The collaboration between composer/instrument builder Pierre Bastien and the duo of Valentina Magaletti and Tom Relleen aka Tomaga arose out of recent commissions from Dunkirk’s Fructose festival and Birmingham’s Supersonic.

The resulting album Bandiera Di Carta features Magaletti on percussion, Relleen on synthesizers and organ, and Bastien on prepared trumpet, rubber band, tin foil and bass ocarina. It will be released by Nicolás Jaar’s Other People label on 20 September. Founded in 2013, the label has also released music by Vtgnike, Darkside, Lucrecia Dalt, Lydia Lunch, DJ Slugo, and more.

Bastien was tested by Richard Foster in the August issue’s Invisible Jukebox (The Wire 426). Subscribers can read that on Exact Editions. Listen to the title track from Bandiera Di Carta below.

Amsterdam’s studio for experimental and improvised electronic music STEIM will mark its 50th anniversary with a three day festival held at four locations between 13–15 September. For the event STEIM has collaborated with guest festival director Rebekah Wilson on a programme of workshops, symposiums, lightning talks and performances.

On 15 September Muziekgebouw aan ‘t IJ will host the concluding birthday party with performances from Jan St Werner, Nic Collins, Atau Tanaka, Takuro Mizuta Lippit, Mazen Kerbaj, Tina Blaine, Joel Ryan and Daniel Schorno.

Full details can be found on their website. Will Montgomery spoke to some of STEIM's alumni in The Wire 348. Subscribers can read that article via Exact Editions.

The Wire contributor Alan Licht has revised and updated his Sound Art: Beyond Music, Between Categories. Originally published in 2007 by Rizzoli and out of print for five years, this second edition will be published by Bloomsbury Academic under the title Sound Art Revisited.

It might be somewhat modestly sized in comparison with the first edition, ditching the original’s artist bios and accompanying CD compilation and now including only 25 black and white images, says Licht, but it significantly expands on the subject to cover artists and their works overlooked elsewhere.

Sound Art Revisited will be published on 22 August, followed by an autumn book launch in New York City. More details can be found on Bloomsbury's website.

Rob Mazurek’s new trilogy of albums will be released in August by Astral Spirits. Called Marfa Trilogy, the records will be available individually or as a bundle. The set includes a two part suite exploring the Texan Marfa desert with his new ensemble featuring Kris Davis on piano, Ingebrigt Håker Flaten on bass and Chad Taylor on Drums. Called Desert Encrypts Vol 1, the suite was recorded live at Marfa's Crowley Theater during the first edition of Mazurek's Desert Encrypts Festival in August 2018. Another part, Love Waves Ecstatic Charge, features Mazurek using a modular synthesizer and computer to construct sounds from 106 images taken on a broken digital camera; Psychotropic Electric Eel Dreams IV is a four channel composition for the ESS Florasonic sound installation series at Chicago’s Lincoln Park Conservatory, made in conjunction with Mazurek's solo exhibition The Shaping Light.

Meanwhile, Mazurek will premiere Desert Encrypts Vol 2 at the second Desert Encrypts festival happening in Marfa, Texas between 26–28 July. And the city's Wrong Gallery will present an exhibition of his visual works from 19 July–19 August.

Listen to “Encrypt IV Bird Encrypt Morning Song” below. Physical copies are available for pre-order via Astral Spirits. Digital versions can be accessed via Bandcamp.

A selection of events are taking place in Epping Forest and surroundings in North East London as part of Waltham Forest London Borough of Culture 2019 and its connected series The People's Forest.

Between 20–28 July art duo Jones/Bulley will present Living Symphonies. Situated in a clearing near Chingford Plain in Epping Forest, a musical composition will develop in line with the forest ecosystem itself, as different sounds respond to varying flora and fauna events, played via a networks of hidden speakers.

Other concerts and performances include Gazelle Twin performing recent album Pastoral on 13 September with support from Helm, and Matana Roberts performing at St Mary’s Church in Walthamstow on 4 October, in which she responds to Ursula Le Guin's The Word For World Is Forest, 90 years since Le Guin's birth. Plus from 31 October– 2 November Una Hamilton-Helle will install a sound installation at Queen Elizabeth’s Hunting Lodge.

Another Timbre are releasing a five CD box set of Morton Feldman’s piano music. Performed by Philip Thomas, the collection marks 20 years since the release of the last major multi-piece Feldman collection, John Tilbury’s four CD collection All Piano on LondonHALL.

Morton Feldman Piano is the culmination of a 25 year exploration by Thomas into Feldman's work and was recorded over the last 12 months at the University of Huddersfield, where Thomas teaches. In 2014 he collaborated on another Feldman release with John Tilbury, Two Pianos, also released by Another Timbre.

“The approach taken with this set of recordings has been to try to capture the experience of the pianist as closely as possible, or, better still, to record such that the resultant audio is as if the listener is somehow snuggled inside the body of the instrument, ears almost touching the strings, feeling the vibrations as the hammer strikes,” says Thomas. “The aim in recording was for intimacy of private experience, distinct from the shared experience of listening to Feldman’s music in the concert hall.”

Released in September, Morton Feldman Piano includes three pieces never before put to disc, and comes with a book of writings about Feldman by Thomas. A launch event will happen in Sheffield on 2 October with the pianist performing For Bunita Marcus alongside shorter pieces. Two films scored by Feldman will also be screened on the night. Further dates include a performance in November at Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival and in December at London’s Cafe Oto.

To mark the 50th anniversary of the moon landings, the online sound project Cities And Memory have launched an interactive map featuring remixed interpretations of sounds from space. Space Is The Place combines 80 artists’ treatments of recordings from NASA and the European Space Agency, all of them working to the brief: “What does space travel sound like?”

Sounds featured include: the Apollo 11 radio transmissions; space walks and alarm calls from the International Space Station; interstellar plasma and deep space tsunami waves recorded by Voyager; radio emissions from Jupiter, Saturn and Ganymede, rocket tests, shuttle flights and much more. The title of the project, say Cities And Memory, is a tribute to the 1973 Sun Ra album.

Full details are available on their website.

Other Cities And Memory projects tackle sound photography and London Underground.

Jenny Hval has announced the follow-up album to her 2016 record Blood Bitch. Called The Practice Of Love, advanced word has it that it’s about connecting with others, sharing and empathy. The album, expands Hval, features multiple voices including her own and those of her collaborators Vivian Wang, Laura Jean Englert and Félicia Atkinson. These represent, perhaps, the voices “of someone who was once an angry teenager, furious at the hierarchies, many years later. No longer angry, but still feeling apart from the mainstream... longing for community.

“I wanted to give the feeling of being apart from the world a mystical, but beautiful place, meaning pop songs,” continues Hval. “A place that also contains enough depth to bury oneself in.”

And where does love come into it? “Love as a theme in art has been the domain of the canonised, big artists, and I have always seen myself as a minor character, a voice that speaks of other things,” she replies. “But in the last few years I have wanted to take a closer look at the practice of otherness, this fragile performance, and how it can express love, intimacy, empathy and desire. I have wanted to ask bigger, wider, kind of idiotic questions like: What is our job as a member of the human race? Do we have to accept this job, and if we don’t, does the pressure to be normal ever stop?"

Listen to the lead track “Ashes To Ashes”. Jenny Hval was on the cover of The Wire 391. Subscribers can read that issue on Exact Editions. She'll perform at London Barbican on 29 September.

Pianist, composer, improvisor and singer Maya Dunietz takes up a three day residency at London Dalston’s Cafe Oto between 22–24 July. Her programme will include solo performances of works by Alvin Lucier and Dieter Schnebel (23) and duo sets with Yoni Silver and Tom White (24). The opening night offers a rare chance to see Dunietz perform works by Emahoy Tsegue Mariam Guebrou, the Ethiopian nun and composer whose amassed sheet music Dunietz help get published. “Emahoy, 88 at the time, handed me three old ragged plastic bags of Air Ethiopia, containing hundreds of pages of music that she wrote in the past 80 years,” Dunietz told a Counterflows audience in 2014.

“The manuscripts from her whole life, including her first ever music book from when she was sic years old...” she continues. “The scores were in a big mess – a first page of one piece in one bag, the second in the other, the third lost [...] the manuscripts were written as sketches she wrote to herself, like little memory notes, and not in a clear way so that one can sight-read it on the piano. So we had to translate this personal notation system she wrote for herself into a more accurate coherent score that can be understood by anyone.”

Three-day tickets cost £26 (£20 for members). Individual day tickets are also available.

Luaka Bop will release the second in their World Spirituality Classics series this September. Following on from the archival release The Ecstatic Music Of Alice Coltrane Turiyasangitananda back in 2017, this new one is compiled from an unearthed collection of “obscure 45s found in attics, sheds and crates across the American south”, says the label. The collection presents a subset of 1970s era gospel that could be seen as a backdrop to The Staple Singers' commercial success.

Compiled by soul DJ Greg Belson, Willie Scott & The Birmingham Spirituals’ The Time For Peace Is Now album includes sleevenotes from Jonathan Lethem, who says the songs “are resplendent with love and yet are not love songs. They speak of life and death, care and disrepair, exultation and release, sorrow and pain, and exhort the listener to hold on, seek peace, let light shine, know joy, recognise the love in one’s fellows.”

Listen to Willie Scott & The Birmingham Spirituals’ “Keep Your Faith To The Sky”. The Time For Peace Is Now is available for pre-order now.