Bo' Weavil is reissuing a set of rare early Joe McPhee releases from the late 60s and early 70s: Underground Railroad, Nation Time, Trinity and Pieces Of Light, all originally released on CJ Records. The releases will be sold separately and also as a box set housed in a silk-screened wooden box.

McPhee chose Nation Time for his Inner Sleeve article in The Wire 358, where he recalled: "In September 1970, on Labor Day weekend, at the Congress of African People in Atlanta Georgia, [Amiri] Baraka had delivered his It's Nation Time poem/speech, which certainly caught my attention. I used the spirit, rhythm and cadence of the piece to inform the music."

More details on all the Bo'Weavil reissues here.

Christopher Kirkley, label head at Sahel Sounds, has launched a Kickstarter campaign to make a film based on Prince's Purple Rain and The Harder They Come. Akounak Tedalat Taha Tazoughai (which translates to Rain The Colour Of Blue With A Little Red In It) stars Music From Saharan Cellphones guitarist Mdou Moctar and will be shot in Agadez. Written with a Tuareg audience in mind, it will be the first fiction film ever in the Tuareg language, if completed. More details here, and watch a trailer below.

The Wire will be hosting a series of talks at CTM festival in Berlin later this month. Three Q&As will be hosted by Wire staffer Jennifer Lucy Allan, with Yasunao Tone, Phill Niblock, and Charles Cohen with Rabih Beaini. Strange Attractor's Mark Pilkington will also be hosting two talks on behalf of The Wire, with Cyclobe, and Rodion GA and Ion Dumitrescu. Full details and times on the CTM site here.

Master of drones Phill Niblock has been awarded this year's John Cage Award by the Foundation For Contemporary Arts. Niblock receives $50,000 from the FCA Award, which has been given biennially since 1992, for work which "reflects the spirit of John Cage". Niblock was the recipient of an artist's grant from the organisation ten years ago.

From April, London's Whitechapel Gallery is hosting a major retrospective of the late French film maker and photographer Chris Maker. The exhibition will include an alternative edit of Marker's most famous work, La Jetée, which features an alternative opening sequence. Also included is a remastered edition of Le Joli Mai, plus Marker's guided tour of his Second Life virtual museum Ouvroir: The Movie, among other films. The exhibition runs 18 April–22 June. More details incoming here.

A Wire reader, Christopher Thompson, has started a Tumblr blog attempting to post every Invisible Jukebox from the magazine, starting at the beginning, with Taj Mahal from December 1991 (The Wire 95) and as of time of writing, has got up to the eighth instalment with Billy Jenkins in the November 1992 issue. Playlists are uploaded to Mixcloud for listening.

Japanese audio visual artist Ryoji Ikeda has been awarded the Prix Ars Electronica Collide @ CERN residency, which will take him to the CERN headquarters in Switzerland to work with data produced at the large hadron collider. Ikeda's first visit will be this spring where he will be paired with scientists from CERN, and his residency will run across two years. Last year's winner was Bill Fontana.

Cult 1970s folk singer Linda Perhacs will release her second album in March, 44 years after her now-classic debut Parallelograms. The new album, The Soul Of All Natural Things, includes contributions from Julia Holter and Ramona Gonzalez (aka Nite Jewel), among others, and will be released on the Asthmatic Kitty label.

Sound And Music have an open call for two embedded composer's residencies, with radio station Resonance FM and Apartment House. The Resonance FM opportunity is for a composer to spend nine months working with the radio station and its broadcasters to develop one or more new works. Two composers will be chosen to spend 40 days across 18 months with cellist Anton Lukoszevieze's Apartment House ensemble. Deadline for Resonance FM residency 5 February, and deadline for Apartment House, 12 February. More details and application forms here.

Poet, playwright and activist Amiri Baraka, has died at the age of 79. Baraka was hailed as one of the greatest black writers of his generation, but was also accused of being homophobic, violent and a misogynist. Baraka inspired but also inflamed, as in 2012 when "Somebody Blew Up America", a poem about September 11, was attacked for being anti-Semitic, and lead to the dissolution of New Jersey's poet laureate position after Baraka refused to resign from the role.

Originally named LeRoi Jones, Baraka grew up in Newark, New Jersey. He built his reputation in Greenwich Village at the tail end of the beat scene, and in the 60s and 70s became a major figure in the Black Arts movement. In 1984 (The Wire 10), Val Wilmer described him as "one of the best kept secrets in the jazz world, a world where his profound analysis is sorely needed. Always provocative, his words formed an appropriate literary backdrop for the tumult that was the 60s New Wave".

He lectured regularly, and received numerous grants and awards including a Guggenheim fellowship. Baraka published books, poetry, music criticism and plays throughout his life, notably Blues People, a history of black people in America through their music, and Black Music, a collection of jazz criticism.