The word eccentric is banded about quite liberally today most to those who are undeserving of the title. It is a shame because the UK has a fine record for nurturing more than its fair share of them. To be eccentric is not to be a Big Brother whoring right-wing gushing racing commentator but is to be Quentin Crisp, Dame Barbara Cartland or Mark E Smith. Another great eccentric died on 31st December ten years ago, Leigh Bowery. A true hallmark of an eccentric is to be indefinable -- was Bowery an artist who used himself as his medium? A fashionista being oh so cool bathing in self-publicity? Or was he a mixture of these combined with a very normal man underneath it all?

The space isn't here to provide the answer: a better source for the true Leigh Bowery is Lucien Freud's incredible paintings, Charles Atlas' decent film or even the dancefloors of the clubs that Bowery could and probably most certainly would claim as his legacy, such as Kash Point will celebrate the man's life this Thursday. DJs and performances will include artists who worked with Bowery -- most notably Matthew Glamorre and Bowery's widow, Nicola. In keeping with the night's ethos of seeking to be more than a disco, previously unseen photographs and videos will be on display. Moonlighting is pretty small so arrive early and show some respect by adhering to the Bowery words of wisdom: "Dress as though your life depends on it, or don't bother."

Time for wrinkly rockers, mods and younger upstarts to unite for their annual gathering. The headliner at this Easter shenanigan is none other than the legendary (and we do not use that term lightly) Arthur Lee appearing with his (tribute) band, Love. This is not the original incarnation of Love, but as a special treat at this event, the band will be joined by original guitarist Johnny Echols. Inevitably, all eyes will be on Lee, who was always the figurehead of the band. Love's opus Forever Changes continues to hog the upper reaches of "all time best album" charts and cemented their status as leading West Coast Elektra artists at the end of the '60s. Its hypnotising blend of flowing, psychedelic melodies supplemented by strings, raucous blasts of rock and lugubrious mariachi horns, all underpinned by Lee's unconventional and fascinating vocals with their twisted lyrical content, sounds as impressive today as it did back at the end of the '60s.

Lee was suffering, suicidal and riding an intense chemical wave when this album was made, and the succeeding years have proved difficult, including spells in prison and hospital. This makes his appearances over the last few years all the more special and, considering how sensitively his band interprets the back catalogue, this will be another compelling experience. The music is just as relevant today as it was then: a fact emphasised by the reverence with which modern artists regard Lee. Before and after the concert take your pick from an array of live or club orientated events within this mini festival, whether you dig northern soul to fancy a frug to some hillbilly rock.

NB: this festival runs from Fri 25/03 (night) till Sun 27/03 (night). For the full line-up click here. Lee plays with his tribute Love band on Sun 27/03.

Elektrofest 2005 is an event that has snowballed in popularity over the past few years and demonstrates just how diverse the teeming underworld of electronic-based music can be. Most of us have a pretty specific idea of what the term "electro" (with or without the kultural "k") means when applied to a musical genre, but between each of us these ideas are likely to be wildly different. These differences are sure to be reflected in the kind of punters flocking to Electrowerkz for this year's experience, from Goths to ravers to indie-kids.

At one end of the Elektrofest spectrum stand Noblesse Oblige, a master and mistress of sinisterly masochistic synth-pop that is reminiscent of Sheep On Drugs in the early '90s. Next to them nestles the ever-present Cursor Miner, exploring deeply sumptuous digital pops and squelches that satisfy followers of trance and dance alike; and female duo Trauma Pet promise to seduce with foxy and emotive song-writing blended with beautifully filtered synth and captivating vocals. Top billing is handed to Visage, however, who have been a force behind punk and electronic music since the '70s, and the fest gives us a rare chance to experience some of the talent behind not just Visage but also Ultravox, Rich Kids and The Skids. This evening looks like a great chance to broaden one's appreciation of just how flexible that "electro" tag can be.

Forever a free-form forum for crossdressing, genre-switching fusion arts, the Royal Festival Hall officiates at this marriage between the London Sinfonietta and Radiohead's prodigiously talented guitarist Jonny Greenwood. (Incidentally, Jonny Greenwood has been foraging further and further afield in his perennial search for creative fulfilment, a quest which may finally have found its holy grail in the shape of a cameo appearance as one of the Weird Sisters in the next Harry Potter flick, alongside another Radioheader Phil and everyone's favourite goggle-eyed Brit-popper Jarvis).

But we digress... playing to an audience that will probably run the gamut from buttoned-up classical cognoscenti to strung-out grunge grommets, these two giants are offering nothing short of a sonic smorgasbord. Both the London Sinfonietta and Radiohead are ensembles celebrated for their ingenuity and sheer inventiveness, so together they promise to manipulate the sound barrier in exhilarating ways. The collaboration includes a traditional Arabic Song played by the Nazareth Orchestra; excerpts of the oeuvre of 20th-century pioneers Messiaen and Penderecki; a bespoke composition by Jonny G; and elastic arrangements of Radiohead tracks with some unspecified involvement from the most emotive of warblers, Thom Yorke. That mind-bending, periphery-treading wormhole, Radiohead Television, will further warp the known AV world with live sonic-generated visuals. Where worlds collide, as the press release says...

NB: the London Sinfonietta and Johnny Greenwood perform for two nights on Sun 27/03 and Mon 28/03. These concerts are part of the Ether Festival, which runs till 28/03.

It's KF's opinion that clubbing on a Sunday should be encouraged the whole year round -- but to avoid the dancefloor on Easter Sunday, when the most taxing thing you have to do the next day is watch television and read a paper, is nigh-on inexcusable. It's with this in mind that the good people at Lost, one of the nation's most cutting-edge club nights, have put together a small yet unmissable line-up in SeOne. Heading the bill is Richie Hawtin, aka Plastikman -- criticised in the dance press a couple of years ago for his cutting-edge MP3 sets by parochially-minded DJs, who believe that you have to leave sticky fingerprints all over records to be successful -- criticism that, insanely, completely fails to take into account the sheer energy of the driving techno that he brings to nightclubs worldwide. Silencing these critics, Hawtin will be playing a "decks and EFX" set at Lost -- expect the kind of urgent, minimal and deeply funky techno that has sealed his reputation as one of the world's foremost DJs and producers.

Joining him are Plaid, who are similarly mixing vinyl with new music from their laptops. Melodic, gorgeous, deeply experimental yet simultaneously funky and incredibly dance-able, their mix of lush synths and quirky, rolling beats incorporating elements of jungle and breakbeat alongside techno and ambient has led to collaborations with the likes of Bjork and Nicolette in the past; impeccable production credentials and a reputation for strong live performances make this a particularly exciting prospect. Lost resident and co-founder Steve Bicknell will also be spinning, and watch out for the visual performances accompanying the beats.

As ICA exhibition director Jens Hoffman says in the sleek little exhibition catalogue, "there is nothing more old-fashioned than the ongoing desire for the new". The Beck's Futures selection panel's avowed decision to reject soothsaying this year and instead celebrate six artists who represent the juiciest crop of today's ripe talent is contemporary in focus but visionary in practice.

At this sixth annual award exhibition, the six artists handicapped for future success are unified by a timeless desire to revisit and revive the past. In Ryan Gander's Bauhaus Revisited, the multi-media artist recreates the plain wood cubes and crosses that Josef Hartwig presented as a Bauhaus Chess Set in 1924 and leaves them in a pile on the gallery floor like a child's discarded blocks. Upstairs, Gander hangs a bookshelf filled with identical thin blue books tantalisingly high, so the appearance of their spines promises order and answers, yet the knowledge they contain remains frustratingly out of reach. Similar pedagogical concerns are explored in Glasgow-based Luke Fowler's mockumentaries and Christina Mackie's installation combining video, wood sculptures and recycled Styrofoam cups crushed together with a drawing patterned after a DNA sequence.

While Gander, Mackie and Fowler assess the nature of thought, Donald Urquhart, death-metal Dada performance artist Lali Chetwynd and video artist Daria Martin (who has also curated a film night at Tate Modern which will be screened on 01/04) concentrate on beauty's powerful pull. Perhaps most compelling is Urquhart's playfully morose installation of a graveyard decorated with drawings evoking Edward Gorey and a depressed Erte that are accompanied by a limited edition fragrance designed for a '30s gay vivant, which smells of decay yet is intended as a remedy for melancholy.

On 26/04 we will learn which of these artists emerges as the winner (the artists share a £40,000 awards-fund but one leaves with an additional £20,000 prize) but until then... the future is on view now.

NB: runs till 15/05.

There is a mass of contradictions in this supposedly Simple Girl that make Melanie Wilson's solo performance piece sublimely entertaining. She's "not how we imagine her looking" (we the audience watching her there onstage) -- or at least that's what she's telling us. And indeed sometimes she can sound like someone else. She tells us slippery stories from a cavernous imagination bigger and darker than Tim Burton's, she sings badly and there are samples creeping out from a keyboard she's playing as accompaniment -- the sound of her own voice rather contradicting herself.

It's always a pleasure to watch a performer of Wilson's undoubted calibre cutting loose by herself. She's popped up in other work and collaborations, most noticeably with her company Patter, to the point of seeming ubiquity at venues like BAC, but this is the sound of someone discovering her own voice. This Simple Girl has travelled from beginnings through the ROAR Project to a radio version on Resonance FM but she really belongs onstage where she marries her sometime glacial presence to the creeping mischievousness of her wit. Really, it is simple stuff -- just some stories canoodling with sound, but cleverer and funnier than most stand-up -- from a simple girl standing onstage. And of course you'd be a fool to believe that's all she is, and a bigger fool to miss this.

NB: Simple Girl runs for two days on Tue 29/03 and Wed 30/03. Wislon is also performing in Dead Man's Biggest Fan (02/04) and in The Experts (08/04 till 29/04) both at BAC.

Philip Jeck is best known for his piece Vinyl Requiem (in collaboration with film artist Lol Sargent) in which no less than 180 Dansette record players, a dozen slide projectors and two movie projectors interact in a sentient, audio-visual maelstrom. Vinyl Requiem won the Time Out Performance Award in 1993 and helped elevate Liverpudlian Jeck (like Christian Marclay, whose current Barbican exhibition is the peg on which tonight's performance hangs) to the vanguard of international sound art/turntablism. Jeck's brace of albums for the dependably ascetic Touch label (1996's Loopholes and 1998's Surf) proffered otherworldly realms of clicks, crackles and phantom melodies -- a sort of one man band-cum DJ, essaying a hybrid, fluff-on-the-stylus, free jazz electro-ambience.

Using combinations of ancient record players and worn, scratched vinyl, Jeck invites the listener to re-examine the basic notion of reproduced sound (along with the concept of hi/lo fidelity and the vinyl album's inherent predictability) and to experience the serendipitous "music" of numerous ad hoc sound sources melting together, as if essayed by some primitive, alien machine orchestra. The results can be jarring, cacophonous or, just as often, exhilarating but are always entirely capricious -- even Jeck has no real idea what kind of sound is ultimately going to emerge once he's set the wheels in motion. His "live" performances depend, therefore, on the happenstance interleaving of vinyl scratches, surface flaws and snatched musical phrases; so no two "gigs" are alike. Leave your preconceptions at the door, but prepare to be "roundly" entertained.

Gianni Amelio's subtle story about a father's quest to rebuild his relationship with his disabled son that he abandoned 15 years ago quietly creeps into your emotional senses. Days after you've watched the film the story remains with you, its haunting simplicity portraying so much about the difficulties of parent and child relationships. On a train bound for Berlin, Gianni (played by Kim Rossi Stuart) meets his son for the first time. In Stuart's father character we immediately sense inexperience and an initial crude misunderstanding of his disabled son's needs. They are heading for a hospital where Paolo (Andrea Rossi) will undergo therapy. It is there that Gianni becomes friends with Nicole (Charlotte Rampling), a frank and guiding French woman who sees straight through Gianni's brooding silence and helps him confront his past.

The Keys to the House has a very pan-European feel, the Italian father and son's story taking place mostly in Germany, as well as Italy and Norway. In these displaced environments there is a rapid change of roles where Paolo and Nicole are the ones helping Gianni take his next step to becoming a father. The film's documentary influenced style, sparse dialogue and a sharp perception of the adult and child relationship immediately take a firm grip on your attention. At the centre of the film is an astonishing natural performance by Andrea Rossi. It was his real-life character that inspired Gianni Amelio to re-adapt this deeply personal book by Giuseppe Pontiggia.

NB: The Keys to the House is released in London on 01/04. Three other good foreign films to catch are Maria Full of Grace (released on 25/03), 5 x 2 and Tropical Malady.

While Boudicca, Queen of the Iceni decapitated her foes as she led a bloody revolt against tyrannical Roman military in AD 60-61: Boudicca, design duo Zowie Broach and Brian Kirkby's conceptual fashion line prove many of their rivals are brainless already. Other designers tinker with trends, but Boudicca gives fashion intellectual depth and elevates it to imaginative heights few designers and few artists could conceive, and fewer achieve. Since Boudicca was launched in 1997, Broach and Kirkby have merged performance, sculpture and fashion, as with their S/S2002 collection It Pays My Way But Corrodes My Soul where they presented masked models in overtly drab garb as a protest against cubical chic and corporations' exploitation/ suppression of consumer creativity.

On 07/04 at the Fashion and Textile Museum, Boudicca consummates their marriage with art by collaborating with architect David Adjaye for Boudicca Vs Adjaye: what happens when fashion and architecture meet, commissioned by Vogue. Together the designers and architect spawn a wood sculpture in which a single naked model nestles at the centre of a cosmos of protruding poles. As this creative merger proves despite their frivolous reputations, fashion and architecture are inherently similar. Since humans need shelter and warmth, both disciplines protect us from the elements, but while fashion and architecture might start off base they aspire to be sublime. On 01/04 at Tate Britain (part of Ladies Night), SHOWstudio's editor-in-chief Penny Martin will discuss with Boudicca how they achieve their transcendent aesthetic inspired by shaman garbs, politics, silent films, primordial animal exoskeletons and Queen Boudicca's ruthless Valkyrie beauty.

NB: catch Boudicca on 01/04 at Tate Britain and catch them on 07/04 at the Fashion and Textile Museum.

The eclectic live programming at Spitalfields' Spitz venue has definitely shifted up a gear in the last few months, and this forthcoming blues festival, straddling a month, is perhaps one of the most exciting, ambitious and diverse set of events on their current agenda. Taking the view that the blues ain't dead -- though it's pretty much long gone in its purest of delta devil forms -- Spitz Festival of Blues is a series of 10 live shows across April. The line-up presents a blues fusion that has been hybridised, deconstructed, spliced and bastardised, searching out its influences across massively varied musical forms, from hobo honky tonk, jazz and soul, to modern electronica and sleazy rock.

From the burlesque and the carnival, to banjos and beatboxes, fine headline acts include Fat Cat-signed raw guitar noiseniks The Mutts (part of the Brighton Rocks night, also featuring Eighties Matchbox B-Line Disaster DJs), Fat Possum T-Model Ford (is there an overweight animal subtext going on here?), Detroit's Soledad Brothers -- "John Lee Hooker on amphetamines", jazz-blues guitarist Billy Jenkins, and an especially dark shade of voodoo blue from the Dead Brothers. The Immortal Lee County Killers close the show.

Also snuck in there are Menlo Park fella, aka Dennis Hopper Chopper, as a one-man-band, eerie beatbox mumbling from ex-Crash Test Dummies' Son of Dave, and Alan Sparkhawk of Low fame's dark alter-ego, a more punked-up Black Eyed Snakes.

NB You can buy a season ticket giving you access to all ten events for £50. See the Spitz website for the full line-up.

Olivier Assayas is one jammy dude: his last film's all star cast included Chloe Sevigny, Connie Nielsen and Gina Gershon, not just babes but thinking babes. His current opus has now roped in Wong Kar-Wai staple Maggie Cheung and Beatrice Dalle, with existential hard man Nick Nolte in tow (yup, he was even that in 48 Hours). This capacity to draw from Hollywood's best and beautiful is testimony to the Frenchman's films. In this country it was probably the "cult-y" Irma Vep, with his then-wife Cheung, that wrangled his name from the Franco film buffs. She plays herself, all clad in black, in this film about filmmaking... But really about the extremes of creativity and the people that have to reach that edge.

Now in town to promote Clean, a tale of a drug-addled singer trying to re-unite with her son, and come clean, Assayas is doing his part for the industry by collaborating with the NFT and Script Factory to bring us plebs a masterclass in filmmaking. Written specifically for Cheung, who won Best Actress at Cannes for this role, she has turned in another strong performance that includes, in classic Hong-Kong actress style, her singing some tunes. She plays a musician after all. Is this a tale of redemption, or attachments in life, or maybe that creative edge again? Whatever the case, films from this former art student and film critic, like Demonlover, are never simple tales, rather they double the complexities we find all around us everyday. Maybe making feature films is not in your plans, but certainly reflecting on life and life's unruly passage is, and we expect that the Frenchman, together with his lead actress, will be showing us a few tricks.

NB: this event is part of the 2005 Renault French Film Season. Other films showing are: Arsene Lupin (UGC Haymarket, 31/03 at 7:30pm -- Q&A with Kristin Scott Thomas and Jean-Paul Salome), Kings and Queen (UGC Shaftesbury Avenue, 31/03 at 7:30pm -- Q&A with Arnaud Desplechin and Emmanuelle Devos) and A Common Thread (UGC Haymarket, 01/04 at 7:30pm -- Q&A with Eleonore Faucher and Lola Naymark).

This eclectic film programme takes inspiration from Caravaggio: The Final Years. The world of Caravaggio's late paintings is a gloomy, feverish nightmare. These dark, unsettling works were painted whist the painter was in exile from Rome, where he had worked for a decade, after killing a man. Figures with sickly, corpse-like flesh and hollow eyes loom out of the shadows. Caravaggio restlessly depicts human anguish with painful sensitivity and moving sincerity.

La Reine Margot is set in 1572, the year after Caravaggio's birth, during a turbulent and bloodthirsty chapter of French history when Catholics slaughtered the Protestant Huguenots. Isabelle Adjani is utterly compelling as the passionate Margot, daughter of Catherine de Medici and sister to the weakling king, who poisons her enemies. She cannot trust her family, who use her as a political pawn, forcing her to marry against her will. She ends up falling in love with the man she saves from a massacre. This is an epic tale of love, survival, religious faith and morality with sumptuous costumes with a beautiful score and intense performances from the greats of contemporary French cinema.

In The Mood For Love's exquisite composition subsumes narrative. The film explores the smouldering, repressed passion between the impossibly elegant Maggie Cheung and the journalist next door. The story unfolds in a claustrophobic apartment block and on the steamy streets of Hong Kong in the '60s. Watch it again before seeing 2046 at the cinema.

Derek Jarman's idiosyncratic biopic Caravaggio seeks to capture the brooding mood and palette of Caravaggio's paintings. There are two personal odes to the eternal city by Italian directors, Fellini's Roma and Pasolini's Mama Roma. Greenaway's film recalls Caravaggio with its use of colour and composition and Scorsese's Mean Streets, a study of gangsters in 1970s New York, draws parallels with Caravaggio's insalubrious reputation.

NB: the films are Caravaggio, Derek Jarman, 1986 (02/04); The Cook, The Wife, The Thief and Her Lover, Peter Greenaway, 1989 (09/04); La Reine Margot, Patrice Chereau, 1994 (16/04); In The Mood For Love, Wong Kar-Wai, 2000 (23/04); Mama Roma, Pier Paolo Pasolini, 1962 (30/04); Mean Streets, Martin Scorsese, 1973 (07/05); Roma, Federico Fellini, 1972 (14/05).

The Japanese are a strange folk, in their politeness, capacity to love culture, and more importantly the way they absorb Western "things" and "improve" them. Everything becomes more streamlined, efficient, and even "cultivated". Yet Tomoko Takahashi is a messy, messy artist, but quelle mess! In assembling sprawling installations from found materials, she belongs to the tradition of '60s Happenings, scatter art and Oldenburg's Store to the more theatrical installations of the '80s. Takahashi is an artist involved in creating chaos in places of order and making order out of chaos. A player of games, like that child that never grew up, her work is rife with metaphor, story and personal narrative. In creating this, her most "ordered" installation, "play" seems to take the form of toys and allusions rather than play itself. The result is her "tidiest" piece, but her free-ranging improv skills will surely regain its heart in this evening game of ultraviolet tag.

Watch her Turner prize video and you'll find that the nominee's at her strongest in these little erratic but witty-poetic happenings. Games and nature play a large part in her diaristic sprawls that occur in the space between art and life. Here, with artist Simon Faithfull, participants will be donning white hats in a garden covered by UV lights, their "glowings" working their way into the live transmission being projected on a big screen in the park. Not a believer in the less-is-more tradition and rather the more-is-more variety, Takashi's and Faithfull's It (Again) will allow us to view white spots and random patterns onscreen as the sun sets. So... Game On!

NB: to continue the participatory nature of her piece, Takahashi will be allowing members of the public to take away parts of the work as she dismantles it. Not quite like De Kooning's brushstroke swipes on newspaper, but who can resist this "Serpentine Take-Away" (10/04 from 10am - 6pm).

The thought of Yve-Alain Bois, Benjamin Buchloh, Hal Foster and Rosalind Krauss sitting down and jointly writing a history of last century's art is much akin to Roosevelt, Churchill and Stalin dividing up Germany after WWII. All four are Art History's big guns, all have contributed theoretically to redefining and intellectualising the cannon. As we finally somewhat distance ourselves from Modernism, it is becoming a period that can be spoken of, debated and defined in historical terms. The T&H book that has spawned the opportunity to bring this unusual and unruly gang of four together is being touted as a "landmark study".

Bois, who is currently writing a tome on every single Barnett Newman painting, has brought French theory to abstraction, while Krauss, in her anti-formalist aesthetics, has been telling alternative tales of Modernism via philosophy. Together they have jointly co-curated and written an alternative treatise of Modern art. Buchloh's approach has been to problematise art with political history, Richter being one of his favourites. Finally, anti-aesthetician Hal Foster has been instrumental in the re-evaluation of Modernism in postmodernist terms. One hopes that the result is akin to the Three Tenors (Buchloh being the large one?!), where the melange of voices raises the "song" to a higher level. Whatever the case, the presence of the foursome in conversation with our very own, Briony Fer and Frances Morris, together with the Paris-based Jean-Pierre Criqui, should be Art History's equivalent of Barca's encounter with Chelsea! Where's TJ Clark then?!

NB: for all you web-bound Flashers, this event will be webcast.

Giveaway: we have two copies of Art Since 1900 (Thames & Hudson) to give away. They'll go to two randomly picked Flashers who can name another famous art historian that was recently mentioned in KF (hint: there is a link to him in this week's issue).

Thomas Heatherwick takes the baton from Jim Eyre for the second of two talks on rule-breaking structures. If you're a Londoner who suffers dizziness and fainting spells crossing into Zone 2, you won't have seen Heatherwick's largest work to date, as it's in Manchester (go north, turn left). But worth the trip: B of the Bang is an enormous frozen explosion in steel -- 36m higher than Gormley's Angel Of The North (also inaccessible by tube), and created, according to Heatherwick, to "give the [Manchester] stadium a friend". Aah. Also, you won't have seen his curious Blue Carpet project in "should-have-been-city-of-culture-2008" Newcastle, then. Anything but grim up north, in fact. Describing himself as a designer, he deliberately avoids the description of artist, architect or, for that matter, town planner. Fabulously, he's been appointed as a sort of artist-in-residence for the whole of Milton Keynes (and who could deny it needs it?).

Back in the safety of the Smoke, his extraordinary curling footbridge at Paddington Basin adds sparkle to the backdrop of 1 & 2 Waterside; and last week saw the official opening of his spectacular glass-bead-blob sculpture Bleigiessen, set in the foyer of the new Hopkins-designed Wellcome Trust HQ on Euston Road. Further abroad, he's even working on a Buddhist temple in south-west Japan (they didn't want a Japanese architect as they felt the building would be too traditional -- no problem with choosing Heatherwick then...).

What happens when giants collide? Gargantuan,William Gibson, inventor of "cyberspace" and the founding father of "cyberpunk" whose seminal mid '80s canon Sprawl built the semiotic playground for two generations of science-fiction writers, meets Barbara Kruger: artist, designer, writer, lecturer, media analyst and all-round, post-modern, ironic, iconic, graphic-word-art vigilante fresh from epic installation exercises in ideological bunker-busting. Meanwhile Tate continues to impress with this innovative conversational match-up -- part of their Contested Territories: Conversations in Practice series.

Art-heads and designers will definitely recognise Kruger's personal style, as distinct as a Picasso, even if the name is less recognisable -- her work has been fusing word/image in a bra-burning fusillade of social consciousness raising, anti-consumerist declarations of autonomy for decades, genre-hogging with Holzer, Ruscha, Prince et al.

Gibson meanwhile wrote the book on cyber-fiction, and called it Neuromancer (1984). The miracle of Gibson is that despite refusing to engage with "tech" on any level (he refused to own a computer because he said it was too noisy), by the middle of the '80s he had not only comprehended the potential of the net but had constructed a still-believable virtual future. Pattern Recognition is his latest, where obligatory thriller/action acts as humdrum curtain rail on which to hang a couture collection of musings on the nature of fashion, branding, cryptography, technology, art and human frailty. He transcends on demand.

Despite their left-field mediums, Gibson and Kruger are two of Western culture's more significant wordsmiths. Their litany is a linguistic armament 'gainst a sea of popular pap, their views on their own understanding of "information" from a personal perspective is bound to be fascinating. Cultural connoisseurs may sneer at either but owe both a debt; in either case, be desperate for tickets.

After Francis Albert Sinatra and Tootsie Roll candy, Yo La Tengo's Ira Kaplan, Georgia Hubley and James McNew are Hoboken, New Jersey's most famous export. Despite high-profile film connections (soundtrack work for Hal Hartley, a memorable role as the Velvet Underground in Mary Harron's I Shot Andy Warhol), they've essentially spent two decades colonising the demimonde between indie cultdom and mainstream acceptance. Their dozen studio albums meander from chugging VU pastiche to free jazz skronk-fest by way of timeless garage pop and unbridled guitar wig-outs, and a decent "best of" compilation is, frankly, overdue. Subtitled "A Smattering Of Scintillating Senescent Songs 1985-2003", Prisoners Of Love is a lavish, slightly schizoid, three-CD package. Two discs chart the band's most luminous (and accessible) songs (pithy thespian homage "Tom Courtenay", or the sublime "Autumn Sweater" remain timelessly haunting), and a third CD documents out-takes and rarities. While the former makes an excellent introduction for the uninitiated, the latter will only sate aficionados, who presumably already have the other tracks. None of which stops Prisoners Of Love being for the most part a thing of chiming, homespun beauty -- and an overdue celebration of what may still be US alternative rock's best kept secret.

To buy Prisoners Of Love online click here.

It's been 15 years since electronic music last strayed from the dancefloor. Freed from repetitive beats, techno has blossomed. Its adaptability is obvious, proven by diverse exponents from Herbert's delicate sample alchemy to Hecker's raw electric storms. Not to mention the interplay between electronica and the avant-garde exemplified by neo-classicists such as Murcof and Max Richter. Infinite Scale has previously teamed up with Radio 1's Bobby Friction (remixing artists like Bhangra Knights vs Husan). There is the faintest Indian influence here (as on opening track "Acoustic Snails" when a subtle tabla weaves in and out of the mix) but for the most part this is a return to the techno blueprint. The EP takes its inspiration from Plaid's primary colours, Warp's Artificial Intelligence series and, most pertinently, Aphex Twin's truly seminal Selected Ambient Works Vol. 1. Equally, growling bass and bell chimes combine to effect on "In-Motion". Derivative it may be, but this EP shows a technical restraint and singularity of vision that makes it considerably more than the sum of its parts.

NB: on Wed 30/03 (7pm - 12am) catch the Infinite Scale (live), Cultek, Ochre (live) among others at the Sound Sensor launch party at Ginglik (1 Shepherds Bush Green, W12).

Giveaway: we have two copies of Sound Sensor to give away. They'll go to two randomly picked Flashers who can tell us in what year was the IDM mailing list started.

To buy Sound Sensor online click here.