Ensembles Asia is an ambitious new initiative launched by Tokyo’s Otomo Yoshihide and Hong Kong’s Takuro Mizuta Lippit aka DJ Sniff. According to Sniff, “This is a large scale project with which we aim to connect independent music communities throughout Asia during the next seven years.”

The project has three components: the Asian Music Network, which will link experimental and underground musicians across the Pacific Rim region; Asian Sounds Research, which will film and record the region’s experimental music and whose project director is Otomo’s regular collaborator Sachiko M; and The Ensembles Asia Orchestra.

The project’s first public outing is the Asian Meeting Festival which takes place in Tokyo on 6 and 7 February and will feature performances by The Ensembles Asia Orchestra, which is made up of underground and experimental musicians from Hong Kong, Bandung, Yogyakarta, Kuala Lumpur, Singapore, Bangok, Hanoi, Ho Chi Minh, Tokyo and Osaka. This will be followed on 8 February by a concert by the same musicians in Kyoto, and on 11 February by a symposium on the subject of experimental music in Asia as well as a concert by Otomo, Sniff, Sachiko M and others at Tokyo’s NTT InterCommunication Center (ICC), which is currently hosting the exhibition Otomo Yoshihide: Between Music And Art (reviewed in The Wire 372).

The Asian Meeting Festival will also host a screening of Adythia Utama’s documentary Bising: Noise And Experimental Music In Indonesia and will be preceded on 5 February by a debriefing session hosted by Tokyo’s Japan Foundation that will present the results of the Ensembles Asia project’s 2014 research trips to the Philippines and Indonesia.

Meanwhile, DJ Sniff has just posted a mixtape online featuring most of the festival’s participating musicians.

More information here

Richard Youngs will be the featured artist at this year’s Counterflows
festival, taking place in Glasgow 2–5 April. Commissioned by festival organiser Alasdair Campbell to create a new vocal work, Youngs has written a piece for four singers called "Experiment For Demolished Structures" and, says Campbell, it is inspired by his and Youngs’s love for brutalist architecture.

Now in its fourth year, 2015’s Counterflows will also feature performances from Daniel Carter, Noura Mint Seymali, Rabih Beaini, Neil Michael Hagerty, Hisato Higuchi, Angharad Davies, Fish Police, Wang Ju-Jui, DINO, Raymond Boni, Negro Leo & The Chinese Cookie Poets, Adam Campbell, Lin Che-Wei, Evan Parker & Sten Sandell, Sacred Paws, Andrea Neumann, Yong Yong and more, as well as film screenings and workshops.

Full details can be found here.

TCF has set loose an artificial intelligence of sorts, a command line called TCFX. It allows users to issue commands to a computer programme, which responds with written answers, numerical code and images.

The command line is intended as an extension of producer TCF’s Liberation Technologies release from last year, the catchily titled 415C47197F78E811FEEB7862288306EC4137FD4EC3DED8B, and future releases by TCF will upgrade and expand TCFX. It has been developed by Remote, with Tljtieue Bovitobenn and Aedrhlsomrs Laucehrofn. Watch a short instructional video on how to use TCFX below.

Susanna Wallumrød, better known as just Susanna, is starting a Best Of Susanna cassette series. There will be three volumes, released at The Wire and NyMusikk's Off The Page festival in Oslo this weekend.

“New technology and digital ways of listening are exciting, but also challenging,” writes Susanna. As such, she has decided to look back at her catalogue via the format she listened to music on while growing up.

The covers are designed by Lasse Marhuag, and are printed in a signed and numbered limited edition. More details on the label here.

Glasgow’s Volcanic Tongue, run by Heather Leigh and longtime Wire contributor David Keenan, is closing after ten years in business. The forest green website, featuring a picture of a girl striking a pose in dressing up clothes (a young Heather Leigh preparing for a Madonna fancy dress party) became a mecca for underground music in the UK, stocking CD-Rs, tapes and vinyl often unavailable elsewhere. It began as a mail order business, run out of Keenan and Leigh’s kitchen, before expanding into a Glasgow shop. Since then, it has moved locations, started its own cassette store day and hosted regular in store performances. The website's regular longform write-ups by Keenan now total an estimated two million words, forming an archive of sorts for underground music released in the last decade.

Musicians and artists also passed behind the desk for spells of employment, including Alex Neilson. “As a reflection of the abundance of its music scene, Glasgow has always boasted a healthy number of high quality record shops,” writes Neilson, who worked at Volcanic Tongue between 2004–07. “Suffice to say, none of these ever had anything like the intensely focused aesthetic or the monomaniacal commitment to alternative culture and experimental art as Volcanic Tongue. As a tender 22 year old with an obsession for free jazz and feral folk music, it was a first class back seat education, which often felt like the equivalent of jet skiing behind a runaway train."

Neilson says that the shop became a crucial hub for underground music at a time when there was a ground swell of musicians and non-musicians using the internet and cheap recording equipment to short-circuit the existing production lines of art and music. “Volcanic Tongue provided a platform for people to record and self-release their most personally conceived expressions with the knowledge that it would be discussed with intelligence, sensitivity and on its own peculiar terms,” he explains. “Its closure hasn't just left a gaping hole in Glasgow's cultural landscape, but that of the world.”

“The noise explosion and the CD-R revolution was something that Volcanic Tongue helped channel,” says Keenan, “and by about 2006 it was really at its apex: glory years where it seemed like there were amazing new releases coming out every few days in incredible inventive packaging and with radical new approaches to the form. But when the recession hit in 2008, it hit hard. I don’t think the economy has ever really recovered, nor ever truly will.”

Last year, Volcanic Tongue announced plans to shut up its physical shop and instead return to mail order, but despite these plans Keenan says that this set off a “chain reaction" which could only end in the shop closing completely. "We started Volcanic Tongue as a mail order run out of our kitchen, and we ended that way,” he says. “We were very fortunate in that we developed a reputation in the underground community for breaking and bringing to people music they had never heard of before, so many of our customers were willing to buy blind purely on our own recommendation. We resisted modernising or upgrading the website, as we wanted to preserve the experience of reading a magazine – the way you would take a pitch on something purely after reading a review, with your imagination on fire and a fantasy image of what you were about to hear.”

One of the key factors leading to the closing of the shop is the increasing number of projects both Keenan and Leigh are working on outside of the shop. Keenan’s debut novel, The Comfort Of Women, will be published by Strange Attractor this year, along with a reprint of his book on the UK underground, England’s Hidden Reverse. He’ll also be continuing to contribute to The Wire, and running his cassette label. Leigh is working on new solo and group projects, with a number of releases planned for this year.

In the coming weeks the site will be holding a sale of all shop stock and used items. Follow David Keenan at @reversediorama, and Heather Leigh at @wishimage. Read the original announcement here.

Following an announcement that it would be staging its 2015 festival in April, due to unforeseen circumstances Brighton’s Colour Out Of Space festival has had to postpone activities until later this year. A new date is expected to be announced soon.

More info incoming here.

Chicago’s Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians celebrates its 50th anniversary in May, and New York’s Interpretations concert series is starting the party early next month with a programme of events featuring music and performances by some of the AACM’s major players.

The AACM was formed in May 1965 as a community music organisation dedicated "to nurturing, performing, and recording serious, original music”; it has since incubated some of the most significant figures in the African-American avant garde, from The Art Ensemble Of Chicago to Matana Roberts. Interpretations’ director is the avant garde baritone singer Thomas Bruckner, who has a long association with various AACM members and who also runs the Mutable Music label. In March Bruckner gives a concert at New York’s Roulette space featuring works specially written for him by AACM members, including cofounder Muhal Richard Abrams, The Art Ensemble’s Roscoe Mitchell, Leroy Jenkins, Wadada Leo Smith and Henry Threadgill. The series begins in February with performances by groups led by pianist Amina Claudine Myers and percussionist Thurman Barker. Future concerts will feature The SEM Ensemble, led by New York based Czech composer Petr Kotik, performing works by Abrams, Mitchell and AACM biographer George Lewis alongside pieces by John Cage and Christian Wolff.

The series is notable for the way it bridges the divide between the US experimental music community and the African-American avant garde, a schism articulated in Lewis’s 2008 book A Power Stronger Than Itself: The AACM And American Experimental Music.

Meanwhile, according to the AACM website, preparations for the organisation’s own anniversary celebrations are underway and will take the form of “a worldwide celebration of musical presentations, installations, exhibitions and more. This year long celebration will honour, reflect and advance the organisation’s contributions to the world's musical landscape.”

Soul Jazz are releasing a new collection of work by Florian Fricke, the late leader of German kosmische unit Popol Vuh. The first disc of Kailash is dedicated to solo piano recordings, fulfilling an ambition of Fricke's which went unrealised in his lifetime. Fricke played Moog synthesizer on the group's first album Affenstunde, but moved to acoustic piano on their next album In Den Gärten Pharaos, and continued to explore the limits of the instrument until his death in 2002. The recordings here are drawn from the early 1970s to late 80s, five of them previously unreleased, and some were sketches for compositions realised on Popol Vuh’s studio records.

The second part of the collection comprises a DVD of the film Kailash, along with a CD of Fricke’s soundtrack. The documentary was self-released in the mid-90s and is long unavailable, and documented Fricke and film maker and former group member Frank Fieldler’s spiritual journey to the mountain in West Tibet. Soul Jazz’s Kailash collection is released on 16 March.

Non profit broadcast media organisation Wave Farm has an open call for participants to its residency programme, where artists are invited to spend ten days at the Wave Farm Study Center resource library in Acra New York, to prepare a new transmission piece and prepare a playlist for broadcast on WGXC, Wave Farm’s creative community station (which serves the Upper Hudson Valley). Each individual will receive a $700 artist fee. Deadline for applications is 1 February.

More information here.

Six Organs Of Admittance’s Ben Chasny has developed a new system for making music based on a set of standard playing cards. The method, which he’s called hexadic, was used to record the forthcoming Six Organs Of Admittance album of the same name, which is to be released this February.

The hexadic system involves relating the cards in a deck to the notes on a guitar, although Chasny claims it’s also transferable to other instruments. A standard deck can be used, although he is also in the process of making his own set of illustrated cards. “There is a romantic element to a deck of cards,” he says, “and a tradition of art – such as the surrealist cards.

“I actually started to have these strange half-dreams as I was waking up about composing with a deck of cards, but as a game,” he reports. “So it wasn't so much like a serial composition, where I was just laying out a tone row or something. It was more engaging and entertaining. I was reading Give My Regards To Eighth Street, the collection by Morton Feldman, before I was going to bed, so I think that had something to do with it.”

The aim of the hexadic system is to break guitar players out of bad habits by creating a situation where they encounter unfamiliar tonal relationships. Chasny claims it can be used in live performance, and that the hexadic system even has a game element. “That is pretty entertaining,” he says. “At least for me! I know I laugh a lot when I have played it with friends.”

Elements of Chasny’s hexadic system are apparently sourced from occult literature. “There is a language aspect that can interact with the aspect of creating tonal structures,” he declares. “There is a graphic element that can interact with the game element. All four of those elements can act together, or exist separately.” Those four parts supposedly derive from German occultist Heinrich Cornelius Agrippa, along with French philosopher Gaston Bachelard, plus Catalan writer Ramon Llull, who inspired one of the hexadic figures.

Chasny's collaborators for Hexadic were Noel Von Harmonson (Comets On Fire, Sic Alps, Heron Oblivion) on drums, Rob Fisk (Common Eider, King Eider, Badgerlore, ex-Deerhoof) on bass and Charlie Saufley (The Assemble Head In Sunburst Sound, Meg Baird, Heron Oblivion) on bass. Chasny has written briefly on the project over at the Six Organs site, and a pack of playing cards will also be produced in due course. The album is released on Drag City on 15 February. Listen to a track from the record below: