The successful applicant will become a key member of the small but dedicated office staff that produces The Wire’s magazine and website. A knowledge of, engagement with and empathy for the kind of underground, experimental and alternative global musics, cultures and scenes covered by The Wire is essential.

The job will be full time, five days/week. It will be based at The Wire office in Somerset House in Central London. The job will allow for a degree of remote/hybrid working, but the successful applicant will be expected to work at least three days/week in The Wire office.

The job itself will consist of the following main duties:

• Commissioning and editing features, interviews and essays for the monthly print magazine and the website.

• Liaising with the magazine’s two other commissioning editors, the online editor, the editor-in-chief and the publisher to generate ideas for all sections and aspects of the print magazine and website.

• Liaising with the art director and photo editor to help facilitate the commissioning of photography for commissioned features.

• Commissioning, editing and proof reading other sections of the print magazine and website as necessary or required.

• Contributing writing to the print magazine and website as necessary.

Among other things, the job will also require you to:

• Attend regular editorial and staff meetings and contribute ideas vis all The Wire’s various activities.

• Communicate with and maintain good relations with freelance contributors.

• Source and bring on new freelance contributors in a way that ensures the demographic of the contributor list best reflects the diversity of music featured in The Wire.

• Maintain productive relationships with the advertising team in order to help facilitate advertising sales.

• Maintain productive relationships with the publisher and subscriptions team in order to help facilitate sales.

• Maintain productive relationships with artists, labels, festivals, venues, PRs, etc.

The job requires both a high standard of editorial skills, eg copy editing, proof reading and writing headlines and standfirsts, and excellent administrative skills.

Key online tools and software used in the job will include Google Drive, Sheets and Docs, InDesign, Photoshop, Word, Excel, and The Wire’s customised CMS.

The job pays £28,941 annually.

You will be paid monthly.

You will be entitled to 28 paid leave days annually inclusive of statutory public holidays.

The Wire will contribute five per cent of your monthly pay towards a pension scheme of your choosing.

The job will require you to work at weekends at least once a month. The job does not pay overtime; instead, you will take time off in lieu for any weekend work.

You will be issued with a full employment contract. The Wire’s employment contracts have been drawn up in consultation with its staff and their National Union of Journalists (NUJ) representative and have been endorsed and approved by the NUJ.

You will find more information about The Wire here.

To apply, send an email to the Publisher saying who you are and why you want to work for The Wire. Please also include a CV detailing any relevant experience, and include some examples of any written work. Closing date for applications: FRI 1 DECEMBER. Candidates who we wish to interview will be contacted by Fri 8 December. We will aim to conduct those interviews by Fri 15 December. Ideally, the successful candidate will take up the position in January 2024.

The Wire actively welcomes applications from all individuals regardless of background, ethnicity, gender identity, sexual orientation or disability. No AI will be used in the assessment of any applications received. All applications will be treated in the strictest confidence.

With its forthcoming March issue The Wire will be switching to a new format, and debuting a new logo and design.

Having celebrated its 40th anniversary in July 2022 with a month-long series of live events in London, Brighton, Bristol, Manchester, Glasgow and Chicago, The Wire is now looking to the future with a sleek new A4 format, and a brand new visual identity courtesy of its new art director Guillaume Chuard.

It has become a tradition at The Wire that departing art directors recommend their successors. Guillaume was introduced to the magazine by Ben Weaver, who left the title at the end of 2022 after 14 years as its art director to take up the same position at Condé Nast’s World Of Interiors.

Another tradition at The Wire is that all incoming art directors are given a brief to redesign the title. The decision to switch to A4 had already been taken by publisher Tony Herrington, who had concluded that after 30 years the magazine’s outsize format could do with a bit of a trim. For his part, Guillaume, whose Studio Ard has previously redesigned Tate Etc, was galvanised by the challenge of coming up with a new visual identity to fit the requirements of the A4 format, while also staying true to The Wire’s commitment to covering independent, experimental and underground music in ways that are both uncompromising and accessible.

Crucially, the content of the magazine, from features to reviews, will remain the same, even as the look of it all gets a crisp overhaul. There won't be any changes made to any of the magazine’s established regular sections, which continue to provide the best context for its coverage of the world of underground sound and music, nor to an editorial direction and philosophy that over the last four decades has made The Wire into "the most essential music magazine of the contemporary era” (Forced Exposure, US), or, if you prefer, “the most prestigious music magazine in the world” (La Nacion, Argentina).

The March issue of The Wire will be on sale from 9 February.

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

Take out a print + digital subscription: thewire.co.uk/shop/subscriptions

Take out a digital only subscription (including option of three months for £9.99): shop.exacteditions.com/the-wire

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

Or find it in these shops and via these distributors.

Guitarist Mary Halvorson has been a long time admirer of Robert Wyatt’s music. She opened her 2018 Wire playlist with his “Sea Song”, saying: “I’m starting with Robert Wyatt because his influence probably runs deepest. He is a true individual and innovator and I’ve spent years with many of his albums on repeat listen.”

Now she has enticed the singer, who announced that he was stopping making music in 2014, out of retirement to sing on three tracks on Artlessly Falling, the second album by her Code Girl group.

“Robert is one of my heroes,” says Halvorson. “It’s such a big deal to me that he was open to singing on this record, because his music has been an enormous influence on Code Girl, and just about everything else I’ve done. I wrote the three tracks he sings on specifically for him, and I was floored by the grace and brilliance with which he approached this music. It was a dream come true.”

Since announcing his retirement, Wyatt has reappeared intermittently, playing cornet or trumpet on albums by David Gilmour and Paul Weller, while in 2018 he contributed vocals to Janek Schaefer’s Wyatt-inspired album What Light There Is Tells Us Nothing. But his appearance on Artlessly Falling represents his most significant return to music making, and coincides with the publication of the book Side By Side, a collaboration with his wife the visual artist Alfreda Benge, and the Domino label’s release of the 2004 compilation His Greatest Misses, which is being issued on vinyl for the first time.

Artlessly Falling is released by the Firehouse 12 label on 16 October, and also features Halvorson’s regular Code Girl collaborators vocalist Amirtha Kidambi, bass player Michael Formanek and drummer Tomas Fujiwara, as well as trumpeter Adam O’Farrill and saxophonist María Grand.

The Japanese avant garde trumpeter Itaru Oki passed away on 25 August. He was one the key players in the development of a distinctively Japanese take on free jazz in the Tokyo scene of the late 1960s and early 70s, leading his own power trio and collaborating with other formative names like percussionist Masahiko Togashi and bassist Keiki Midorikawa. In 1974, Oki moved to France, where he remained until his death, an actively engaged and generous collaborator with European and US players including Alan Silva, Noah Howard, François Tusques, Linda Sharrock and Axel Dörner.

The desire to push further out, further away from his starting point was a constant motivating force for Oki throughout his life. You can feel it in the roadmap of his life journey and hear it in his questing trumpet lines. You can see it too in visual form on the classic photo on the cover of his 1976 album Mirage. Boots and fur coat on, knitted cap pulled down over his forehead, trumpet slung over his shoulder and cigarette in hand, Oki leans pensively against a monumental metal lantern at a Japanese temple. A brief pause for reflection before he lights out for the territories.

Like many other founders of Japanese free jazz (Masahiko Togashi, Sabu Toyozumi, Masahiko Satoh, Mototeru Takagi), Oki was a war baby. He was born in 1941 in Kobe, and by a very happy accident he lived across the street from the elder brother of Japan’s first jazz trumpeter of note, Fumio Nanri, who had cut his chops in Shanghai and San Francisco in the 1930s. Apparently Nanri gave Oki his first trumpet lessons, showing him how to hold the instrument and form his first embouchure. Oki moved to Tokyo in 1965 and progressed rapidly through Dixieland and bebop before finding a home amongst the new jazz experimentalists of the period. He was a member of one of the first Japanese free jazz units, ESSG, with Satoh and Togashi, and first toured Europe in 1969.

Soon afterwards, he started his own trio with drummer Hozumi Tanaka and bassist and cellist Keiki Midorikawa. He released a series of LPs with the trio and later under his own name that were both formally inventive (one piece on his first album features a trumpet solo played into a bowl of water) and ambitiously restless. Oki was much taken by Togashi’s distinctive ‘speed and space’ approach to the rhythmic development of free jazz, and he deployed a similar oceanic pulse on early albums like Satsujin Kyoshitsu (Classroom For Murderers) and Genso Note (Phantom Note).

Once settled in Europe, Oki’s entrée to the local jazz scene came through Alan Silva. Oki was one of the early teachers of the revolutionary musical pedagogy taught at Silva’s Institut Art Culture Perception (IACP), founded in Paris in 1976. He was a frequent and inspired player on Silva and IACP-related projects like The Texture Sextet and The Celestial Communication Orchestra. He performed on a wide array of horns and woodwind instruments, but he was also known as an accomplished trumpet builder, making instruments with the bell at bizarre angles or even with two bells.

In spite of his long residence in France and his embeddedness in the European free improv scene, Oki maintained a close relationship with Japan. Every year he would return home in the autumn to tour extensively and record in a series of ad hoc units with some of the ageing giants of the scene as well as with a host of younger players.

In an interview with the jazz critic Teruto Soejima for the sleevenotes for his first LP, Satsujin Kyoshitsu (1970), Oki commented prophetically: “I want to keep on moving forward, so that decades from now, even if I’ve gone bald, I still want to be playing new jazz.”

The Showroom, London​ and film maker/producer ​Reece Ewing​ have launched IN·​FLO·R​ES·C​ENCE, a new interdisciplinary online platform for compositions and conversations that champion jazz and promote freedom, experimentation and improvisation.

​Ongoing until 3 October across Instagram, Vimeo and The Showroom website, participating musicians include ​JD Allen​,​ Bokani Dyer​, Sarathy Korwar​,​ Nduduzo Makhathini​,​ Siya Makuzeni​,​ Elaine Mitchener​,​ Corey Mwamba​, Thandi Ntuli​,​ Luis Carlos Pérez​ and ​Leyanis Vald​é​s Reyes​, who have each composed a one minute composition that responds to the changes to daily life brought on by the pandemic. Their contributions will also be interpreted and performed by the project’s artist-in-residence, the New York based Cuban pianist and composer Elio Villafranca.

Also included is a selection of interviews conducted by Kevin Le Gendre, Kodwo Eshun, Vijay Iyer and Jason Moran.

The project was conceived by Ewing​ and curated with assistant curator ​Katherine Finerty​, in collaboration with ​The Showroom, London​, directed by ​Elvira Dyangani Ose​.

As previously reported, this year’s longrunning Polish music festival will take place online between 1–11 October.

Key to its programme is a new book and album featuring freshly commissioned texts, music and sound works that respond both to the current Covid-19 pandemic and the contradictions found in this year’s core theme: intermission. The book explores a range of subjects such as making music, protests, online intimacy and solidarity, ecology, mental health, audio-virology, machine listening, and more; and its contributors include Agata Pyzik, Ayesha Hameed, Dave Tompkins, Deforrest Brown Jr, Ewa Majewska, Gamall Awad, Jace Clayton, Jennifer Lucy Allan, Joel Stern & James Parker from Liquid Architecture, Moor Mother, Kristen Gallernaux and Steve Goodman. Artists on the companion album include 33EMYBW, Bastarda, Chris Watson, Deforrest Brown Jr & James Hoff, Jana Winderen, Jlin, Lutto Lento, Moor Mother & Geng, Sam Slater, Hildur Guðnadóttir & Kári Grisey, Slikback, Tim Hecker, Agata Harz & Katarzyna Smoluk and Vargtss (Varg X Vtss).

Published on 16 November, the physical format edition includes a digital download of the album, which is also available to buy separately.

The festival programme announced so far includes Deforrest Brown Jr & James Hoff presenting a new audiovisual project that examines a geographic history of race in America; Moor Mother working with DJ Haram as 700 Bliss to collaborate with Pussykrew; and Hubert Zemler & Miłosz Pękala performing live percussive interpretations of two compositions by Jlin. And Kode9 will be presenting an an audiovisual work based on his contribution to the book.

In other news, Liquid Architecture have curated a Machine Listening curriculum; and an Unsound Patreon campaign has been launched.

Unbegrenzt was recorded by Catherine Christer Hennix (recitation, percussion and electronics) and Hans Isgren (bowed gong) in 1974 and is the Swedish artist's realisation of Karlheinz Stockhausen’s piece of the same name. The Stockhausen original was released by Shandar as part of Aus Den Sieben Tagen (1969), a collection of 15 text pieces written in Paris in May 1968 and which, without notated direction, offered poetic cues aligning with the concept of intuitive music, a form Eurocentric improvisation. Here the realisation expands on Hennix's work with infinitary compositions, a concept central to her work with the ensemble The Deontic Miracle.

It follows Selected Early Keyboard Works and Selections From 100 Models Of Hegikan Roku, as well as a two volume collection of Hennix’s writings titled Poësy Matters and Other Matters.

Unbegrenzt was restored and mastered by Stephan Mathieu. Including an essay by Bill Dietz, Unbegrenzt is released on 28 August by Blank Forms Editions and Empty Editions.

Tomaga co-member Valentina Magaletti has confirmed the news that the London based duo’s Tom Relleen died of stomach cancer in London’s St Bartholomew's Hospital on 23 August.

Founded in 2013, Tomaga released a number of albums through the Hands In The Dark and Meakusma labels. The duo also collaborated with Pierre Bastien on Nicolas Jaar's Other People label and released a split 7" with Charles Hayward on God Unknown. According to The Quietus, Tomaga had scheduled another release for 2020. "We rushed to master the album in his final days because the release was important to him," confirmed Magaletti.

Outside Tomaga, Relleen collaborated with Demian Castellanos on two projects: The Oscillation and Autotelia. He was a founding member of Phonica Records and worked as a booking agent for Julie Tippex.

In 2017 Tomaga put together an hour-long mix for The Wire, featuring artists Marc Barreca, Charles Hayward, Pancrace and others.

A major retrospective of Mika Vainio's work is running at the Museum of Contemporary Art Kiasma in Helsinki until 10 January 2021. Called Mika Vainio: 50 Hz, it’s the first comprehensive survey of Vainio’s sound installations in the late musician's native country. “The exhibition project has also served as an important and groundbreaking research into Vainio’s sound art,” says chief curator Kati Kivinen.

Vainio’s first solo exhibition was curated by Hans Ulrich Obrist at the Musée d'Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris in 1997. Shortly after he died in 2017, Kiasma received a donation of a Vainio sound installation called x 540 kHz (2009). In Mika Vainio: 50 Hz, it features alongside his other works 3 x Wall Clocks (2001), 808 (2015), Onko (1996), Soundchamber Berlin (2004) and - 27 (1998).

The show is co-produced with Helsinki Festival, which runs until 6 September. As part of the festival Kiasma Theatre are showing a series of films based on Vainio’s music. The exhibition catalogue includes articles by Pertti Grönholm, Tommi Grönlund, Kati Kivinen, Rikke Lundgreen, The Wire’s Anne Hilde Neset and Mika Taanila, plus an artist interview by Ute Meta Bauer and foreword by Museum Director Leevi Haapala.

Mika Vainio: 50 Hz runs at the Museum of Contemporary Art Kiasma on until 10 January 2021.