The Mark Harvey Group launch their live album A Rite For All Souls with a livestreamed event on 9 August. Released earlier this month, the LP comprises of a newly discovered recording of a 1971 concert by the free jazz quartet, featuring trumpeter and composer Harvey, woodwind player Peter H Bloom, and the late percussionists Craig Ellis and Michael Standish.

The fully improvised 90 minute concert took place on 31 October that year at Boston, Massachusetts’s Old West Church. At the time, Harvey and his group were mourning, protesting and commemorating losses of the Vietnam War. The recording was discovered by Harvey on reel-to-reel tapes in his basement. “Today,” he says, “we find ourselves in another dark and tumultuous time [...] Then, as now, we search for spiritual healing and the rediscovery of a common humanity.”

At the event, veteran jazz writer Bob Blumenthal will host interviews with Harvey and Bloom and stream excerpts from the new release. Harvey is also the founder of Aardvark Jazz Orchestra. The event is free but a reservation is required.

A Rite For All Souls has been remastered and released via Americas Musicworks.

The Canadian label We Are Busy Bodies have announced the release of The Heshoo Beshoo Group’s only album and shared its lead single “Wait And See”. Called Armitage Road, it was originally released in 1970 by the EMI subsidiary label Little Giant.

Formed in 1969 by Henry Sithole, The Heshoo Beshoo Group included Henry's brother Stanley Sithole, guitarist Cyril Magubane (responsible for writing much of the LP), bassist Ernest Mothle and drummer/percussionist Nelson Magwaza. In a nod to The Beatles' Abbey Road sleeve, the original LP cover shows the band members crossing the township street Armitage Road in Orlando, Johannesburg, the then address of 24 year old Magubane. Pictured on the sleeve in a chair, he was struck with polio in childhood.

Once disbanded, Henry Sithole, along with Bunny Luthuli, went on to form South Africa group The Drive. They both died in a car accident in Tzaneen on 5 May 1977. Magwaza also played in The Drive, while Mothle left the country and joined other South African exiles in the London based group Jabula.

Armitage Road was released in France by Columbia in 1971, and by His Master’s Voice with a colourised cover in 1974. This newly remastered reissue will be released on 30 October in Vinyl, CD and digital formats.

Australian organisation Liquid Architecture have turned their 20-year audio archive into a podcast series featuring performances, lectures and conversations with artists, musicians, activists and thinkers working with sound.

Produced by Mara Schwerdtfeger, episodes are available on iTunes, Mixcloud and YouTube, and feature Suzanne Kite, Hannah Catherine Jones, Michel Chion, Douglas Kahn, Chino Amobi, Melbourne Georgian Choir, Holly Herndon, Natasha Tontey, and many others.

They are also calling out for any related materials from artists, audiences and friends, “because all archiving is a collective undertaking, and because our memories and matter aren’t always aligned”, as they step towards expanding the archive into a fully digital open-access collection. You can get in touch with them by emailing info@liquidarchitecture.org.au.

Chicago-based drummer has released the second single from his new album Universal Beings E&F Sides. Called “Beat Science” it was recorded at H010 in Ridgewood, Queens, New York and features Brandee Younger on harp, Joel Ross on vibraphone and Dezron Douglas on double bass.

Following his reimagined Gil Scott-Heron album We're New Again, released earlier this year on XL Recordings, the new album acts as an addendum to his 2018 release Universal Beings and was composed as the soundtrack to the forthcoming documentary of the same name.

The documentary itself was directed by Mark Pallman and follows McCraven to Los Angeles, Chicago, London and New York City, focusing on his life and the community of musicians that surround it.

The Universal Beings documentary and Universal Beings E&F Sides album will be released on 31 July 31st on International Anthem.

Listen to “Beat Science”

Watch an excerpt from the documentary.

The 60-strong sound collective Alligator Gozaimasu have announced a new release called Solange Bunte Balken Durchlaufen. Translating as As Long As Render Bars Go Colourful, the title’s a nod to the process of rendering audio or video. Alligator Gozaimasu was founded in 2014 when Stephanie Müller of Beisspony and Kimya Dawson worked with Cup & Saucers, Takeshi Hattori, Miboujin, Otaco, Aoi Swimming and Shimettainu during a residency in Sapporo, Japan. The global pandemic and subsequent lockdowns spurred this continuing collaboration, now featuring a much expanded collective taking in artists and musicians from Austria, Germany, Finland, Italy, Japan, Senegal, Spain, Turkey, UK and the US. Their scattered members shared sonic fragments, voices and noises online, culminating in the first episode, Solange Bunte Balken Durchlaufen: “An album that is open for all the different circumstances and needs of such a large band, an album that celebrates mood swings and listens closely to the different tempi in these days.”

Alligator Gozaimasu will release this first episode on 24 July, with future episodes to follow on a monthly basis until December 2020. All money raised will be donated to the Sea Watch eV, a nonprofit organisation that conducts civil search and rescue operations in the Mediterranean Sea.

Richard Skelton has teamed up with Phantom Limb for his forthcoming album These Charms May Be Sung Over A Wound. Skelton has released over 50 albums since 2004, but this is his first vinyl LP in over a decade. Marking another first, These Charms sees Skelton abandon his signature acoustic instrumentation to map out a new sound from sine tones, distortion and bass. Yet the music was still composed in “rural isolation” and “intricately and indelibly bound to its local geography; in this case, the low, broad valleys of the Scottish Borders”. The album and track titles come from 19th century translations of Anglo-Saxon medicinal remedies.

Listen to “For The Application Of Fire”. Pre-order on Bandcamp.

Detroit techno pioneers Jeff Mills and Eddie Fowlkes have joined forces with poet Jessica Care Moore in a new trio called The Beneficiaries. Their debut record The Crystal City Is Alive is produced by Mills and Fowlkes and features sleeve art by Sabrina Nelson, another Detroit native, marking a coming together of various sectors in the city's artistic community. As John-Paul Shiver writes in his review in The Wire 438, Greg Tate’s sleevenotes describe the trio as “beneficiaries of Black Detroit’s multidimensional legacies of selfsufficiency and sonic futurism”.

“The D,” John-Paul continues, “has been the crucible for the creation of many boundary pushing genres over the years, largely due to the work and innovation of black musicians in the city.”

He adds: “These chefs waste no time and get right to burning.”

Head over to Jeff Mill's Facebook page to hear a teaser, and read John-Paul Shiver's review in full via Exact Editions. The Crystal City Is Alive is released on 24 July by Axis.

Unsound has started releasing information about this year's programme. Having already scheduled activities during its usual slot in Krakow in October, this summer will see the music festival move online to host a selection of streams and mixes.

First up is the open-access series Black Techno Futures: Local And Global Perspectives. Taking a place on 23 July and programmed and hosted by Frankie Decaiza Hutchinson of Discwoman and Brooklyn’s Dweller Festival, the discussion will explore the challenges of working as a Black person in the music industry and what needs to change. Panelists include Jasmine Infiniti, Lakuti, Axmed Maxamed, Authentically Plastic and Onirica. Next will be an online five-day workshop dedicated to working in the music industry during the pandemic and beyond. Sessions taking place from 19–20 and 26–28 September will be fronted by artist agencies, managers, promoters, curators, publishers, music journalists and lawyers, including Laetitia Deering of Annex agency, Matt Werth of the RVNG Intl label, Mr Mitch of Gobstopper Records, Gamall Awad of Backspin Promotions, and festival producers Lisa Meyer of Supersonic, Wire contributor Stephanie Phillips of Decolonise Fest, Jan Rohlf of CTM and Mat Schulz of Unsound itself. Places are limited. The application form, full list of speakers and the schedule can be found on their website.

Finally, Unsound and SHAPE have worked together with Warsaw’s Radio Kapitał to present the Intermission Studio mix series. Launching on 22 July, the line-up features Fausto Mercier, VTSS, Poly Chain, Svetlana Maras, FOQL, Rojin Sharafi, Object Blue and Aquarian.

Edited by Blank Forms artistic director Lawrence Kumpf, Neneh Cherry's daughter Naima Karlsson and writer Magnus Nygren, Organic Music Societies is a new book collecting archival documents and new writings on the intermedia collaborations of Don and Moki Cherry.

The book covers a period from the 1960s when the Cherrys's home in Tågarp, Sweden became a hub for musicians, poets, actors and artists. Included alongside texts from Don and Moki Cherry are contributions from Keith Knox, Rita Knox, Bengt af Klintberg, Iris R Orton, Åke Holmquist, Pandit Pran Nath, John Esam, Michael Lindfield, Sidsel Paaske, George Trolin, Alan Halkyard, Ben Young, Christer Bothén, Bengt Berger and Fumi Okiji, plus interviews with Don Cherry, Terry Riley and Steve Roney.

Organic Music Societies is available for pre-order now and expected to ship on 27 October.

In other Cherry family news, Blank Forms is putting out the debut LP by duo of Naima Karlsson and Kenichi Iwasa, who perform as Exotic Sin. Titled Customer’s Copy, the album is released on 21 August.

Cambridge festival Wysing Polyphonic have announced a major online streaming event running throughout August and into September. This year's theme is marked as The Ungoverned, and looks at ways to “deconstruct normativity through collaboration, exchange, texts, ephemeral gestures and other languages.” The programme, they say, “emphasises the importance of difference and diverse ways of communicating: the morphing of words to choreographies, soundscapes, dialects and voices.”

The first part will take place in August and will see CRYSTALLMESS, mobilegirl, LYZZA, AUDINT and Hannah Catherine Jones presenting mixes and soundscapes via wysingbroadcasts.art. Following that will be an event on 5 September with a special live broadcast of readings from Whiskey Chow, Rachel Long and Tanaka Fuego, and a newly commissioned performance from choreographer and dancer Maëva Berthelot and musician Coby Sey, both of whom are in-residence at Wysing for two weeks prior to the broadcast. That will be streamed on Twitch. Tickets are free but registration is required.