William Basinski's first album Shortwavemusic has been reissued as a tape reel by Indiana based record label Auris Apothecary, for the 30th anniversary of the album's creation.

Basinski created Shortwavemusic in 1982, using sounds recorded from the radio, edited into loops and slowed down. Auris Apothecary has recorded the album on to 1/4 inch tape on recycled reels, in reference to the way Basinski constructed album. It was originally released on clear vinyl by Raster-Noton in 1998, and was reissued on CD by 2062 in 2007.

The label, which produces objects as much as it releases records, has a back catalogue full of awkward formats: cassettes coated in shattered glass, wrapped in leaves and filled with sand, as well as olfactory CDs and a double floppy disc.

This reissue of Basinski's Shortwavemusic (released on 31 December 2012) has been produced by Auris Apothecary in a run of 101, and comes with artwork specially created by Basinski for this release. Listen below. More at the Auris Apothecary site.

(Read a blog post on Auris Apothecary from 2011 here.)

A short biography on American composer Robert Ashley has been published by University Of Illinois Press, in their American Composers series (which also includes books on Christian Wolff, Carla Bley, John Cage and others).

Ashley founded the musicians collective Sonic Arts Union in the mid 1960s with Alvin Lucier, Gordon Mumma and David Behrman. The book draws on interviews and Ashley's early years and his effect on the post-Cageian avant-garde of the 60s and 70s, also looking at his major TV operas including Perfect Lives (performed last year in Spanish at London's Serpentine gallery).

The 184 page book is by music writer Kyle Gann, correspondent for The Village Voice and the author of books on Conlon Nancarrow and John Cage's 4'33". More details here.

Author of the Acid Archives (second edition reviewed The Wire 325) Patrick Lundborg has published Psychedelia: An Ancient Culture, A Modern Way Of Life, which he has been researching for 20 years.

The book presents psychedelia as an underground culture with a history stretching back 3500 years, covering Philip K Dick, William Blake, DMT and ayahuasca, via Haight-Ashbury and Goa. Lundborg is also posting outtakes and a full book index online. Read more at the Lysergia site.

(Image courtesy Patrick Lundborg. Timothy Leary & The Grateful Dead's Phil Lesh at Human Be-In, 1967)

Richard Youngs is performing with Turner Prize nominee Luke Fowler at The Cube in Bristol next month, as part of Qu Junktions's new residency series Play The Cube. Across two nights two films by Fowler will be screened, and Youngs will play in a duo with Fowler as well as solo.

Fowler's film on Marxist historian EP Thompson The Poor Stockinger, The Luddite Cropper And The Deluded Followers Of Joanna Southcott will be screened on 15 February, followed by All Divided Selves on Glasgow born radical psychiatrist RD Laing on 16 February. On the first night of the residency Youngs and Fowler play together, with Youngs playing solo on the second night.

More details here.

An exhibition of Savage Pencil's Trip Or Squeek comic strip is on from 10 January until 10 February at Orbital Comics on Great Newport Street in London.

On the opening night, Savage Pencil (aka Edwin Pouncey) will be signing copies of Trip Or Squeek's Big Amplifier, published last year by Strange Attractor and The Wire. The book collects over 100 strips, which have been appearing in the magazine since 2002, and also includes an interview with Pouncey.

More details on the book here (available in the shop here).

This one slipped under the net: a book on British Benedictine monk, scholar, translator and concrete poet Dom Sylvester Houédard has been published. Notes From The Cosmic Typewriter includes essays by David Toop, Gustavo Grandal Montero, Rick Poynor, and Charles Verey, plus Houédard's concrete poems (which he called 'typestracts'), produced on an Olivetti typewriter, as well as previously unpublished performance scores.

Houédard, who also went under the moniker dsh, became a monk in 1959 after serving in British Army intelligence, and was ordained as a priest ten years later. From the early 60s he became a leading practitioner of concrete poetry using a technique he began developing in the 40s, which he saw as being linked to ancient traditions of shaped verse. He said: "During 1945 I realised the typewriter's control of verticals and horizontals, balancing its mechanism for release from its own imposed grid, and offered possibilities that suggested (I was in India at the time) the grading of Islamic calligraphy from cursive (naskhi) writing through cufic to the abstract formal arabesque, that 'wise modulation between being and not being'."

More details on the book here.

(Image: Dom Sylvester Houédard, Figuur, 1964. Courtesy Ruth & Marvin Sackner Archive of Concrete and Visual Poetry via Occasional Papers)

Next month Emptyset (James Ginzburg and Paul Purgas) screen a film installation at the Tate Britain, of sound and video recorded in decommissioned nuclear power station Trawsfynydd in Snowdonia, using the resonances of the building's interiors.

Trawsfynydd, designed by the architect Basil Spence, was operational betwen 1965 and 1991. It's now in the lengthy process of being decommissioned, meaning staff are still on site but are essentially overseeing the caretaking of the building before it moves into the next phase of shut down in 2016 (a full timeline for the decommissioning of the power station is here).

The night is part of the Late at Tate series Performing Architecture, and will also include a discussion with Ginzburg and Purgas, hosted by the Architecture Foundation's Justin Jaeckle. London Tate Britain, 1 February, 6–10pm, free. More details here.

MIE Music celebrated its fifth anniversary this year, and in 2012 released albums by Pelt, Sarin Smoke, Richard Youngs and others. Label head Henry Tadros is offering the chance to win a copy of every single MIE Music release from this year.

The full haul includes: Richard Youngs, Amaranthine (LP); Birchall/Cheetham Duo, Tipping Point (CDr); Gate, The Dew Line (2LP); Chord, Gmaj7 (LP); Hallock Hill, The Union | A Hem of Evening (2LP + Book); Sarin Smoke, Vent (LP); Pelt, Effigy (2LP).

To enter, answer the following question:

In what year was Cook Vegan by Richard Youngs first published?

Email your answers to henry@miemusic.co.uk, with WIRE COMPETITION as the subject line. Closing date for entries is midnight on New Year's Eve.

Spacesuits and slabs of oak make up a new work by composer and artist Kaffe Matthews, who's collaborated with textile artist and film maker Mandy McIntosh. The project, titled Yird Muin Starn (old Scots for Earth Moon Star), involves padded spacesuits for keeping warm, 'sky gazer' chairs for astronomical contemplation and a vinyl album of space inspired music composed by Matthews and lyrics by McIntosh.

The project is intended to encourage contemplation of the sky from the forest, where light pollution is at a minimum. The star gazing chairs are set up based on a Victorian astronomer chair at Greenwich observatory (10ft slabs of green oak embedded in the ground), designed for viewing the sky, and the space suits are designed to keep the observer warm, made from screen printed fabrics from materials used to clothe RAF pilots and NASA astronauts.

The project launches at Loch Dee by the White Laggan bothy in Galloway Forest in Scotland on 2 February, at which point the suits and seats (which are fixed in place) will be available to the public. More details here.

A memorial service for avant garde pianist Borah Bergman will be held on 15 April in New York. The service starts at 7:30pm at Saint Peter's Church, 619 Lexington Avenue (on the corner of East 54th St). Those wishing to attend can contact Jason Kao Hwang for more information at jkhwang[at]me.com

Bergman died in October at the age of 85. He was known for his ambi-ideation technique, where he trained himself to be an ambidextrous player, training his left hand to do everything his right could. He spent long periods composing solely with his left hand. Read a short Borah Bergman obituary here.