Greetings Kobaïans! Jazz Village are planning an enormous Magma dump, pressing all the group’s original albums to vinyl and releasing two new recordings. A new extended recording of “Rïah Sahïltaahk”, which originally appeared on 1001˚Centigrades is out now on CD and vinyl. Also in the pipeline are vinyl only reissues of Köhntarkösz Anteria, Köhntarkösz, and Ëmëhntëhtt-Ré. In January, a new recording of Axiom will be released, which contains a new recording of Slag Tanz, which has previously only been heard live.

To mark the 45th anniversary of the group’s creation, Magma will also be performing a series of live concerts, with a three week stint lined up at the Triton in Paris, before heading further afield. No dates are confirmed yet but there are plans for performances in South America, UK, Germany, Scandinavia, Japan and the United States.

Over 100 members have passed through the group, with the first incarnation assembled by the group’s leader Christian Vander in 1969 as a direct response to the death of John Coltrane in 1967. Vander famously created a new language for his group, Kobaïan, a reference to the fictional planet Kobaïa, the backdrop for Magma’s prog-ventures. More info incoming here.

Clive Palmer, one of the original members of the Incredible String Band, has died aged 71. Palmer, originally from London, spent much of his life in Cornwall, and despite being best known as an original member of the Incredible String Band, only contributed to a fraction of the group’s 1966 self-titled album.

Palmer started Clive’s Incredible Folk Club in Glasgow with Robin Williamson in 1964, and then spent much of the late 60s on the hippy trail around Iraq, Afghanistan and India. Upon his return he bounced down to Cornwall and formed a succession of short lived groups, The Famous Jug Band among them. He later formed his own group COB (Clive’s Own Band) with whom he recorded two albums, considered the peak of his career, both musically and commercially.

Former Wire editor Mark Sinker is one of the organisers of a two day symposium scheduled to take place in London next spring that will examine the circumstances and legacy of the seismic changes that took place in UK music journalism at the beginning of the 1970s.

Taking place at Birkbeck's Institute for the Humanities next May, the symposium, titled Underground/Overground: The Changing Politics of UK Music-writing 1968–85, will examine how the UK's mainstream music weeklies NME and Melody Maker reinvented themselves in the early 1970s by hiring journalists from counterculture and underground press titles such as Oz, Frenz and International Times; the symposium will debate the immediate consequences of this process for the established music press as well as its lasting impact, both positive and negative, on the music journalism of the 1980s and beyond.

The symposium has been co-organised by Esther Leslie, Professor in Political Aesthetics at Birkbeck, and participants will include sociomusicologist Simon Frith, Black Atlantic scholar Paul Gilroy, St Etienne's Bob Stanley, and music journalists Charles Shaar Murray, Cynthia Rose, David Toop and Barney Hoskyns.

Summing up the philosophy behind the symposium, Mark Sinker states: "Rock writing at its conflicted best has been a conversation that musician, writer and reading fan all joined, as equals on the same page, an argument that reflected the crackles of dissent and tension within the songs it explored, and the conflicted world these songs fell out across, the disputatiousness as well as the joy. It has something to teach us."

More information here.

LA and New York City based reissue label Dias Recordings is set to repress William S Burroughs’s 1980 collaboration with Throbbing Gristle's Genesis P-Orridge and Peter Christopherson.

Nothing Here Now But The Recordings was made with help from Burroughs's then assistant – and after the writer's death in 1997, executor – James Grauerholz. The album used segments from Burroughs's spoken word tape "cut-ups", field recordings from his travels, as well as recordings that came out of Burroughs's interest in Electronic Voice Phenomena (EVP) recording techniques.

In early 1981 Nothing Here Now But The Recordings was the last release on Industrial Records when TG was initially dissolved. It was reissued on CD in 1998 by John Giorno. Dias's reissue is remastered from the original master tapes in a limited edition of 1,000 vinyl copies.

The first monograph collecting a selection of John Fahey’s paintings is being published by Inventory Press and Audio Visual Arts. It brings together 92 abstract works in paint and spraypaint, with essays by No Neck Blues Band founder Keith Connolly and critic Bob Nickas.

Fahey began making pictures in the late 1990s, a childhood hobby he’d dropped when he began to play guitar. Towards the end of his life, having largely disowned his musical output, he began making art, which developed into an obsession. Fahey painted on the road and in the hotels and motels he was living in at the time. He gave his paintings away, bartered with them, or just as often, discarded them. In the book’s essay by critic Bob Nickas, Fahey’s former wife Melody recalls one of his common creative processes: “He made these small paintings by putting the powder into wet phone books and then he’d stomp on them...” she says.

The pieces included in the monograph were chosen from around 130 works, unearthed in Salem, Oregon around five years ago. New York's Audio Visual Arts gallery curator Justin Luke said: “Around 2009 I was having a conversation about Fahey with an artist I’d been working with called John Andrew. We were both old fans of Fahey’s and knew he’d painted. Andrew had lived in Portland in the 90s and been to performances where the paintings were being sold at the merch table instead of CDs. He’d spoken to Fahey about including the works in a show he was organising, but it never happened.”

Luke and Andrew then contacted Fahey’s estate to ask what had happened to the paintings, and were directed to an old roomate who had bought them and, as they later discovered, had them stored them under a bed. “We made a trip out there to view the works and were blown away,” says Luke. “Since then I’ve been working with the paintings,” he says, “helping them to be exhibited and placed into collections.”

Some of the works are now in private collections, and others are being stored and are for sale in New York. More info on the book, John Fahey: Paintings, is online here, and you can view a gallery of work from it here.

French sound poet Bernard Heidsieck has died. Heidsieck, born in 1928, combined his career as a deputy manager of a Parisian bank with his work as a poet, where he brought spoken word together with a wide range of recorded material. In the mid 50s Heidsieck started performing his Poèmes-Partitions pieces, which used typographical spacing to guide his performances. He began to use the tape recorder in the 1960s, often performing live against a pre-recorded backdrop. In 1976 he organised the first International Festival Of Sound Poetry in Paris, and later, the Polyphonix festival of performance and sound poetry, along with the journals Sound Poetry and Action Poetry. Heidsieck believed in poetry as an active discipline that should be “on its feet”, and aimed to, in his own words, “animate our mechanical and technocratic age by recapturing mystery and breath”.

Curbside Splendor Publishing is piecing together an oral history of Chicago venue The Empty Bottle, hosts of The Wire’s now defunct Adventures In Modern Music festival, which ran for ten years. Curbside Splendor’s publisher Victor David Giron has an open call out for stories and photographs of the venue, which can be submitted online. The book is slated for publication in Autumn next year, and will be titled The Empty Bottle Chicago. An Oral History. 20-Something Years of Piss, Shit, and Broken Urinals.

Important Records have announced the forthcoming release of a complete edition of the sonambient sound sculpture recordings of Harry Bertoia, to coincide with the artist, designer and sculptor’s centenary in March 2015.

Bertoia started out as a jewellery and furniture maker, but in his later years he produced hundreds of sound sculptures, many of which still reside at his former estate at Bally in Pennsylvania. Bertoia was born in Italy but studied in Detroit’s Cranbrook Academy of Art, where he encountered furniture designers Ray and Charles Eames, and the success of Bertoia’s famous diamond chair – which he said was "mainly made of air, like sculpture" – enabled him to pursue deeper interests in sculpture, space and sound in the decades that followed.

Bertoia recalled in interviews how he wished as a youngster there were musical instrument that anyone could play instantly, and his sound sculptures – typically constructed of metal rods, pins and dishes – fulfilled this purpose. Some would interact with the wind and weather, others would be playable by hand, and Bertoia would play them for hours in his converted barn space, exploring their ever-changing range of tones, drones and resonances.

Rather than selling the instruments, Bertoia recorded them, and privately pressed a series of 11 records he described as "sonambient" before his death in 1978. These discs have never been reissued in their entirety, and Important plan to release all 11 releases together as a CD box set in March 2015, alongside an extensive book of images from the Bertoia estate.

A brand new video with footage of many of Bertoia's sound sculptures has just been put online.

Guitarist and singer Eugene Chadbourne has published a collection of diaries that date back to his teenage years and run through later tours as well as his dream diaries. Dreamory is self published by the guitar player, founder of The Chadbournes, among other groups. It runs to over 1000 pages, and is available direct from Chadbourne’s own site, The House Of Chad.

The folklore research and heritage project, Devon Folklore Tapes, which aims to document and rework Britain’s myths and legends via audio-visual interpretation, is repressing its first release: Devon Folklore Tapes Vol 1: Two Witches. Originally released in 2011 on a split cassette housed in a hollowed-out hardback book, the remastered reissue will be sold as a twin 10" gatefold edition that will include research notes and artwork.

Recorded by project founders David Chatton Barker and Ian Humberstone, Two Witches is a sonic interpretation of the story of Hannah Henley and Mar­iann Voaden: two 19th Century Devonshire women who practiced witchcraft.

Two Witches is set to be released 1 December and will be the first in a series of reissues planned for the label throughout 2015. More information here.