Released in November 2019, Desolation Center tells the story of a series of guerrilla music and art performances that ran between 1983–85 in the Mojave Desert, California. Directed by the creator and organiser of the original events, Stuart Swezey, the 94 minute documentary features interviews and rare archival footage of Sonic Youth, Minutemen, Meat Puppets, Swans, Redd Kross, Einstürzende Neubauten, Survival Research Laboratories, Savage Republic and others.

The first of these events, dubbed Desolation Center, was called Mojave Exodus. Punks and industrial fans travelled on rented school buses into the far reaches of the Mojave Desert for a programme of gigs documented by LA Weekly as being “like some bizarre ritual at the end of the world.” Following that, Joy at Sea had punters take a boat to a floating space in the San Pedro harbour, while for Mojave Auszug and the Gila Monster Jamboree they returned to a secret location in desert's expanse. Kim Gordon, in recent autobiography Girl In A Band: A Memoir, described the Gila Monster Jamboree as “a magical night, one of my favourite shows ever.”

Although the film makes links between Desolation Center shows and the formation of larger commercial festivals like Burning Man, Lollapalooza and Coachella, in his review in The Wire 429 (available to subscribers), Byron Coley disagrees: “I had occasionally thought this myself,” but, he continues, “after watching Desolation Center, I am less convinced. It reminded me that there were more than a few of us back in the day who would regularly drive out to Joshua Tree, rent a cabin at the 29 Palms Motel and spend the weekend running around the desert while tripping our brains out. Swezey’s desert events were closer to those weekends than anything offered by their big time supposed-spawn.”

Whether a precursor to bigger things or not, the film documents the power of DIY culture at a time when more traditional punk was moving aside for hardcore. It's available to stream from today on iTunes, Apple, Amazon, FandangoNOW, Google Play and Vimeo On Demand.

Watch rare footage of Einstürzende Neubauten performing in the desert.

Sparkle Division is a new project by William Basinski and Preston Wendel, and today they release a recent collaboration with the late Henry Grimes, who died of Covid-19 on 15 April. The track “Oh Henry!” had Grimes appear on upright bass and violin and was recorded at Grimes’s favourite studio, The Bunker in Brooklyn.

“I met Henry and Margaret Davis Grimes in the green room at The Empty Bottle in Chicago around 2003 or 2004, shortly after Henry had moved to NYC and began playing again,” explains Basinski. “When Preston pulled out this slow groove that became “Oh Henry!”, I was moved to play a sexy, slow melody. Then the beats hit and he’s got it in double time... it worked! I called Margaret in NYC and said we had a track we’d like them to hear to see if Henry would come in on it.

“Margaret called me a few days later and said, ‘a lotta babies gonna be born to that track!’ When their schedule allowed, we booked Henry’s favourite studio, with Nolan Thies engineering. Nolan recorded five takes of Henry performing upright bass and violin for the track, which Preston edited here at Musex International in LA. Henry’s playing is mind-boggling as usual, and we were absolutely blown away.”

The track is out today on Bandcamp. Read William Parker's tribute to the man who “opened the door to his inner world every time he was on the bandstand”.

The new album by Speaker Music aka DeForrest Brown Jr is released on Juneteenth – a holiday which celebrates the official end of slavery – and acts as a response to recent events in the US and the nationwide anti-racism protests following the deaths of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor and Ahmaud Arbery. It's described as a “street-level fire music” and explores poet Tsitsi Ella Jaji’s concept of stereomodernism – or as Jaji says, “dubbing in stereo for solidarity”.

Brown’s second release for Planet Mu following 2019’s a desire, longing, Black Nationalist Sonic Weaponry is a “mobilisation beyond the savage free market capitalist industrial system, and towards a future that isn’t indebted to the fictive and failing socio-economic ‘progress’ imagined within the frames of White American techno-utopianism”, according to the release notes on Bandcamp.

The album is accompanied by a PDF booklet of writings by black theorists and poets. Opening track “Amerikkka’s Bay” features a text written and read by Maia Sanaa, remixed by Brown.

It's available on Bandcamp now with the label's proceeds going to BEAM and M4BL.

Keith Tippett died on 14 June; the cause of death is currently unknown. Born Keith Graham Tippetts in Southmead, Bristol, in 1947, Tippett studied organ and piano. He formed his first jazz group whilst at school alongside friends Terry Pratt and Bob Chard, and became a regular at Bristol venue the Dugout Club.

Tippett moved to London at the age of 20. It was there he would meet trombonist Nick Evans, cornettist Mark Charig and saxophonist Elton Dean and form the The Keith Tippett Group. Having first seen Tippett perform at the 100 Club, the then Julie Driscoll would have Tippett's group play on her debut album in 1969. “We were introduced and were then literally locked in all night at Polydor’s studios until the cleaners came in the morning,” recalled Tippett in The Wire 426. “Julie would play her songs and say, ‘I would like some brass here’. We worked all the way through the night and we fell in love.”

They married in 1970. It was at that time that Tippett would drop the "s" in his name in response to a number of misspellings by promoters who would bill his group as Keith Tippett’s Sextet. Julie and Keith would go on to collaborate throughout all of their respective individual music careers.

In 1970 Tippett played piano on the King Crimson albums In The Wake Of Poseidon and Lizard. The following year he formed Centipede – Keith and Julie's first collaborative project, an ensemble of more than 50 musicians including members of Soft Machine, King Crimson and Spontaneous Music Ensemble – releasing Septober Energy in 1971 on Neon Records.

Interviewed in The Wire 142, Robert Wyatt described Tippett as “a West Country bloke with a great big heart and completely unlike the Old Boy Network jazz mafia that was the London scene at the time. He listened to everybody, was openminded, never put anybody down and one of his things was to get all these different musicians from different genres together.”

In 1972, Tippett released Blueprint, his and Julie's first improvised album as a duo. Tippett would go on to collaborate with Louis Moholo-Moholo, Paul Dunmall, Peter Brötzmann, John Tilbury, Pat Thomas and many others. For 25 years he co-directed, with Lewis Riley, a course at the Dartington Summer School. He was also an Honorary Fellow at Royal Welsh College Of Music and Drama.

In 2018 a fund was set up for Tippett following a heart attack and complications with pneumonia. He would later regain strength and return to performing live.

Tippett was the subject of two large articles in the pages of The Wire, which are available to read for free until 15 July. In 2001 he was interviewed by Julian Cowley (read on Exact Editions); and in 2019 he and Julie were interviewed together by Mike Barnes (read on Exact Editions).

Buy direct from The Wire: thewire.co.uk/issues

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Buy as an in-app purchase in The Wire app: download the app for free from the App Store or Google Play

Other places to buy the June issue online:

UK:

Boomkat

Bleep

Newsstand

Norman Records

US:

Forced Exposure

Austria:

Vienna: Substance Recordstore

Finland:

Helsinki: Digelius Music

France:

Paris: Souffle Continu, Gibert Joseph

Germany:

Cologne: A-Musik

Berlin: Bis Aufs Messer, Zabriskie Buchladen

Italy:

Milan: Serendeepity

Netherlands:

Rotterdam: Underbelly

Portugal:

Lisbon: Flur/Holuzam

Porto: Materia Prima

Switzerland:

Geneva: Librairie Le Rameau D’or

A major list of black producers and black-owned label pages on Bandcamp has been compiled and circulated. Administered by a group of volunteers, at the time of writing the list already contains over 1300 links, and is growing by the hour.

“This sheet is a work in progress (non exhaustive),” it says, encouraging visitors to get in touch with new submissions. Edits, feedback and comments can be e-mailed to collectivedatavol.

The list comes in time for the latest round of Bandcamp's new fee-waiving initiative which is held on the first Friday of every month, midnight to midnight Pacific Time (8am-8am BST), which allows all revenues from sales to go directly to artists. Many artists, labels and commentators have suggested that music fans purchase music specifically from black musicians and labels today, in response to the ongoing violence against the Black Lives Matters protest movement in the US.

Earlier this week, the online music retail platform announced that on 19 June (and continuing on the same date annually) it will donate all of their share of sales to the NAACP Legal Defense Fund. “The recent killings of George Floyd, Tony McDade, Sean Reed, Breonna Taylor, Ahmaud Arbery and the ongoing state-sanctioned violence against black people in the US and around the world are horrific tragedies. We stand with those rightfully demanding justice, equality, and change,” they say.

You can browse, link and buy via the full list here.

Trumpeter and French hornist Robert Northern aka Brother Ah died on 31 May. Born in North Carolina in 1934, Northern grew up in New York. During his time there, Northern was given a bugle by a neighbour, and he recalls using it to imitate the sounds of his neighbourhood. While in school he learned the trumpet but soon switched to French horn, for which he was offered a scholarship at the Manhattan School where he formed his practice, combining classical music and jazz.

Northern went on to play with Gil Evans and performed on many releases including Thelonious Monk’s 1959 Town Hall album, John Coltrane’s Africa/Brass, Freddie Hubbard’s The Body & The Soul, and McCoy Tyner’s Tender Moments. Throughout the early to mid-1970s Northern spent time in Ghana, Kenya and Tanzania, and released several albums as leader. He taught at Dartmouth College, replacing Don Cherry when Cherry moved to Sweden, and founded the World Music Ensemble. He died in Washington aged 86.

Phil Freeman spoke to Robert Northern in 2017 for an interview published The Wire 398. Read it for free via Exact Editions.

Jamaican reggae and dancehall producer Bobby Digital died from kidney disease on 21 May aged 59. Born Robert Dixon in Kingston, he began working with King Jammy in the mid-1980s. Indeed, he spent time as the in-house engineer for Jammy and is credited with helping record Wayne Smith’s “Under Mi Sleng Teng”. In the late 80s he opened the Heatwave studio and sound system and founded his Digital B label. He went on to work with Shabba Ranks – notably on the latter’s “Dem Bow”, a track that helped popularise reggaeton – Sizzla Kalonji, Super Cat and Admiral Bailey.

“A freq_wave is a rogue wave: unpredictable, sudden, and can impact with tremendous force”, reads the introduction to Carl Michael von Hausswolff's new online installation which has 84 sound artists and composers collaborating on the new climate project. “This is also an act of remembering. Our current health and economic crisis is inextricably linked to the long-lasting climate chaos, social inequalities and environmental injustices violently manifesting amongst many humans and other than humans around the world.”

Focusing on the complexities of marine degradation and pollution, it sets to make these changing sounds audible and follows on from 12 freq_out live-installations 2002–2017

The 84 artists are: Jana Winderen, Finnbogi Petursson, Tommi Grönlund/Petteri Nisunen, PerMagnus Lindborg, Mike Harding, Kent Tankred, BJ Nilsen, Jacob Kirkegaard, Maia Urstad, Christine Ödlund, Peter Rehberg, Hans-Joachim Roedelius, Zavoloka, Dungeon Acid, Christopher Chaplin, Klara Lewis, Joachim Nordwall, Bethan Kellough,Francisco Meirino, Christina Kubisch, Anna von Hausswolff, Lise-Lotte Norelius, Francisco Meirino, Puce Mary, Nadine Byrne, Chris Watson, Ulf Bilting, Brandon LaBelle, JG Thirlwell, Dark Morph, Yann Novak, Chandra Shukla, Tim Story, Dorit Chrysler, Stephen O’Malley, John Duncan, Okkyung Lee, Maria Chavez, Randall Dunn / Chloe Alexandra Thompson, Kali Malone, Yan Jun, Gus Ferguson, Jim O’Rourke, Minoru Sato, Bana Haffar, Dickson Dee, Ryoji Ikeda, Basel Abbas/Ruanne Abou-Rahme, Kim Ngọc, James Webb, Lawrence English, Francisco Lopez, Cielo Vargas, Felix Blume, Sandra Gallo Corona, Aoki Takamasa, Jonny Nash/Esmee Geerken, RAMZi, Alice Eldridge, Lisa Schonberg, Asma Ghanem, Yannick Dauby, Von Lichtern, Sun Araw, Manja Ristić, Maia Koenig, Yambe Tam/Dylan Henry Price, Soundwalk Collective, Dror Feiler, Tatiana Zobnina/Alonso Vázquez, Mats Lindström, Mark Fell, Adi Newton, Lary 7, Carl Abrahamsson, Tetsuo Furudate, Leif Elggren, Robert Crouch, Schneider TM, Zachary Paul, Thierry Charollais, Michael Esposito, Scot Jenerik, Daniel Menche, and Scanner.

Released weekly until 1 August, visitors can interact with the installations online. Freq_wave 1: North Sea to Red Sea is available now. The project was commissioned by TBA21–Academy.

Shirley Collins has announced she'll release the follow-up to comeback album Lodestar in July. Heart's Ease, her second album for Domino, is touted as “even stronger” than its predecessor, in light of her newly gained confidence. Shirley says, “Lodestar wasn’t too bad, was it? But when I listen to it, it does sometimes sound rather tentative. I had to record it at home because I was just too nervous to sing in front of somebody I didn’t know. This time I was far more relaxed – even though I went into a studio.”

Recorded at Metway in Brighton, Heart’s Ease features traditional songs from England and the US, as well as four newer, less traditional tracks.

Its lead track “Wondrous Love” comes from an 18th Century English ballad about a sea captain called William Kidd who was hanged for piracy in 1701. The hymn, also recorded by Collins and Alan Lomax on a field recording trip in 1959, was first heard by Collins at a Sacred Harp Convention in Alabama. She decided to record it for this album “because songs are stored in my memory for a great many years, and suddenly it seems the right time to bring them out again.”

Heart's Ease is released on 24 July.