Wire #491/2

Bumper double issue. On the cover: 2024 Rewind: the Year in Underground Music, including the Top 50 Releases of the Year; the Top 50 Archive Releases of the Year; Critics’ Reflections: our writers discuss their memorable cultural experiences of the past 12 months. 

Columnists’ Charts: our specialist critics delve deep into their musical niches from noise to modern composition. Plus: YATTA: the New York based artist fuses noise, pop and improv with a spiritual sensibility. By Stephanie Phillips; Music Ex Machina: the epic history of algorithmic music is surveyed at a new exhibition in Lausanne. By Robert Barry; Bridget Hayden: the Vibracathedral Orchestra member swaps free rock for folk on a stark new album.

The Wire is an independent, monthly music magazine covering a wide range of alternative, underground and non-mainstream 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, electronica, hiphop, new jazz, modern composition, traditional musics and beyond. Passionate, intelligent and provocative