Following up their one dayer earlier this month, Tusk has announced dates and the first batch of acts for its 2014 festival. Taking place between 8–10 October in and around Newcastle's Star & Shadow, the festival hosts performances by Hijokaidan, Borbetomagus, Norbert Möslang and Aine O'Dwyer, with more to be announced.

Tickets are on sale now, and there's a deluxe early bird offer that comes with a copy of Ambarchi/Campbell/Flower's Live At Tusk Festival 2013 LP. More acts, plus talks and a film programme will be added in the coming months. More details here.

Semibreve festival in Portugal has opened applications for its first new media art residency. The residency will take place over the course of a week between 1–8 October, and will culminate with an installation at GNRation and a workshop over the weekend 9-12 October. Semibreve takes place in the small city of Braga in the North of Portugal, with the chosen artist also spending time with Braga's arts and technology lab EngageLab.

To apply, detail your proposal and fill in the application form online here. Deadline for submissions is 10 August. Musicians programmed for the festival so far include Demdike Stare, Karen Gwyer, Patten, Roll The Dice, Ryoichi Kurokawa and Sensate Focus, with more to be announced in the coming months.

ST Holdings, who distribute music by a number of UK independent labelsm, are shutting up shop. In May the company pared back its customers from 200 labels to 30 in order refocus operations. All payments will be brought up to date by September, and the company's sales manager Mat Harwood has launched his own vinyl distribution service via newly opened Bournemouth record shop Unearthed Sounds.

[Hat Tip: CMU]

Brian Eno is designing acoustic environments for Chelsea and Westminster hospital's A&E department. Eno is volunteering to refine the acoustics and possibly record sound for the A&E, along with other artists who will create new visual and sonic features for the ward.

Eno said: “Music can be designed to help improve the atmosphere and environment for people going through difficult times...I don’t go to hospital much myself, but on visiting, I thought, this is really the way we should be thinking about hospital."

The £10million redevelopment aims to create a more soothing environment that is less frightening to distressed patients, working on the same technique used in burns wards to distract patients from pain and reduce the administering of painkillers.

[Hat Tip: Evening Standard]

Japanese free jazz critic Teruto Soejima passed away on 12 July at the age of 83. Since the late 1960s he had been a tireless booster of free jazz in Japan. In 1969 together with Masayuki Takayanagi, Masahiko Togashi and Masahiko Satoh, he helped found the New Jazz Hall, Tokyo’s first dedicated free jazz venue.

Unusually, Soejima viewed promotion and production as essential components of his job as a critic, and he was closely involved in record production and arranging concert tours. He enjoyed a particularly long and fruitful relationship with the Moers Festival in Germany, where he arranged appearances by over 130 Japanese free musicians between 1977 and 2006. He was equally committed to promoting Japanese tours by Western free jazz musicians (particularly those from Russia and Korea), including Peter Kowald, Christian Marclay, the Seoul Free Music Trio and Jazz Group Arkhangelsk. His books included History Of Japanese Free Jazz (2002), a valuable first-hand account of the music’s development in Japan, and The Story Of Free Jazz Around The World (2013).

Christian Marclay recalls: "In 1986 he organized a tour of Japan for David Moss and I. We performed all over the country traveling in a van for a month. To be Soejima-san's guest was a great honor, he was a thoughtful guide and it was a privilege to discover the country through his eyes and ears. I'm also very grateful to him for introducing my work to a new audience. Through him I met many musicians, among them Otomo Yoshihide who was helping him organize some of the gigs. Teruto Seojima was an important contributor to the development of the music avant-garde in Japan."

Christian Marclay will be appearing in the studio on Thursday 24 July, talking to Chris Bohn about Teruto Soejima in a short one hour tribute. Adventures In Sound And Music broadcasts every Thursday 9-10:30pm on Resonance FM. All shows are archived online.

Hackney Film Festival is starting a record label called Psychè Tropes, focused roughly around the myriad intersections between film and music, beyond the soundtrack. The first release on the label will be a triple vinyl compilation, packaged with a 16mm film strip. HFF Vol 1 includes tracks by Some Truths, Scanner, Sculpture and others, and a launch event takes place on 29 August.

Watch a trail for the compilation below, more details are online here, and extracts are on Soundcloud.

HFF Vol. 1 from psyché tropes on Vimeo.

Kevin Pierce, who ran the now defunct blog and PDF publication Your Heart Out (featured as an Unofficial Channels in The Wire 326) has published an ebook. A Moment Worth Waiting For is a semi fictional novel, which partly extends on his music writing and criticism, starting with Vic Godard's What's The Matter Boy.

A Moment Worth Waiting For is available on Amazon. More details on his site here.

Dalston's Cafe Oto is holding a one dayer in Bexhill this September, at the De La Warr Pavilion, as part of the venue's bimonthly Dear Serge series. On Sunday 14 Oren Ambarchi, Johan Berthling, the trio lll人 (Daichi Yoshikawa, Paul Abbott and Seymour Wright), Rie Nakajima and Shelley Parker perform, plus Part Wild Horses Mane On Both Sides's new site specific piece Conduit Of The Bottomless Submundane, which uses tactile elements and camouflages the process of sound creation.

The day runs from 12-6pm, and is free to enter, with performances starting at 1pm. More details here.

Scott Walker and Sunn O)))'s collaboration, Scott O))), has been given a title and tracklisting after its recent announcement at the beginning of the month. Five tracks run to 50 minutes long, and is titled Soused. Scott Walker also produced the album along with Peter Walsh and Mark Warman. The release date has also been confirmed as 22 September, and it will be released on CD, vinyl and digitally.

A tracklisting is on the micro site here. No word on whether we're supposed to pronounce the 'O'.

[HT]

Tropicalia: Ou Panis Et Cirencis, the 1968 album that helped define tropicalia as a cultural movement, is being reissued by Soul Jazz. The compilation, which was a manifesto of sorts, includes tracks by Gilberto Gil, Caetano Veloso, Gal Costa, Nara Leão and Os Mutantes, and arrangements by Rogerio Duprat, who (unusually for an arranger) is also included on the cover image. Physical copies have been scarce, and Soul Jazz are releasing a CD and vinyl version, although there's no digital download available.

More details here.