Running for just over five months, a new exhibition titled Listen: 140 Years of Recorded Sound will kick off on 6 October at the British Library. “Just how important have the sounds of the past 140 years been to our lives?” asks the event, which sets to tell a story of sound recording and explore the importance of sound in capturing history. It will also look at radio and new technologies. Featured items are said to include rare and unpublished recordings, various sound players and recorders, as well as access to the British Library sound archive. There will also be a specially commissioned audio installation by Aleks Kolkowski and a selection of extra events such as Late at the Library: The Radiophonic Workshop and Guests; Super Sonic: A Day of Audio Adventures; writers Bella Bathurst and Erling Kagge exploring their emotional relationship to sound, and more.

Listen: 140 Years of Recorded Sound will run from 6 October – 11 March 2018. More information can be found on the British Library website.

The character of Holger Czukay, who died this week, informed his music both solo and as part of Can. Author and band associate Andrew Hall summed him up well: "A crazy genius who walked the tightrope between this state and what others saw as ludicrous insanity."

I met him several times over the years, both as friends and in connection with my zine Perfect Sound Forever. The first time was when he gleefully took up techno, collaborating with German producer Dr Walker for 1997's appropriately titled Clash. The album was followed by his first US shows, and after the New York gig, where he performed with a small keyboard, I cornered him for an interview. He spoke of Can's proudly amateurish nature and literally hiring Damo Suzuki off the street, and how multitrack recording led to the band's break-up, leading to finger-pointing about mistakes. When I asked him how he put songs together, he replied "Just by logic. You must have a vision, even with the roughest idea where this could lead to."

We talked about his favourite music, and he mentioned Eno, PiL, Bach, Schubert, Hendrix, James Brown, Stockhausen (of course), The Beatles, Philip Glass and The Velvet Underground ("my heroes"). Holger mentioned an idea he’d had, staging musical competitions, where performers who were polar opposites would engage in heated debates. Who would he take on, I asked? "Peter Gabriel! He's much too serious!"

Following our interview, I encouraged him to put up a website. Months later, I received an early morning long distance call. Holger told me to go to his new site, and I saw my own name, listed as webmaster. “You're doing my webpage!” he announced, and started throwing ideas at me about how to connect with musicians and fans. He never asked me if I was game, but I obliged, though after a few grueling months, I handed the responsibilities onto someone else. Soon after, he returned the favour, writing articles for Perfect Sound Forever about Can's history, detailing the secret between-song pauses recorded for Tago Mago, and Stockhausen's influence on his music.

I visited Germany in 1998 to meet Holger and his wife Ursula aka U-She on their home turf. We met in a Cologne hotel, went to get some Asian food (which he loved), and were whisked to his home for a tour of his studio and gadgets. He was tired, but gave U-She his blessing to go out clubbing, so we piled into a cab to see Ken Ishii perform (she danced much better than me). I hosted him in return when Holger came back to NYC around 1999 with his former bandmates to promote a major edition of Can reissues. We checked out the Anchorage club, at the base of the Brooklyn Bridge to see DJ Spooky, who didn't impress him much, but the venue piqued his fancy: "I must do my next New York show here". When he returned in 2004, he eventually played at Knitting Factory. "Hello girls and boys!" he announced when he took to the stage with a big smile.

Writing to me later, he made some interesting observations about what he saw as his role as a musician. "My function is between a DJ and an active musician,” he said. “I love to present new material and also from the past, transforming them into something different than before. I like to listen with the audience and if something turns out inadequate, I know my schoolwork still has to be done. On the other hand, when all waves are not extinguishing each other, the result can be received amazingly positive to all our satisfaction."

We never met face to face again, but continued to correspond online. Knowing that he loved "I Am The Walrus", I shared the source of radio material included at the end (a BBC King Lear broadcast). As a child of the Second World War, he fretted about the rise of the far right, insisting that neo-Nazis should be stamped out. In his last email to me, he rewrote the pop classic "Singin' in the Rain" to include alligators.

After his death I'd recall some of the stories of prankish encounters to try and comfort myself. There was an early 70s show with Amon Düül II where they were dosed up with cough syrup, and someone from Can was suspected. Holger denied it, but an associate commented: "we all know who it was…". Around the same era, Holger drove the Can van on tour through a Soviet Bloc checkpoint. When a guard searched the van, Holger asked: "You're looking for something illegal?" He then produced a huge marijuana joint. "This is what you were looking for!" He slapped the joint into the guard’s hand, insisting "Take this home to your wife – you both enjoy it and thank me!" They drove off in the van as the guard stood frozen in amazement.

After Can split up, he was in a cafe with a friend, and the management asked them to leave for making noise. They returned with dark glasses and walking sticks, pretending to be blind, and stumbled around, knocking over carts and tables – earning another hastened exit from the establishment.

But the favourite Holger story that he told me involved a phone. Acting alongside an accomplice, he applied a ketchup marinade to a handset in a public booth. While they hid watching, a man entered, struggling to find coins for his call. When he balanced the receiver on his shoulder, the marinade smeared on his face. Someone in the next booth panicked, thinking it was blood, and called for help. An ambulance arrived and the attendants dragged the reddened men onto a stretcher – he was furious at their manhandling, but they drove off with him regardless. Holger and his accomplice were hysterical. “You were a precocious teenager,” I remarked. The impish Holger, who was in his sixties when he told me the story, gleefully replied: "Actually, I did that last year!"

Repeater books are ready to publish their new book Under My Thumb: The Songs That Hate Women And The Women Who Love Them. Making an open call for submission in May 2016 for essays that explore the tensions that arise from loving the music that doesn't necessarily love you, the book has been compiled into 15 short essays, commissioned by Repeater's Tamar Shlaim and edited by Rhian E Jones and Eli Davies.

“Our aim is to explore the joys of loving music and the tensions, contradictions and complexities it can involve. This book is intended to be as much celebration as critique. Think of it as a kind of feminist guilty pleasures,” read the open call last year. “There are no restrictions on types of music here – we’re keen to get contributions across a range of genres, places and eras."

With contributions from The Wire Contributing Editor Frances Morgan with the essay "Where Does A Body Begin?" on Michael Gira of Swans, as well as Wire contributor Nina Power with "And Now It Hurts To Know The Truth: On "Young Girl"", about the song performed by Gary Puckett & the Union Gap, and beyond. Other contributions include Zahra Dalilah with "Equality Is In The Doing Not The Saying: What Tupac Taught Me", Stephanie Phillips on "The Two Sides Of Phil Spector", the book's co-Editor Rhian E Jones with the essay "You Shouldn’t Take It So Personal: Bob Dylan And The Boundaries Of Rebellion", and many more.

Under My Thumb: The Songs That Hate Women And The Women Who Love Them will be released on Repeater this October. Pre-orders available via Hive.

CTM have made a final call for submissions to their 2018 Radio Lab invitation. Now in its fifth year, the open call invites artists working in the fields of experimental music, sound art, radio art, new radio drama, and performance to submit proposals for new works that bring radio art and live performance or installation together, and which are based around this edition's central theme, turmoil.

As we detailed in a news story last July, the commissioned works will premiere at the festival and then be broadcast as part of Deutschlandfunk Kultur’s Klangkunst programme. Following that, Österreichischer Rundfunk (Austrian Broadcasting Corporation) will also present the winning pieces via either Ö1 Zeit-Ton or Ö1 Radiokunst – Kunstradio radio shows, and/or the ORF musikprotokoll im steirischen herbst festival in Graz. The deadline for submissions is 17 September with winners being notified late September. More information can be found on CTM's website.

Last year the open call was won by Rima Najdi with Called Happy New Fear, and Julian Bonequi with The Death Of The Anthropocene.

CTM festival will take place between 26 January–4 February at various venues across Berlin. The event will include club events and concerts as well as day time lectures, talks, exhibitions and the sixth edition of MusicMakers Hacklab. The line up of artists set to perform is due to be announced at the beginning of October.

Club producers Malcriado and Englesia have put together a new compilation, Praxis Houston, to aid victims of Hurricane Harvey in Houston, Texas and contribute to the rebuilding effort there. Artists on the release are Laurel Halo, Kareem Lotfy, Endgame, Scraaatch, Englesia, Torus, Kamixlo, Santa Muerte, Mya Gomez, Qualiatik, Dasychira, Chino Amobi, Bob Traxx, & Malcriado.

Englesia says, "100% of raised funds will be donated to the Greater Houston Autonomous Relief, a grassroots coalition of groups from the Greater Houston community coming together to offer direct support to those most impacted by Hurricane Harvey. Their mission statement is to help each other instead of relying on corporations or the state. The coalition consists of Solidarity Houston, SHAPE Center, Campaign Nonviolence Houston, Houston Peace & Justice Center, Houston Anarchist Black Cross, Black Lives Matter Houston Chapter, Resilient Nacogdoches, World On My Shoulders, & Black Women's Defense League. The funds will go through World On My Shoulders, a registered 501(c)3 non-profit, and then will be allocated by on-the-ground need between organisations."

More information can be found on the campaign's gofundme site.

Listen to the compilation on Bandcamp.

Holger Czukay, bassist, editing mastermind and co-founder of legendary German rock group Can, has died, his label Spoon has announced. Czukay was found at his home, the old Can studio in Weilerswist near Cologne – a former cinema where the group recorded through most the 1970s – on 4 September. He was 79. His wife Ursula Schüring – aka U-She, a close collaborator throughout much of his post-Can career – is thought to have died just weeks previously.

Czukay was apparently planning new projects in the weeks before his death. Much of his recent years had been spent with editing and reworking recordings from his extensive archive of Can and solo tapes. His last official release was Eleven Years Innerspace, released by Grönland in 2015, a mysterious collection which, as the album and track names such as "My Can Revolt" suggest, incorporated (and radically remixed) numerous recordings Can made at their studio.

He was born in Danzig, at that time a partially independent city state, in 1938. In the early 1960s he became a student of Karlheinz Stockhausen, the beginning of a lifetime obsession with electronic music and the possibilities of the studio. Alongside fellow student Irmin Schmidt, the pair began to explore the possibilities of working together that could bring composition and experimental music into a group context while responding to the rapid artistic advances of rock. They hooked up with drummer Jaki Liebezeit and guitarist Michael Karoli to form a group originally called Inner Space, who played together for the first time in 1968, a performance captured on the limited edition release Prehistoric Future.

Czukay elected to play the bass with the group – Liebezeit supposedly recommended he should try "to play bass with only one tone" – and developed a distinctively hypnotic style on the instrument. The decision to play bass was dictated partially as the instrument was free, but also as it might allow him to operate tape recorders in the studio. A landmark tape work from the early days of Can, Canaxis 5, was recorded in 1969 with Rolf Dammers, and featured extensive use of loops incorporating a haunting vocal recording of a Vietnamese vocalist on “Boat-Woman-Song”.

Can’s work blossomed through the 1969 debut album Monster Movie, the collection Soundtracks and 1971 album Tago Mago, working alongside vocalists Malcom Mooney and latterly Damo Suzuki. The group practised and recorded together almost constantly, and Czukay left the tapes running in many of their studio sessions – when The Wire’s Rob Young visited Weilerswist for a Can cover story in 1997, engineer René Tinner showed him a cupboard containing carefully preserved Revox tapes of hours of tapes, recordings which would eventually come to form part of the 2012 retrospective set The Lost Tapes. "As a bass player, Holger Czukay is comparable only to John Cale,” wrote Julian Cope in his book Krautrocksampler. “But as an editor, he is surely second to none". His editing is crucial to many Can tracks – songs such as "Mother Sky" and "Halleluhwah" exist in multiple different edited versions, with Czukay carving out distinct sections from extensive recorded jams.

By the mid-1970s, the group dynamic of Can was changing, in part because improved recording technology meant that the group could overdub individual instrumental parts, and were no longer required to play together simulataneously as a group unit. By Saw Delight Czukay had ceded bass duties to Rosko Gee, to concentrate solely on working with editing and tape loops, audible on complex constructions such as "Animal Waves".

The 1979 album Movies marked his departure from Can, although the entire group contribute instrumental parts to the album. The 80s saw Czukay collaborate widely and influentially, with artists including David Sylvian and Jah Wobble. As Biba Kopf observed in The Wire 66 in 1989, Can’s innovations had by that time been taken up by groups as diverse as PiL, Cabaret Voltaire and Einstürzende Neubauten. By the 1990s he had found a new lease of life working inside the fertile electronic scene in Cologne, recording and touring with Dr Walker of Air Liquide. Electronica’s debt to Can was returned in 1997 with the remix album Sacrilege, which featured artists such as A Guy Called Gerald, The Orb and Brian Eno grappling with Can’s two-track recordings and attempting to work them into new shapes.

In the 2000s and beyond Czukay worked on numerous new recordings and remix projects, often featuring U-She on vocals. The Can collection The Lost Tapes emerged in 2012, followed by The Singles in 2017.

The final line-up has been announced for the 14th edition of Barreiro's OUT.FEST. The four dayer’s opening concert featuring Porto composer Jonathan Uliel Saldanha will take place in the new festival venue Santa Maria Church – the 30th space OUT.FEST has used since its inception in 2004. The municipality workers’ senior and junior choirs, Carol Tab and Coro Be Voice, will also be performing at the church. The complete line-up is Caterina Barbieri, Charlemagne Palestine, Quarteto De Sei Miguel, Pere Ubu (The Moon Unit), Casa Futuro, Lolina, This Is Not This Heat, Jejuno, Bookworms, Coletivo Vandalismo, Simon Crab, Alex Zhang Hungtai with David Maranha & Gabriel Ferrandini, Dj Nigga Fox, Black Dice, Dj Problemas, Nocturnal Emissions, Gyur Putas, and Bêbadas.

“As you can guess we're very happy with it,” beams festival organiser Rui Pedro Dâmaso, talking about the line-up. “It's quite the mix between influencers and new blood, and some bands we'd been wanting to have in Barreiro for quite some time and never had the chance to make it happen.”

OUT.FEST runs between 4–7 October. Tickets start at just €8, and shuttle buses are available from Lisbon and surrounding areas. More information can be found at OUT.FEST’s website.

The Egyptian American composer and performer Halim El-Dabh has died. He was 96 years old.

Born in 1921 in Cairo, he was passionate about contemporary music from a young age, attending concerts such as the 1932 historic Conference on Arabic Music in the Egyptian capital. It was there he also saw music being recorded onto a wire recorder (as precursor to the tape recorder). Though Pierre Schaeffer is often cited for inventing musique concrète at Radio France in 1948, the first known piece of music recorded solely from electronically processed tape was created four years earlier by El-Dabh, as Rob Young noted in his Once Upon A Time In Cairo article in The Wire 277. El-Dabh borrowed a wire recorder from the Middle East Radio broadcasting company with which he recorded various sounds including that of an ancient zaar ceremony. He then processed into the magnetic tape piece The Expression Of Zaar, which he presented at an art gallery in 1944.

El-Dabh later moved to the US, where among other roles he worked as a consultant to the Smithsonian Institution, professor of African studies at Howard University, and professor of music and Pan-African studies at Kent State University, the latter a part time post he held until 2012.

The fourth edition of the all night festival Night Of Surprise will take place in Cologne´s jazz and experimental music venue Stadtgarten in October. The evening promises “a wild variety of experimental music”. Last year the event attracted more than 1000 people.

The line-up so far confirmed includes Dedekind Cut, Mustafa Said, Sidsel Endresen & Stian Westerhus, John Butcher with Thomas Lehn & Matthew Shipp, Sote, Philm, Rabih Beaini, Going, 7000 Eichen, Elysia Crampton, Weiße Wände and ER & WE, with more to be announced.

Night Of Surprise happens on 20 October at Cologne’s Stadtgarten, from 7pm. Entry is free. Watch a video of Night Of Surprise 2015.

American photographer William Eggleston’s debut album will be released this year by Secretly Canadian. Described by David Lynch as "music of wild joy with freedom and bright, vivid colours”, the collection of 13 improvised symphonic scores were gleaned from an archive of 49 floppy discs containing over 60 hours’ worth of music made on the Korg 01/WFD. Eggleston, who lived for several years at New York City’s notorious Chelsea Hotel, apparently titled his album Musik by way of tribute to his musical hero JS Bach.

Today Eggleston lives in Memphis with a nine foot Bosendorfer grand piano and a selection of audio equipment designed by his son William Eggleston III. The synthesizer originally used on the recordings had broken, but the artist bought another in order to playback the discs to be digitized and mastered alongside a handful of DATs.

The album, produced by Numero Group co-founder Tom Lunt, is released on 20 October, with more music to follow. You can pre-order here. Below you you can listen to “Untitled Improvisation FD 1.10”, the single trailering the album.