Wire #512 - October 2026

Wire #512 - October 2026

On the cover: Mike Watt: From Minutemen to fIREHOSE, the San Pedro bass man has charted an unclassifiable career through the heart of US punk and improv scenes. Interview by Alan Licht, plus: Mike Watt Eight Pack: Eight places to start with the bassist’s back catalogue. By Byron Coley. Inside: The Primer: Aphex Twin: A user’s guide to the music of the shapeshifting, mercurial mainstay of the UK electronic underground. By Derek Walmsley; You and Me Festival: The Beijing free festival offers a place for experimental performance in the shadow of the connected society. By Drew Daniel; Kaja Draksler: The Slovenian pianist’s chafing against jazz orthodoxy leads to thrilling innovations. By Peter Margasak; Invisible Jukebox: Pamela Z: Will the US vocalist and composer breeze to the end of The Wire’s mystery record selection? Tested by Marc Weidenbaum; Truck Violence: Montreal four-piece drive masculinity in new directions. By Miloš Hroch; Finn Loxbo: The Swedish guitarist’s fingerpicking figures. By Stewart Smith; Global Ear: New music by the lake at Slovenia’s Bled Contemporary Music Week. By Keith Potter; Unlimited Editions: Belgium’s Aspen Edities’ unique brand of Northern European pastoralism. By Peter Margasak; The Inner Sleeve: Yuko Mohri on Yuming’s Pearl Pierce; Against The Grain: Listening in the shadow of Palantir. By Stephen Roddy; Secret History of Film Music: Philip Brophy’s column returns to the pages of The Wire appraising Jon Brion’s work for Paul Thomas Anderson’s One Battle After Another and more; Epiphanies: Corey Mwamba on threading his vibraphone with washing line. And in the reviews sections: Immersion: Happy returns. By Leah Kardos; Francisco Mela: Caribbean carnivals. By Daniel Spicer; Funkadelic: Mind/body connections. By John Morrison; Building A Voice: Sound, Surface, Skin: Vocal ranges. By Matthew Blackwell; Darius Jones & Otomo Yoshihide Quintet: Cosmic couriers. By Gabriel Bristow, and more.

About The Wire magazine: The Wire is an independent print and online music magazine covering a wide range of global alternative, underground and experimental musics. The Wire celebrates and interrogates the most visionary and inspiring, subversive and radical, marginalised and undervalued musicians on the planet, past and present, in the realms of avant rock, electronic music, hiphop, new jazz, improvised music, modern composition, traditional musics and more. Passionate, intelligent and provocative, The Wire wages war on the mundane and the mediocre. Its office is based in London, but it serves an international readership.