Peter Principle, longtime member of San Francisco post-punk outfit Tuxedomoon has died aged 63, just when the band were in Brussels preparing a new album and tour to celebrate their 40th anniversary. “The probable cause of his sudden death is a heart attack, or a stroke,” states Crammed Discs, which, along with its sister label Cramboy, has been responsible for releasing much of Tuxedomoon's music. However, Tuxedomoon’s early work was released by The Residents’ label Ralph.

Peter Principle, born Peter Dachert on 5 December 1954 in New York City, played bass and guitar. He joined Tuxedomoon shortly after the group was formed in 1977 by saxophonist Steven Brown and violinist Blaine Reininger. He quickly went on to play a key role in the group’s compositions, recording and production work. Following their 1981 album Desire, the group relocated to an artist's commune in Rotterdam but within a year they moved on to Brussels. At the time of Peter Principle's death he was one of only two San Francisco era members, alongside Brown, to have remained in the group until today, though Reininger continues to record with them.

Peter Principle also recorded four solo albums: Sedimental Journey (1985), Tone Poem (1989), Conjunction (1990) and Idyllatry (2005). About the latter, released by LTM, Crammed Discs comments that “he gave free rein to his taste for experimentation and his love for quasi-psychedelic soundscapes. He once explained that he had discovered the magic of pure sound by listening to the sound of lawn-mowers in his native New York suburb, and then proceeded to reinvent musique concrète (which he didn’t know already existed)…”

Crammed Discs reissued Tuxedomoon’s 1980 debut album Half-Mute last year. “His presence, his intriguing ideas, his imposing silhouette and stage presence, his inimitable bass guitar style will be cruelly missed,” concludes Crammed Discs’ statement.

Beatrice Dillon, Chu-Li Shewring and Zhe Wu have been nominated for this year's Jules Wright Prize. Awarded to UK based female creative technicians who have worked within the field of the moving image, the prize of £5000 will this year celebrate those working in sound design. This is the third year that the award has been running with the aim of highlighting the role of female technicians and to draw attention to the underrepresentation of women in the industry.

The jury, comprising Sara Putt of Sara Putt Associates, editor and winner of last year's prize Lucy Harris, and composer, librettist and singer-songwriter Errollyn Wallen, said “We were impressed by the commitment, knowledge, professional experience and diversity of the works of all the shortlisted nominees, presenting an impressive picture of the quality and depth of talent of female technicians working with sound. The high technical and professional skills of the shortlist are matched by a sensitivity of approach and interpretation to working with sound that is informed by collaboration and dialogue. This creative exchange and generosity continues to make a huge contribution to the international success and vibrancy of artists’ film.”

Dillon, who was tested by Jennifer Lucy Allan for the Invisible Jukebox in The Wire 389, is a London based composer, DJ and producer who has released on labels such as Boomkat Editions, Pan, The Trilogy Tapes and Where To Now?. She's collaborated with the likes of Conrad Shawcross, Pedro Reyes, Mai-Thu Perret and Claire Hooper, working on sound and music for film, installation and performance. Chu-Li Shewring is a film maker, sound designer and visiting sound tutor at University College London and the National Film and Television School. She's worked with Steve McQueen on Hunger, Frances Scott on CANWEYE { } and Diviner, as well as with Ben Rivers, Phil Coy and Esther Johnson. Zhe Wu is a sound designer and post-production engineer who's worked with Sarah Turner on Perestroika and Public House and with Siobhan Davies and David Hinton on The Running Tongue.

The prize is part of Film London Jarman Award and the winner will be announced at a ceremony at the Whitechapel Gallery on 20 November. Watch an excerpt from Beatrice Dillon, Florence Peake and Anne Tetzlaff's Untitled, 2017 at Wysing Arts Centre:

A lost magnum opus of electronic music is set for its first ever release this autumn. A Little Electronic Milky Way Of Sound is a late work by the composer Roland Kayn – a former member of the groundbreaking Gruppo Di Improvvisazione Nuova Consonanza, who went on to forge his own style of cybernetic music – which is one huge piece running to almost 14 hours and spanning tape music, musique concrète and electronic and electroacoustic sounds.

Kayn, who was born in Germany in 1933 and lived in the Netherlands from 1970 until his death in 2011, amassed a rich body of work over several decades of study and collaboration, which ranged across electronic sound exploration, live performance and philosophy. His early musical ideas were influenced by the information theory of philosopher Max Bense and the mathematical approach of composer and teacher Boris Blacher; he began working at the Studio for Electronic Music at Westdeutscher Rundfunk Studios in Cologne in 1953. In the mid-60s, he was one of the founders alongside Franco Evangelisti of Gruppo Di Improvvisazione Nuova Consonanza, a group that also featured Ennio Morricone, and he played organ in that group’s groundbreaking mix of live electronics and improvisation.

Roland Kayn, 1958. Copyright LRKA (Lydia-und Roland Kayn Archive) Bussum

“At that time it was his longest composition, I think,” his daughter Ilse Kayn reports down the phone line from Holland. Her father, she recalls, moved to an old farm in eastern Groningen in 1999, which gave him the space to establish an extensive studio, archive and living space. The piece remained unreleased until now, she explains, as “I had to find my way through the bureaucratic jungle. I’m not bilingual so contracts in Italian, German and English are not always easy to understand.” The project finally got off the ground with the help of the Helsinki based archive specialists Frozen Reeds, whose last release was the acclaimed 2016 Julius Eastman set Femenine.

The task of audio restoration of this mammoth piece fell to longtime Kayn enthusiast Jim O'Rourke. “Kayn’s work has been paramount in my way of thinking about creating music with electronics, for sure,” he emails. “I have known his work from about 30 years ago when Christoph Heemann first introduced me to his music. At the time, the LPs were still available, and I actually bought them at a grocery store in Aachen, ha ha. I was in college at the time, so I started thinking of trying to go to the Institute of Sonology in Utrecht and became quite obsessed with composers who worked there, like Leo Kupper and later Jaap Vink, a good deal because of pictures included in the Kayn box sets.” He tells me about what he calls his own “lame attempts at Kayn-inspired music”, including “A Young Person’s Guide To Drowning”. “Ever since,” he says, “I have been a very vocal supporter and fan of Mr Kayn’s work.”

Ilse recalls that a Revox tape machine was one of Kayn’s main instruments during the composition of a piece. For O’Rourke, “these works are a little rougher both in construction and execution than his earlier works. I definitely want to retain that as much as possible while taking care of the problems that have surfaced from digital degradation… The original recordings were either recorded directly to DAT or ADAT, formats that deteriorate over time, so most of the work is finding the anomalies in the waveforms where data has been lost and interpolating the waveform from what remains.”

One of the remarkable things about A Little Electronic Milky Way Of Sound is its sheer length – it was conceived as a single piece running to almost 14 hours. “There have been huge scale works like this before, I am thinking of some of Gunner Møller Pedersen’s works for example,” muses O'Rourke. “But this does seem like it was Kayn’s ‘summing up’ of his work. At this point since I am working on it on a very microscopic level instead of a macro level, I am learning a lot about his work just by looking at the waveforms. I always knew phase relationship was a big part of how his pieces worked, but actually looking at it has been kind of eye opening.”

Ilse attempts to sum up her father’s idea of cybernetic music. "He would always explain it with throwing stones in the water,” she says. “You get those circles… it's about the crossings.” The 16 CD set will be released by Frozen Reeds in October, and is available for ordering at their site here.

Two Ornette Coleman albums are set to be reissued on CD for the first time since their original release on Impulse!. 1969’s Ornette At 12 features Coleman on alto saxophone, trumpet, and violin plus Dewey Redman on tenor saxophone, Charlie Haden on bass, and his son Denardo Coleman on drums, who was aged 12 at the time of recording. 1972's Crisis was recorded live in 1969 at NYU with the same line up as Ornette At 12 but with the addition of Don Cherry on flute and trumpet.

The freshly remastered albums will be released on a single CD on 9 September, featuring the original gatefold album art and liner notes by Howard Mandel, author of Miles, Ornette, Cecil: Jazz Beyond Jazz. The CD is available for pre-order now.

Listen to Haden's “Song For Che” from Crisis:

Our ongoing series with London’s The Jazz Cafe continues on 2 August with a special gig from Idris Ackamoor & The Pyramids to be held at the Cafe’s other venue, The Old Queens Head.

As featured in The Wire 389, the alto saxophonist veteran of Cecil Taylor’s Black Sun Ensemble formed his own spiritual jazz outfit Idris Ackamoor & The Pyramids during the 1970s, and last year the group reformed to make We Be All Africans, which was released by Strut.

We're offering two free pairs of tickets, you just need to guess what year the photo below was taken. Email us your answers via this link with the subject heading: Idris Ackamoor competition.

The Pyramids at Antioch College, Yellow Springs, Ohio

Idris Ackamoor & The Pyramids will play at London's The Old Queens Head on 2 August. Tickets are available via Resident Advisor.

For those of you who already have tickets, please note that this event will no longer be held at The Jazz Cafe in Camden.

Morgan was one of the most feted jazz musicians of the 1950s and 60s, recording extensively for the Blue Note label, but his life and career were blighted by drug addiction. He was shot dead by Helen in Slug’s Saloon in Manhattan, New York, in 1972, and I Called Him Morgan is a moving portrait of the couple's complex relationship leading up to that event.

Reviewing the film in The Wire 394, Derek Walmsley wrote: "There are many sad endings to the stories of musicians on Blue Note Records, but few are as shocking as Lee Morgan’s. Yet I Called Him Morgan, which centres on the second wind the trumpeter got from his partner after spiralling into heroin addiction in the mid- 1960s, carries an aura not of death but rebirth. By giving voice to collaborators and associates from across Morgan’s career, it transcends the tidy narrative arcs and tragic cliches of many jazz biopics, and has the unmistakable feeling of joyful lives lived to the full."

I Called Him Morgan screens at London Picturehouse Central on 26 and 31 July, and at London Bertha Dochouse on 28 July. NB The Wire will not be hosting the Q&A with Kasper Collin at the 26 July screening, as previously announced.

Inspired by the renewed interest in his music and new age culture, the Harlem based electronic musician and laughter meditation practitioner Laraaji is set to release some new music this autumn. He has two albums in the pipeline, which follow reissues of 1984's Om Namah Shivaya on Leaving and the new age compilation I Am The Centre Private Issue New Age Music In America 1950–1990 on Light In The Attic. His current music was honed during recent live shows, deep listening sessions and appearances at various festivals such as Unsound and Moogfest.

Recorded with engineer Davey Jewell at Gary's Electric Studio in Brooklyn during August 2016, Laraaji produced nine hours of extended jams, which were then edited and mixed by Carlos Niño of Leaving.

The two releases are Sun Gong, comprised of two drone works exploring processed gong, and the double LP Bring On The Sun. Both will also be available in double disc format.

"Celestial music improvisation flows through my intuitive imagination,” declares Laraaji. “I feel my way through these spontaneous music and song compositions. They are gifts revealed by my undoing the ribbons of no longer essential thinking. As these ribbons fall away the gift of my authentic life, love and creative expression opens bathed through and through by a most timeless inner sunlight.”

Pre-order links: Bring On The Sun and Sun Gong. And you can watch a trailer below:

Unsound festival extends its Dislocation series to London in December. The UK night follows similar Unsound dislocations in Almaty and Minsk, with more events to come in Murmansk, L’viv and Kazan. Taking over the Barbican Centre, Unsound Dislocation: London will explore geography and identity through freshly commissioned works, premieres and collaborations.

Participating artists include Nivhek aka Liz Harris with MFO, The Caretaker performing in the UK for the first time in six years with a video from Weirdcore, and Felicità joined by Śląsk Song And Dance Ensemble to perform a specially commissioned work. And Rabih Beaini will DJ through the night.

The event will take place on 8 December. Tickets costing £22.50–17.50 go on sale on 21 July (Barbican members can can grab one from 20 July).

Portugal festival OUT.FEST has announced dates and the first list of artists to perform at this year's event. Happening in Barreiro, a city just across the river from Lisbon, it'll take place between 4–7 October at various venues. Artists announced are This Is Not This Heat, Jejuno, The Pere Ubu Moon Unit, Casa Futuro, Nocturnal Emissions, Simon Crabb, Jonathan Uliel Saldanha & Coral Tab + Coro Be Voice and Bookworms.

Tickets are available now for 25€. Watch a short documentary of Les Graciés as they record, compose and perform the finished product at the 2016 edition.

Pablo Picco of experimental folk group Ø+yn has made a travel film soundtracked by an array of Argentine alternative musicians. Called Kalinga Utkal, the film documents Hindu and Buddhist cultures in India and Nepal. Musical contributors include Pan Del Indio, Calato, Ø+yn, Mariano Rodriguez, and Uton, among others; but an audio recording of a Tashi Ling Buddhist ceremony will be released separately as The Bombastic And Repetitive Sound Of Tashi Ling Buddhas In Pokhara, Nepal on the More Mars label.

“The temple was somewhat small but the voices and the mood was very, very strong,” recalls Picco, when asked about the recording of that ceremony. “The recordings were made on a day they call ‘happy holy’, which is the international celebration of colours. At the beginning of that record, the recordings were made outside the temple. Getting there was pretty odd because it was VERY dark and the road was in some ways creepy.

“We woke up around 4am and drove by motorbike,” he continues. “But at some point we became very lost in the fog on the dark road… not a single soul was there at that hour... so we drove further and further hoping to get to some meeting point or something.

“Luckily we made it to the temple. We weren’t allowed to enter until the first callings were made – that’s the sound of horns at the beginning of the record – and then when the gong started, a monk inside opened the gate for us.

“The other sounds present on the disc were recorded the same day at the Pewa Tai Lake. Also the part of the clock and the crowd was recorded outside that cave too while they were touching and celebrating with a man that has special powers.”

You can watch the film below:

Ø+yn were featured on the 2015 Buh Records compilation ¡Salgan Al Sol!: Avant-Rock En La Argentina Del Siglo XXI, reviewed by Kek-W in The Wire 380. Subscribers can read his piece via Exact Editions.