Intonal has revealed some of the artists confirmed for this year's Intonal festival, Hailing from Detroit, Montreal, China, Berlin, China and elsewhere, they’ll be performing in the city's old chocolate factory Mazetti. The latter became home to the three stage arts venue Inkonst back in 2006.

So far, acts announced include Arpanet, Elysia Crampton, Towlie, Mag, Pelada, Pan Daijing, Courtesy, Oiseau Danseur, Alessandro Cortini, Aleksi Perälä, Avalon Emerson, Charlemagne Palestine, Charlotte Bendik, DJ LAG, Don’t DJ, Eartheater, Ellen Arkbro, Goat, Group A, Mokira and Nadah El-Shazly.

Intonal takes place between 25–30 April. Tickets are on sale now for 600 krona.

Norwegian artist, musician and former Wire cover star has announced she is to release a new novel this year. Called Paradise Rot, the fiction follows the story of Jo, an overseas university student in a unknown country, as she experiences a sexual awakening and queer desire.

It will be released by Verso this October, with the exact date still to be confirmed. Hval spoke to Maya Kalev about her vampire inspired album Blood Bitch and more in The Wire 392. Subscribers can read that interview on Exact Editions.

DJ Target's has announced a new book Grime Kids: The Inside Story Of The Global Grime Takeover will be published by Trapeze on 14 June. Grime Kids marks the debut publication for the Roll Deep member, who has been a consistent figure in the scene since the formation of the earlier garage collective Pay As U Go Cartel. He's now a broadcaster for BBC Radio 1 and 1Xtra, and label head at Pitched Up, the imprint he co-founded with Danny Weed in 2014.

The book maps out the rise of the scene through his own perspective and through other prominent figures. “Offering an unrivalled level of insight”, says Target, “it will give fans the story that only a select few of us can really deliver firsthand. Charting legendary stories and moments in grime music, as well as investigating the social aspects behind the culture, my personal journey from a young grime kid and growing up with the likes of Wiley and discovering Dizzee Rascal, to being a member of two of the most influential collectives and experiencing both underground and mainstream success with Roll Deep, through to my position today as a National Radio broadcaster.”

He's also revealed the cover, sporting a young Target with the recently awarded MBE Wiley, and promises that an audio book narrated by the author himself will also be available. Pre-orders of the print edition are available at Amazon.

An acronym for Musik Produktion Schwarzwald, MPS was officially launched by Hans Georg Brunner-Schwer back in 1968 as the successor to the SABA record label. Based in the Black Forest region of Villingen-Schwenningen, MPS was the first label in Germany to be exclusively dedicated to jazz – Oscar Peterson, George Duke, Singers Unlimited, Freddie Hubbard, Jim Hall, Dizzy Gillespie, Count Basie, John Handy, Ali Akbar Khan, Baden Powell, Dave Pike, Volker Kriegel, Wolfgang Dauner, and Rolf and Joachim Kühn are just some of the names associated with the label.

In 1983, Brunner-Schwer sold most of the rights to MPS to Polygram, who subsequently released music from the MPS archive on CD. Ten years after Brunner-Schwer’s death on 12 October 2004, MPS's catalogue found a new home at German label Edel AG Ede, where the music got digitised and a selection – namely works by Oscar Peterson, George Duke and Monty Alexander – from its back catalogue was also re-released on vinyl and tape. It also produced some new records from Rolf Kühn, China Moses, Lisa Bassenge, Hamilton de Hollanda and Mari Boine, among others.

To mark its 50th anniversary, April will see the launch of the Ambassador series, which hopes to bridge “the gap between present players and past MPS milestones”, by inviting the likes of Gilles Peterson, Ed Motta, Till Brönner and Götz Alsmann to present their favourite albums for reissue, along with personalised sleevenotes.

You can find more information about the label’s releases at MPS's website.

Bambooman, Pye Corner Audio and Object Blue are to play Leeds Industrial Museum – a former wool mill in Armley – this April. Working as part of a project which looks to expand the museum's audience, the organisers have set their sights on bringing rhythms and sounds back to the mill, with several artists taking up residencies and working with local communities and neighbourhoods.

Bambooman, aka Kirk Barley, will be taking up residency followed by a final performance at the mill alongside Pye Corner Audio and Object Blue.

“I personally will be spending a week engaging with the local community, making field recording of the mill, local water wheels, steam trains etc, and even re-imagined industrial folk songs that workers at mills in the UK used to sing,” explains Barley. “I will then be forming a live set from these recordings.”

Final works will be performed on the closing night at Armley Mill on 21 April. Following the event, Barley says he will put all the recordings he made at the mill online for free.

Knoxville, Tennessee, will be home to Big Ears festival again this year. The three day event will take place at various venues across the city, including Tennessee Theatre, The Mill And Mine, Bijou Theatre, St John's Episcopal Cathedral, and Knoxville Museum Of Art.

On the line-up is Abigail Washburn & Wu Fei, Áine O'Dwyer performing William Eggleston’s “Musik”, Algiers, Arto Lindsay, Bang On A Can All Stars celebrating their 30th anniversary with various performances, Bonnie “Prince” Billy, Craig Taborn Quartet, Diamanda Galás, Evan Parker's Electro-Acoustic Ensemble, Four Tet,
GAS, Godspeed You! Black Emperor, Jenny Hval, Juana Molina, Julie Byrne, Laurel Halo (Live with Eli Keszler), Lightning Bolt, Milford Graves, Roscoe Mitchell Trios, Susanna, The Black Twig Pickers, The Ecstatic Music of Alice Coltrane Turiyasangitananda performed by The Sai Anantam Ashram Singers, The Thing, Tyshawn Sorey Trio, and many others.

Bigs Ears will take place 22–25 March. Watch Rob Young speak to Jace Clayton at Big Ears 2017.

The latest edition of MaerzMusik festival reflects on “the time wars of the present” through a series of concerts, performances, installations and symposiums featuring Terre Thaemlitz aka DJ Sprinkles, Mark Fell, Zeitkratzer, and many more. Happening across various venues in Berlin, the ten day event continues its special focus, begun during last year’s edition, on the late Julius Eastman.

Indeed, the festival opens on 16 March with Apartment House performing Eastman’s Buddha and Femenine; and the composer is also the subject of an exhibition called We Have Delivered Ourselves From The Tonal (from 24 March–6 May). Other highlights include a Zeitgeist evening centred around composers Iannis Xenakis, Brian Ferneyhough and Ashley Fure; and Georges Aperghis will premiere his composition Migrants. The latter’s theme of temporality and migration is also central to Hannes Seidl’s Salim’s Salon.

“This Festival For Time Issues proposes to probe the current state of affairs through the lens of time and through listening, collectively considering what today’s ‘beings in time’ experience on a daily basis,” declares Maerzmusik’s festival manifesto, continuing, “exposed as they are to diverging and colliding temporal force fields: flexibilisation, fragmentation and the maxing out of capacities; time horizons shrunk, stretched and warped; the vertigo of reciprocal speed and slowness; the loss of temporal claim and agency. Our hypothesis is that a war is raging between temporalities. Less obvious, perhaps, than today’s countless other conflicts, but no less real.”

MaerzMusik runs from 16–25 March. More information can be found on their website.

To mark International Women's Day, NTS radio show and cassette label Diet Clinic has released a compilation of exclusive tracks that showcase some of the programme's previous guests. Running since summer 2015, Diet Clinic's broadcasts feature female DJs and artists reflecting on aspects of sexuality, environment and mind.

Weaponise Your Sound Vol 1 pulls together a selection of exclusive tracks by guests on the show, including CAR, Deena Abdelwahed, Fantastic Twins, Lokier, Marika Underspreche, Moor Mother, Sue Zuki, and Penelope Trappes. “They may be scattered across the globe”, confirms label boss and host Kristina McCormick, “but their love, strength and support for their art and their female counterparts continues to inspire and drive me on a daily basis.”

Proceeds will go to Focus E15, an independent housing campaign in East London, who support women and their families evicted from their homes, demanding social housing, and not social cleansing. “Moor Mother is involved in a similar project called Community Futures Lab in Philadelphia,” explains McCormick. “I am constantly awe of what they are doing over there.”

Weaponise Your Sound Vol 1 is available on cassette and digitally via Bandcamp.

A documentary about US bassist Buster Williams is in its final stages of production. Directed and produced by Adam Kahan, all the footage and early editing has already been done, with a crowdfunding campaign now launched to help finish the project.

As a composer and bassist, Williams has played with a host of artists from Sarah Vaughan to Miles Davis, Nancy Wilson, Art Blakey and many others. In Buster Williams Bass To Infinity, Williams tells his own life story, as he's joined on camera by Benny Golson, Herbie Hancock, Rufus Reid, Christian McBride, Larry Willis, Carmen Lundy, Kenny Barron and Lenny White.

“It is a film about a great contributor to America’s greatest art form, and many other greats” says Kahan on the project's Kickstarter page. “Monk, Trane, Paul Chambers... All of these artists' stories makeup that thing we call jazz, and each individual, each story is intertwined to make up a whole.”

“We have already shot the entirety of this film and the editing is in progress” he explains. “We do however need to raise money for a good amount of editing to come.”

Kahan has used crowdfunding to finance music documentaries before, including The Case Of The Three Sided Dream about Rahsaan Roland Kirk (reviewed in The Wire 384) and a film on Junior Mance, Sunset And The Mockingbird, which is still in production.

You can watch the trailer below. As the time of writing, 14 days are left on the campaign, with £5,873 raised out of the £14,395 target.

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US labels Allergy Season and Discwoman are back with another mammoth charity compilation, one year after Physically Sick raised money for The American Civil Liberties Union, Callen-Lorde, The National Immigration Law Center and Planned Parenthood. Physically Sick Volume 2 focuses on the injustices of the US jail system, donating its profits to Brooklyn Community Bail Fund.

“It's hard to believe it's been a year since we released Physically Sick, and while the response was beyond our expectations – there's no sugarcoating it: we're still sick!” says the joint statement on Bandcamp.

“Everyone's heard of bail, but the cycle of financial bondage it perpetuates is less well known,” it continues. “If a person can't pay their bail, they must wait in jail until their court date... It is a racist, backwards design that disproportionately punishes people of colour and the poor. Our goal is to draw attention to this pernicious cycle, and raise actual bail money for as many people as possible.”

Physically Sick 2 was compiled for the two labels by Umfang, Frankie Decaiza Hutchinson and Physical Therapy, with artists including Fatima Al Qadiri, Varg, Elysia Crampton, Giant Swan, MESH, Puce Mary, Laurel Halo, EMBACI and many more. It's out now via Bandcamp.