A rare magazine that privileges thinking about music over tracing its market movements, The Wire has spent the past 20 years creating a historical narrative almost entirely its own. From its early jazz-journal days to its current role as a glossy publication that boasts cover cameos by such experimental non-stars as Jim O'Rourke, Kid 606, Boredoms, and Cannibal Ox, the English magazine has grown into a sort of international way station for music that's both rapt and defiant in its role as art. The fringe-intensive policy doesn't make room for many of music's finer pleasures, but it does help build the invaluable foundation pieced together in Undercurrents, an anthology that sweeps Pythagoras, Thomas Edison, John Cage, Sun Ra, Harry Smith, Kraftwerk, and Grandmaster Flash into a dustbin still coughing up mites. Compiled from a series of Wire think-pieces, Undercurrents starts with Erik Davis' essay on "The Esoteric Origins Of The Phonograph," which delves into the mystical beginnings of a tool that was intended to sound the call of the dead. Technology plays a crucial role in the book's opening "Electrification" chapter, from Ian Penman's meditation on the way microphones changed the shape of singing to Rob Young's essay about electronic music's immersive glitch worship. With the equipment turned on, Undercurrents moves into the mechanics and mythologies of music-making, staring down the tune of "the music of the spheres" through the occultist eyes of ages-old drone devotees and Anthology Of American Folk Music mastermind Harry Smith. Equal parts historical exhumation and agenda-setting exposition, Undercurrents' themes treat music as a medium engaged with contexts and brushed by various tines of culture. In a pair of rich essays on the robotics of rhythm, Peter Shapiro and Biba Kopf chart a searching line from New Orleans marching bands to James Brown to Kraftwerk, mixing the militaristic traces of brass bands with the post-War hauntings of Germany's Autobahn. The wide backdrop makes the evolution of movements and genres–Undercurrents has a lot of them, from Futurism and Fluxus to rock 'n' roll, techno, and jazz–part of a story still developing. The book divulges countless secrets: A great David Toop piece charts the proto-automation aims of music boxes and 18th-century Kabuki theater. But Undercurrents' most revealing secret lies in the way it makes margins and headlines part of the same text.