Customer Rating: 
Summary: For adventurous and dedicated music lovers
Comment: The Wire is the mag for everything avant-guarde, experimental, innovative, remarkable or obscure in music. It covers most genres including (avant) rock, electronica, jazz, dub, folk, hiphop, intelligent techno, reggae, world and modern classical.
Individual issues contain in-depth articles, essays and interviews, plus regular features like the impressive CD -, Book -, Movie - and Live reviews. World Music is usually covered in a section titled Global Ear and the mag often carries articles on various interesting aspects of rock history.
Once a year, a list of the most crucial albums of that year is published and occasionally lists + short discussions of memorable albums are provided, with titles like for example: "The 100 Most Important Records Ever Made."
The writing style is engaging and mercifully void of pretension and in this mag, even the Letters to the Editor are mostly intelligent and readable. A word of caution is in order - if you get hooked on The Wire, you must be prepared to spend a lot of money on music every month.
Mojo
Q - England
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Customer Rating:
Summary: Simply the best... to discover what's next in modern music
Comment: Avalanches of new bands, acts and performers every year creates or redefine genres and tendencies in modern music. The only way to understand things like "clicks&cuts", or "laptop techno" is to read about them, because it's almost impossible to buy or download every new album that is issued every week. The most avant garde of all magazines is the british 'The Wire' where you can read 100 record reviews and know only a 10% of the artists commented. The main areas covered are electronica, avant rock, improv and any other weird or experimental music. It's a bible for obsessive listeners like me.
Customer Rating:
Summary: The Greatest music magazine on the planet...
Comment: The Wire is the definitive source for infomation and thought regarding experimental, avant garde, or forward thinking music. My eyes and ears have been opened. The Wire has helped my musical tastes and knowledge evolve exponentially in the past 3 years. I consider the Wire to be akin to a scholarly journal...it's much more than you're average glossy Americanized-advertisment filled rags. This publication is a well needed antidote to today's profit driven, corporate controlled media garbage that we are constantly bombarded with. I know of nowhere else where Sun Ra, the Boredoms, Cannibal Ox, Miles Davis, Sonic Youth, the Grateful Dead, and Venetian Snares can peacefully co-exist with Kid 606, Merzbow, Albert Ayler, Tom Waits, John Cage, Autechre, and Bjork. I highly reccomend this magazine to anyone with discriminating tastses and intelligence. Well-written, and often including excellent CD's that you'll actually want to listen to, The Wire is definately worth the elevated import price, and a true journalistic treasure.
Customer Rating:
Summary: Everything a music magazine should be
Comment: Literary and even-minded and yet completely gushy and fannish at the same time. The Wire does focus on jazz, but many other fringe, avant garde, and just plain great genres are also very well represented. If, like me, you feel it's increasingly difficult to stay knowledgable of musical innovators, The Wire is the perfect antidote. The Invisible Jukebox feature, in which a musician of note is made to guess the names of songs the editors play for him or her, is especially great (so great, in fact, that there's a whole book dedicated to collecting some of the best episodes of the feature so far.)
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