Schnitzler by DJ Olive, at All Gold (9 August). More information can be found here.

Mordant Music has composed two new scores for the Blu-ray edition of Soviet film pioneer Dziga Vertov's Man With A Movie Camera. But note that the soundtrack to the disc’s title documentary is the 2002 score composed and performed by Michael Nyman and his band. Mordant Music’s contribution consists of soundtracks to two other Vertov documentaries, Kino-Pravda No 21 and One-Sixth Of The Globe (both 1925), included on the disc. The set is completed by Vertov’s Three Songs Of Lenin (1935).

This is the fifth time Mordant Music has worked with the BFI – their first collaboration saw them rescore a series of 1970s and 1980s public information videos, culminating in the BFI’s 2010 release MisinforMation. In keeping with the spirit of Vertov’s films, Mordant Music fulfilled the commission within a tight ten day deadline. More information about the release can be found here.

A kickstarter campaign has been started to help fund a documentary about the free jazz revolution. The film is directed by Tom Surgal, co-leader of the improvisational ensemble White Out, and produced by his regular collaborators, guitarists Thurston Moore and Nels Cline (Wilco), as well as the documentary maker Dan Braun.

Called Fire Music, the documentary tells the story of the history of free jazz through footage and recordings of key musicians such as Ornette Coleman, Sam Rivers, Wadada Leo Smith, John Tchicai, Dave Burrell, Marshall Allen, Prince Lasha, Sonny Simmons, Rashied Ali, Evan Parker, Paul Lytton and more, as well as the jazz historian Gary Giddins.

Most of the work on Free Jazz has already been done, however Surgal now needs money to cover production costs such as sound mixing, clearance rights and editing, to finish the film. You can get more information on the campaign and see a live performance clip of Marshall Allen at Arkestra House at the Fire Music Kickstarter page.

At the time of writing, the campaign has reached $17,375 out of its $37,500 target, with 21 days to go.

Negativland member and radio DJ Don Joyce died from heart failure on 22 July. He was 71 years old. Joyce, who worked with the freeform collagists for 34 years, is credited with coining the term ‘culture jamming’.

Born in Keene, New Hampshire, Joyce moved to Oakland, North Carolina in the late 1960s. In 1981 he founded the Thursday night radio show Over The Edge on KPFA FM, which ran for 34 years. It was there where he met the late Ian Allen (the former Negativland member who died in January this year). Since joining the group, Joyce worked on nearly 30 Negativland albums, two books and three DVDs. He stopped touring with the group in 2010 but continued working on other projects with them.

According to the Negativland website, every show of Over The Edge, totalling 5000 plus hours of air time, is currently being archived, with a view to making it available in late 2015.