The Harry Bertoia Foundation, Bertoia Studios and Important Records have launched a crowdfunding campaign to raise funds for transferring hundreds of Bertoia’s sound works from tape to digital. If successful, the crowdfunding effort will mean that Important is able to preserve the entire archive, and release a selection of the Sonambient recordings on CD and LP. Rewards include copies of the record, the metalwork used to press the LP, Bertoia's Polaroids of his sculptures, plus a set of the original LPs that he self-released in 1978.

Bertoia's tapes have been sitting in the Sonambient barn in Barto, Pennsylvania since he died in 1978. Important's John Brien says: "Each tape contains a little note from Harry, with the date and a description of the recording."

Bertoia was an Italian sculptor, printmaker, furniture designer and sound artist, famous for his metal mesh chair designs for Knoll, which allowed him to create the Sonambient sculptures, which were made from clusters of heavy wire rods. More details on the project here, and view a gallery of photos of the Sonambient sculptures here.

Mutek Montreal has announced its first batch of artists for the 2015 edition. This year's programme includes Andy Stott playing solo and with Miles Whittaker as Millie & Andrea, sets from Stroboscopic Artefacts label head Lucy, Atom TM and Robin Fox performing their collaborative piece Double Vision, Ólafur Arnalds’s Kiasmos, Rrose, Sherwood & Pinch, James Holden, John Tejada and more.

This year’s festival takes place between 27-31 May at various venues across the city. A full line up of confirmed acts is online here, with more names to be added in the coming months.

UK sound scavenger Mordant Music is collaborating on a spoken word album with essayist, polemicist, architecture critic and BBC broadcaster Jonathan Meades. Pedigree Mongrel features excerpts from three books: Pompey (1993), Meades’s blackly humorous novel set in Portsmouth; his architecture polemic Museum Without Walls, and his digressive memoir An Encyclopaedia Of Myself. Meades speaks in character, tries on various accents, occasionally breaks into song or cracks up with laughter, while Mordant Music provides uneasy background sounds and gives Meades’s voice the dub treatment. The LP is the fourth in the London based Test Centre label’s series of spoken word excursions, following discs from Stewart Home, Ian Sinclair and Chris Petit.

More details at Mordant Music.

Mica Levi, cover star of The Wire 372, will be resident at Bristol’s The Cube Cinema this March with a new project. Good Sad Happy Bad is a new incarnation of her group Micachu And The Shapes, and for three days the microplex venue will host ad hoc performances and exhibitions put together on location by Mica and collaborators Raisa Khan and Marc Pell, over the weekend of 13–15 March.

The first two days promise live music, DJs, video footage and karaoke, and a final day will feature a film programme put together by the band. The event is part of the occasional series Play The Cube, which has previously hosted residencies by Richard Youngs and Liz Harris. Watch the video for “goodsadchristmasbetter” by Good Sad Happy Bad below.

Bloomsbury is publishing How To Write About Music, a book collecting a selection of texts from the 33 1/3 series, as well as excerpts from magazines, books and blogs, plus advice from music writers. Editors Marc Woodworth and Ally Jane Grossan interviewed over 40 music writers for the textbook, including the likes of Drew Daniel, Anthony Kwame Harrison, Richard Henderson, Marvin Lin, Paul Morley, Jessica Hopper, and The Wire’s Editor-In-Chief, Tony Herrington.

Chapters cover the live review, the album review, writing blog posts and how to pitch to publishers, and includes advice, examples and stories from music writers themselves. Launched in 2003, the 33 1/3 series (which is now on its 100th title) is a series of short books dedicated to writers writing about a specific album. More details on How To Write About Music here.

Little Annie has published a collection of writing and illustrations of New York City, titled Just Like I Pictured It. The 41-page paperback is published by Existstencil Press and includes monochrome sketches, poetry and prose. It is dedicated to New York City where she lives, and which she describes in her dedication as her “fickle and arrogant muse”.

More details on the book here.

Artist Blanca Regina is making a film about musician and improvisor Terry Day. Day is an influential improvisor, prolific collaborator, songwriter, poet and artist, who formed a duo with Derek Bailey in the late 60s, and was also a member of The Continuous Music Ensemble, People Band, and the group Alterations with David Toop, Steve Beresford and Peter Cusack. The crowdfunding campaign aims to raise £12,000 towards the production, edit, and post-production of the film. It will run for two months from 19 February.

On 19 March a fundraiser for the film takes place at Cafe Oto with an enormous line up of guests whch indcludes Okkyung Lee, David Toop, Max Eastley, John Butcher, Peter Cusack, Pat Thomas, Phil Minton, Mike Figgis, Steve Beresford, as well as Day, among others, with around ten short sets planned for the evening.

The film has been in progress for three years, and includes live footage, interviews, and narration from Beresford, Toop and Figgis, looking at Day’s attitude and approaches to improvisation. More details on the show here, and a crowdfunding campaign opens here next week.

Paul Purgas and Heather Phillipson are among the artists taking up residencies this year at Wysing Arts Centre in Cambridgeshire. Purgas is a member of the duo Emptyset, whose last album was released by Raster-Noton, and who have performed at numerous festivals including Unsound, Mutek and Semibreve, as well as in spaces ranging from London’s Tate Britain to disused mines in Kent. Phillipson is a London based artist who works with spoken work, poetry and film (see The Wire 372). Other artists taking part in the year long residency include film maker Erica Scourti and curator and Wire contributor Irene Revell, of Electra Productions.

Wysing’s 2015 residencies programme has been given the theme The Multiverse, with artists contributing to a number of public events throughout the year. The first of these takes place on 21 February. More details on all the artists taking part here.

Loscil, aka Scott Morgan, has released a three track EP to raise money for the daughter of his friend Tim Loewen, who has been diagnosed with a rare form of bone cancer called Ewing’s Sarcoma. The record, titled For Greta, has been released on Bandcamp for a $5 or more donation. Loewen is “an extended member of the Loscil family”, according to Morgan, who contributed guitar on First Narrows and played live for Morgan on various occasions.

To download or listen head to Loscil’s Bandcamp page.

Pan Records is reissuing Spectre’s illbient hip hop mixtape Ruff Kutz. Spectre, aka Skiz Fernando, originally released the limited edition cassette on his WordSound label in 1998. The 90-minute release comprises alternative mixes, obscure beats, and unreleased tracks and edits, by Sensational, Mr Dead, Bill Laswell, Jungle Brothers, Kevin Martin’s Techno Animal project, among others.

Fernando is now a professional chef (he published a cookery book in 2012, and has a YouTube cooking channel here). More details on the release, pressed to double LP, incoming on Pan records.