The world's greatest print and online music magazine. Independent since 1982

News
Subscribe

Donate now to help The Wire stay independent

Radeq radio project open call for broadcast submissions

Following three month's at the V22 Summer Club, online radio project Radeq is relocating to SoundFjord's Tottenham gallery, and has an open call out for submissions. Radeq will be in situ at SoundFjord from 6–31 August, and for the final week is putting together a full programme of performances to be broadcast from sun up until sun down. Submissions are open to anyone, anywhere in the world, and applications to perform live in the London studio are also welcome. Any sonic form is permitted, but must be a representation of the summer of 2012.

For the rest of the month Radeq will be broadcasting a live stream. To submit a proposal email radeq[at]hotmail.com. more details here.

Manuel Göttsching E2–E4 performance streamed live from Japan

Manuel Göttsching will be performing his 1984 album E2–E4 live in Japan this weekend, and the show will be live streamed online. The show is part of Dommune's festival at Chiba's Makuhari Messe conference centre. The festival, Freedommune Zero <0> A New Zero, also includes appearances by Fushitsusha, Merzbow, Hijokaidan, NHK, Otomo Yoshihide and others, plus the preserved brain of writer Soseki Natsume. (More listed on Time Out Tokyo here.)

The festival starts at 6pm local time (10am UK time) on 11 August and ends at 6am. Göttsching is scheduled to play at 4:30am on Sunday, which will be 8:30pm on Saturday, UK time.

If you're in Japan, the festival is free. Tune in online at Ustream or on the Dommune site.

[Hat tips: Keiko, The Quietus]

Colour Out Of Space going on hiatus for 2012

The 2012 edition of Brighton's Colour Out Of Space film and music festival has been cancelled following Arts Council funding cuts. The 2012 edition is being rescheduled for spring next year to give the festival some time to raise extra cash and reapply for funding, with organiser Michael Sippings saying there are plans to extend the festival from a three day event to a week long festival.

Colour Out Of Space is run by Dylan Nyoukis, with Sippings and Karen Constance, and has been running since 2006. Last year it hosted the Bohman Brothers, Jozef Van Wissem, Silvia Kastel & Ninni Morgia and others. More details incoming.

Revenant records returns with Paramount records set

Revenant records is planning a return to the fray. Dean Blackwood, who founded Revenant with John Fahey in the mid-1990s, says that the last five years has seen the label lie dormant, still selling existing titles and working with Dust To Digital on the John Fahey Fonotone box set, but not releasing anything itself.

One of the first records to be released on the resurrected label will be a two volume set of words, images and music titled The Rise And Fall Of Paramount, which documents the Wisconsin based record label from the period 1922–32, and includes tracks by Son House, King Oliver, Blind Blake, Big Bill Broonzy, Charley Patton, Jelly Roll Morton and Blind Lemon Jefferson among others.

Blackwood says: "The set will be a narrative, aural and visual history of this peculiar enterprise, which despite being run out of a chair factory, with cheap recording and production processes and inferior record-pressing materials, by cynical people with little idea of what black audiences were interested in, nevertheless managed to create an archive of American art which we believe is singular in its depth and power."

The packaging will be hand made, with a large format book, 200g vinyl records and digital download. more details incoming here.

New venue opening in Glasgow: The Glad Cafe

Glasgow is getting its own version of Cafe Oto. On 17 August a new venue opens in the Southside of Glasgow for new and experimental music and art, with plans for installations and film screenings. Venue manager Joe Smillie says: "Three years ago my sister Sarah was staying in Dalston and took my mother to Cafe Oto, knowing it was the kind of place my mum would go nuts about. She did, and on arriving back in Glasgow decided that this was something the Southside was missing. She wouldn't stop talking about it and eventually roped my wife, Karina and myself in."

The first confirmed acts for the venue (on 17 August) are Conquering Animal Sound, Daniel Padden's One Ensemble and Jonnie Common, and the following night (18 August) fhosts Rustie, with support from Ben Butler & Mousepad and Cru Servers. More details here.

William Basinski's Disintegration Loops collected in enormous box set

William Basinski's Disintegration Loops is being released in its entirety by Temporary Residence as an enormous box set that weighs 12lb. The set contains nine LPs, plus five CDs, a DVD and a 144 page book. It includes all four volumes of The Disintegration Loops, remastered and pressed to both CD and vinyl, plus two orchestral performances pressed to vinyl, the 63 minute film on DVD and a book featuring photos and liner notes by Basinski, Antony, David Tibet and others.

Disintegration Loops was created using old tapes Basinski was converting to digital. The tapes were seriously decayed, but rather than try to remove these sounds he instead used them as a key factor in the composition. The work was created around the same time as the events of 9/11, and he dedicated the record (the first volume of which was released in 2002), to its victims.

The Disintegration Loops box set will be released on 4 September in an edition of 2,000 copies. More details here. Basinski was subject to The Wire's Invisible Jukebox in September 2009.

The Status Of Sound conference open call for papers

On 30 November the City University of New York hosts an interdisciplinary conference titled The Status of Sound: Writing Histories of Sonic Art, which includes a roundtable with David Grubbs, Branden Joseph and Marina Rosenfeld. The conference asks how we define sound art, and looks at the difference between sound art and music and how sound art should or could be exhibited. The conference takes place at the CUNY's Graduate Centre.

Proposals should include a 300 word abstract, with CV and contact details, and can be emailed to lrosati[at]gc.cuny.edu. Deadline for submisisons 15 August. More details here.

Jeff Mills publishing Axis retrospective with USB mix

On its 20th anniversary Axis Records is publishing a retrospective book covering its artwork and photography, which comes with a USB mix of 30 tracks selected by Jeff Mills. The 320-page 12" book is titled Sequence, and will be released simultaneously with a double CD compilation of tracks from the label's catalogue.

Mills's intro reads: "Axis was built, not created as a matter of circumstance or chance... Early on, I realised that even though the allure of dealing with the subjects of here and now are attractive, maybe even rewarding to a certain extent, eventually I would fall short when wanting to offer more substantial music contributions. Essentially, I could not imagine making music for someone I did not understand, so I decided to make it for myself."

Story of Herbie Hancock and the Mwandishi Band to be published

In 1972, Herbie Hancock's Mwandishi band were joined by Patrick Gleeson, a white schoolteacher with a monophonic synthesizer that took up a whole room and had to be prepared for recording sessions a week in advance. The group were among the pioneers bringing synthesizers in jazz and improvisation, and were in operation from 1970–73.

The University Of Chicago Press is now publishing a book on the group, by Bob Gluck (jazz historian and director of the Electronic Music Studio at the State University of New York), titled You'll Know When You Get There. It includes interviews with Hancock and other band members, plus the producer and engineer they worked with, among others. Gluck discusses Hancock's formative years and recordings, with Miles Davis and in bebop ensembles, and moves through the development and influence of the group's three albums: Mwandishi, Crossings and Sextant.

The group consisted of Herbie Hancock (electric piano and electronics), Buster Williams (bass), Billy Hart (drums), Patrick Gleeson (synthesizer), Bennie Maupin (sax), Julian Priester (trombone) and Eddie Henderson (trumpet). They broke up a month after Sextant was released, following poor record sales, pressure from their label, and a number of inappropriate support slots for Canned Heat and The Pointer Sisters.

More details on the book here. A feature on the group appeared in The Wire 174.

Matmos releasing EP and album created via telepathy, sign to Thrill Jockey

Matmos have been conducting and re-enacting telepathy experiments for the past four years, and are releasing an EP in October and an album in February next year borne from their test subjects' responses. The tests, known as Ganzfeld experiments, were originally conducted in the 1960s, and involve basic sensory deprivation set ups in which subjects listen to white noise in headphones and are unable to see and are asked to recognise shapes being transmitted to them.

In Matmos's experiments, they tried to transmit the concept of their new album into the minds of their experimental subjects. The resulting transcripts were then used as a kind of score. Visual images informed collages or instrumentation, humming became a melody, and if a subject described an action Matmos performed it and incorporated the sound recording.

Matmos join the Thrill Jockey roster for these forthcoming releases, titled The Ganzfeld EP and The Marriage Of True Minds. The EP, released on 15 October, will come packaged with a pair of headphones and opaque white eye glasses so that listeners can recreate the conditions of the test subjects.

Watch a performance from Auto Italia earlier in the year below, where each collaborator recites different transcriptions of the psychic experiments that are played through their headphones. Matmos perform at London Southbank Centre as part of Antony's Meltdown on 6 August.

Matmos Live At Auto Italia from The Wire Magazine on Vimeo.