Scream and scream again is the motto of an eight day event in Switzerland at the end of May. Co-organised by the International Institute for Screamscape Studies and The Centre d’Art de Fribourg, Screamscape has opened up a scream bank for participating musicians and artists, including Junko Hiroshige, Keiji Haino, Prurient, Dave Phillips, and more, to ensure the screaming never stops.

The scream bank is a collection of screams uploaded by the public via swissscreamscape.org, as well as recordings made at public events. The eight days of Screamscape take in talks, choirs, concerts, scream-battles, radio shows, installations and performances at Fribourg’s Kunsthalle Fri Art between 30 May–6 June, more info incoming via Fri Art.

Barron Machat, cofounder of Los Angeles record label Hippos In Tanks, died in a car accident in Miami, Florida, on 8 April. He was 27 years old. The label’s name, originally the title of the late night radio show he started with Travis Woolsey on the West Coast station KXLU in the late 2000s, references And The Hippos Were Boiled In Their Tanks, an early novel cowritten by Jack Kerouac and William S Burroughs that went unpublished in either writer’s lifetime. Machat had played baseball at Pacific Hills school in California, and at one point he eyed a career in sports. But he came from a family of music industry heavyweights – his grandfather Marty once managed Leonard Cohen – and his new label grew, in part, from the support and connections of his father Steven, a former lawyer at Death Row records. Hippos In Tanks released early records by Laurel Halo, Grimes and Arca, as well as albums by Daniel Lopatin and Joel Ford’s Games project, Hype Williams, Dean Blunt and James Ferraro, whose Far Side Virtual was voted album of the year in 2011 (The Wire 335). In his cover feature about Blunt (The Wire 367), David Keenan described the label as “hypnagogic pop’s Altamont, a label that functioned as a high paying lightning rod for major thinkers like Blunt, James Ferraro and Daniel Lopatin, while giving them access to visions of the kind of dark Babylonian capital and debauch that their music had previously only imagined”.

Only Connect festival in Oslo is building an octobass, which will be played at this year’s event by improvisor and noise musician Guro Skumsnes Moe. The octobass is a four metre high double bass invented by Jean-Baptiste Vuillaume in the 1850s. Three were actually made by him, and since then only a few replicas have been produced.

Tuned two octaves below a cello, the lowest note it can produce is 16 Hz, which is below the lower level of human hearing. Its strings are controlled from a set of levers mounted on the side, and players access the instrument via a small platform.

Skumsnes Moe is a member of Norwegian trio MoE, and she will be playing the newly built octobass with violinist Ole Henrik Moe. Guro also curates the All Ears festival with Paal Nilssen-Love.

Only Connect takes place in Oslo 4–6 June, across various venues in Oslo. More details on the octobass concert here.

Jac Berrocal has recorded a new album with fellow composers and improvisors David Fenech and Vincent Epplay. Called Antigravity, it will be released by Blackest Ever Black.

Trumpeter, composer and poet Berrocal became a key player in the 1970s Parisian improv and experimental scenes, both as a collaborator and as founder of the group Catalogue. He has worked together with artist and composer Fenech before in a trio with Ghédalia Tazartès on the 2011 LP Superdisque.

Antigravity will be released by Blackest Ever Black on 27 April.

More information here

Sound Development City has put out an open call for performances, research or installation projects from artists working in any discipline for a tour in Belgrade and Athens between 9–27 September.

In effect the trip itself will serve as a studio on the road for the ten artists finally selected. There is no age limit. The jury will be announced here at the end of April, and the deadline for submissions is 19 April. More details here.

Death Waltz label head Spencer Hickman is opening a record shop in Margate this summer with artist Kimberley Holladay, who designed the artwork for Death Waltz's Forbidden World OST. The shop, Transmission, will stock new and used vinyl, artwork, and collectibles. It has already opened in the digital realm, and the shop itself will be opening in June at 105 Northdown Road, Cliftonville, Margate.

The online shop and more details on Transmission can be found online here.

[HT: Vinyl Factory]

Supernormal, held annually at Braziers Park in Oxfordshire, has put out an open call for workshops, activities and performances to be included in this year’s programme.

The festival is looking for around 30 workshops and activities, but has no strict rules against other types of performance. Supernormal say that they aim to cover expenses and offer a small fee, depending on the requirements for each pitch, with successful applicants contacted at the beginning of May.

More details and an application can be found on the Supernormal site. The festival takes place between 7–9 August at Brazier’s Park in Oxfordshire.

Electronic music producer and vocalist Antye Greie-Ripatti aka AGF has started a Tumblr documenting female producers working in their studios.

At time of writing the Female Pressure Tumblr has over 300 entries, inspired by Björk’s January 2015 Pitchfork interview in which she discusses the frustrations of being a woman in the music industry, commenting that the lack of photographic evidence of her working solo in the studio might be one of the reasons why her work is repeatedly miscredited by journalists.

The Tumblr is part of the Female:Pressure network: an international collective of more than 1400 female electronic music producers that aims to challenge the under-representation of women working in the electronic music scene. Talking about the photographs on the Tumblr, Greie-Ripatti says: “I am sick of a bunch of things… the visual representation of women and this ‘one woman in the club’ thing... Here we offer a visual catalogue of female producers, DJs, media artists and electronic music performers at work. These are not our press photos. This is a collective effort to demonstrate women and their use of technology in music and media production.”

The Female: Pressure Tumblr is open for submissions.Head here for more information.

Lewis Watts and Elizabeth Pepin Silva are crowdfunding the reprint of their 2006 jazz and blues history book, Harlem Of The West: The San Francisco Fillmore Jazz Era, in an extended form that will include a multimedia website and a travelling museum. An Indiegogo campaign finished over the weekend, and the authors are continuing to fundraise.

The photographer and academic Watts, who coauthored New Orleans Suite: Music And Culture In Transition with Eric Porter in 2013 (The Wire 351), collaborated with the film maker and writer Pepin Silva to tell the story of the Fillmore music scene in the 1940s and 50s. During this time, the Fillmore contained more than two dozen nightclubs and music venues, including well-known spots like Jimbo’s Bop City. Its significance for African-American musical and cultural history led to the Fillmore district being compared to New York’s Harlem in the postwar period. Yet when Pepin Silva began researching the neighbourhood after taking on the job of day manager and historian at the Fillmore Auditorium in 1986, she found it to be relatively under-documented.

After combing the local library, historical societies and universities for information, she says, “I changed my tactics and began just walking the streets, going into what few shops remained and talking to the workers. I quickly learned that the neighbourhood had once been a vibrant cultural and entertainment hub. The entire place had been wiped away by redevelopment.”

The rapid redevelopment of the Fillmore district in the 1950s saw many local businesses, music venues among them, being demolished. It was part of a wider campaign of postwar rebuilding in cities across the US, but, as Pepin Silva notes, “There were thousands of people living in the Fillmore, and a thriving business and entertainment area. And while the housing stock was old, and there were some other problems, people took pride in the neighbourhood and enjoyed living there.

“City planners had no plans for all the people who lived in the Fillmore. They were simply told to get out, and given no help in finding new places to live or move their businesses,” she says. Residents successfully sued the redevelopment agency, but many had already been forced to leave by the time the case was won.

Watts and Pepin Silva met in the mid-1990s when Watts exhibited a set of photos that had been collected by Red Powell, the owner of a shoeshine parlour in Fillmore Street. Powell’s collection had been saved by a neighbour, Reggie Pettus, who ran a barbershop across the street, after Powell suffered a stroke and his shop was closed. “Reggie rescued the archive from being thrown out by the landlord,” remembers Watts. “He was thrilled that I was so happy to find them. I began to restore the damaged photographs for the report and later to exhibit.

“I have always been interested in visual history and black culture and music in particular, and this has been a wonderful history to work on. Since the book came out, we’ve found many new archives and stories and we get continued requests to put the book back in print. We have continuously been told that the heyday of the Fillmore was one of the best times in many of the residents’ lives. When people were displaced, it shattered many families. And many of the people who died in Jonestown in Guyana were former residents and their offspring who were members of Jim Jones’s People’s Temple.”

The new edition of Harlem Of The West will feature more photographs and memorabilia that have been made available to the authors since the original publication, and the accompanying website will feature these along with audio interviews conducted with former residents of the area. Watts and Pepin Silva are also planning to take a travelling exhibit on the road, so that the stories and sounds of Fillmore can be seen and heard in places such as schools and community centres as well as museums. This serves to bring the story into the present day, where it resonates with current concerns about how gentrification, in the guise of regeneration, affects urban communities.

“I think it's more urgent than ever that people understand the history of the Fillmore neighbourhood, the tragedy of what has been lost forever so that it doesn't happen again,” says Pepin Silva. “ We as communities need to have serious discussions about how we want our cities and towns to look, and what is important to keep. Do we really want to live in cities that look all the same and that only the extremely wealthy can afford? I for one do not. What has always appealed to me about the Fillmore of the 1940s and 50s is its multiculturalism and integration of all classes. There were doctors and lawyers living next to janitors and shop clerks; African Americans and Japanese Americans and Jews and Euro-Americans all living side by side in one big mix. That, to me, is what makes a vibrant neighbourhood. And what is important not to lose.”

More about the project is on Indiegogo. A gallery of images from the book is online here. To donate, contact Elizabeth Pepin on otwfront@gmail.com.

A triple CD set of Evan Parker’s three night residency at London’s Cafe Oto in May 2013 is being released by Eddie Prévost’s Matchless label. The compilation also comes with an 80 minute DVD. Parker played with Prévost and John Edwards across all three nights. They were joined by Alexander von Schlippenbach on the second night, and Christof Thewes on the third.

More details on the release, which is expected around the end of March, online here.