Planet Mu head Mike Paradinas is “doing an Aphex”, also known as uploading a raft of previously unheard and unreleased material to his Soundcloud account. At time of writing Paradinas was uploading four or five tracks per hour to his µ-ZIQ account. All tracks are tagged with the year they were made, and some have brief annotations on places, people and equipment used.

In among the uploads is the first ever 4-track recording Paradinas ever made, a track called "Souvenir" from 1985. Listen to it below, and expect more to come via Soundcloud.

[HT: Rory Gibb]

Aldeburgh Festival will celebrate French composer and conductor Pierre Boulez’s 90th birthday with a mixed media retrospective, including Barrie Gavin’s documentary Pierre Boulez: Living In The Present; The Chicago Symphony Orchestra playing a selection of Boulez’s work from the last six decades (in a mix conceived by Gerard McBurney); and Boulez Exploration – two performances by Quatuor Diotima and Florent Boffard of rarely seen Boulez works. The Boulez events will run between 16–18 June. For more information go here.

Other festival highlights include Benjamin Britten’s only full-length ballet score The Prince Of The Pagodas, the premiere of Harrison Birtwistle’s chamber opera The Cure, and a weekend themed around the works of Bach, alongside a selection of walks, talks and films.

The festival runs from 12–28 June. More information here

Called Hecker Leckey Sound Voice Chimera, Florian Hecker and Mark Leckey’s new LP is rooted in a 2011 performance event at London’s Tate Modern of the same title. In its original installation context, Hecker deconstructed the vocal track of a Mark Leckey piece, GreenScreenRefrigeratorAction, on which the artist intoned the monologue of a refrigerator and patched it together with an earlier installation, 3 Channel Chronics. The resulting installation was a hybrid of Leckey’s monologues and Hecker’s sonic structures. Each side of the LP version features a single sound channel of the installation, with fragments of Leckey’s voice emerging from and submerging into Hecker’s dense electronic structures. A third channel of the installation is available as a download.

The collaboration is another iteration of Hecker’s recent Chimera series, where he subjects spoken texts from writers such as Reza Negarestani, Stefan Helmreich and Catherine Wood to extreme electronic manipulation, while much of Mark Leckey’s recent work has taken sound systems as an inspiration. Hecker Leckey Sound Voice Chimera will be released by Pan in March.

50 years after he wrote it, Garth W Caylor Jr has finally published his book of jazz interviews. Called Nineteen +, it documents his meetings with Herbie Hancock, Milford Graves, Bill Evans, Steve Lacy, Paul and Carla Bley, Jimmy Giuffre and Ornette Coleman, among others, in New York City between 1964–65. “The conversations are about jazz music at its centre in New York City, at a time of social unrest and accelerating change,” says Caylor Jr, via email.

Why did he choose to talk to these musicians? “Each one had produced – to my thinking – moving and memorable music,” he replies, “and I could find them, meet with them and learn, first-hand, about the theory of their music and the life context of it.”

Caylor Jr says he let the interviews take shape by following cues in the musicians’ interests and thoughts. As such, he talks to Carla Bley about the body's capacity for absorbing plastics; to Giuffre about security versus substance; and to Ornette about the architect Edward Durrell Stone. This approach, he adds, was influenced by his friend and author John Arthur, who had developed a conversational technique of interviewing realist painters.

He finished the book in 1965 but couldn’t find anyone to publish it, despite a letter of glowing recommendation from Ralph J Gleason, rock and jazz critic and cofounder of Rolling Stone. “All I can say is that I urge you with every ounce of conviction I have to publish it,” Gleason wrote to Little Brown Company, adding that he had “read it twice and both times found it fascinating, but more than fascinating, I have found it illuminating”.

Finding no takers, Caylor Jr eventually filed the book away. “I was disappointed and embarrassed to have bothered so many people, now my friends, for their ideas and hospitality, which were hidden away in a file folder,” he writes.

Two events prompted him to self publish it. Firstly, Jason Weiss asked Caylor Jr if he could use some of it in a book he was writing about saxophonist Steve Lacy. Some time later, Caylor Jr read a Garrison Keillor article about changes in publishing and "decided to get the thing done by my own resources”, he says. He has now produced a paperback edition of Nineteen +, via Amazon's self publishing platform. You can read excerpts and find more information here.

A documentary about The Residents gets its first airing at Austin, Texas’s SXSW festival next month. Called The Theory Of Obscurity: A Film About The Residents, it tells the history of the group through archival and new footage, plus interviews with Devo’s Jerry Casale, Chris Cutler, Dean Ween, Matt Groening and others.

Made in collaboration with The Residents' management group The Cryptic Corporation, the film also draws material from the group’s own archives. The Theory Of Obscurity was successfully crowdfunded via Indiegogo at the end of December 2013, raising more than $40,000 to cover the costs of handling and converting archival footage, and post-production. Watch a trailer below.

[HT IndieWire]

UK underground stalwart Richard Youngs is releasing No Fans Compendium, a 7xCD box set on VHF compiling a selection of tracks from his No Fans series of short run editions of 20-50 copies, sold exclusively at shows or from the desk at Volcanic Tongue. Also included in the box set are two discs of previously unreleased work recorded between 1989–2014.

More details plus a full tracklisting are online here. Listen to a long excerpt from the box set below.

An archival exhibition documenting the rise of pirate radio stations in the UK has opened in Stoke-on-Trent, as part of the ICA's touring exhibition programme. Shout Out! UK Pirate Radio in the 1980s tracks the rise of pirate radio stations following the Telecommunications Act 1984 which forced many independent stations to close down.

Photographs, videos, press clippings and publications will document the story of how these 600-plus pirate radio stations – such as Radio Invicta, LWR, Jackie FM, Horizon, Dread Broadcasting Corporation and Kiss FM – came to dominate the airwaves, and the lasting impact such stations have had.

The exhibition will run at Stoke-on-Trent The Potteries Museum and Art Gallery, between 14 February–9 May; London ICA between 26 May-19 July; Leicester Phoenix, between 23 July–24 August. More info here.

Composer and computer musician Mark Trayle has died. He studied at Mills College in the 1970s with Robert Ashley, David Behrman and David Rosenboom, and in the 80s formed part of The Hub, the project formed from the ashes of Bay Area supergroup The League Of Automatic Music Composers, alongside Jim Horton, John Bischoff, Tim Perkis, Rich Gold and others. The Hub, named after the central machine they used in live performance, explored the possibilities of making music via computer network, where each performer might access and use sonic commands, parameters or information provided by the other musicians. A three CD collection of their work appeared on Tzadik in 2008. Trayle's music was released on Artifact, Atavistic, Nonesuch and many other labels, and he collaborated or performed with Wadada Leo Smith, Nels Cline, David Behrman, Alvin Curran, The Rova Saxophone Quartet and numerous others. At the time of his death he was on the staff of the music department of CalArts in Los Angeles.

Mark Harwood’s Penultimate Press is reissuing a trilogy of releases by French industrial group Étant Donnés. Aurore, Royaume/Aimant + Aimant and Bleu were originally released on Touch, Staalplaat and Danceteria between 1990 and 1994, and have now been remastered and repackaged.

Aurore includes ambient and field recordings and will be the first to come out this April, followed by Royaume/Aimant + Aimant in June and Bleu as a 2LP later in the year. Named after a work by the pioneering conceptual artist Marcel Duchamp, Étant Donnés are brothers Eric and Marc Hurtado, originally from Morocco. Formed in 1980 and active through the 90s, they have collaborated with Alan Vega, Genesis Breyer P-Orridge, Michael Gira and others. More details on the group here. Listen to a track from Aurore below.

Composers Inside Electronics artists John Driscoll, Phil Edelstein and Matt Rogalsky have installed David Tudor's Rainforest V at Broadway 1602 gallery in New York. Following Tudor’s death in 1996, Composers Inside Electronics continued to perform the Rainforest installation, which in 2009 became Rainforest V – a self-running installation created for Arte Alameda in Mexico City. This version of the site-specific piece runs until 4 March.

The first version of Rainforest was conceived by Tudor following a commission from the choreographer Merce Cunningham in 1968. 140 performances ran as part of the Merce Cunningham Dance Company Repertory, and in 1973 Tudor invited other artist to collaborate on the project, leading to the sound sculpture and installation Rainforest IV.

Talking about the piece to Teddy Hilberg in 1988, Tudor explained: “The idea is that if you send sound through materials, the resonant nodes of the materials are released and those can be picked up by contact microphones or phono cartridges [...] It becomes like a reflection and it makes, I thought, quite a harmonious and beautiful atmosphere, because wherever you move in the room, you have reminiscences of something you have heard at some other point in the space.”

More information and opening times here.