Regular readers of KultureFlash will probably be familiar with San Francisco art rockers Deerhoof, such is the regularity they receive our endorsement. Having recently supported The Melvins, they return for yet another All Tomorrow's Parties show offering their uniquely chaotic fusion of discordant, jarring guitar and quirky melody. With an array of high profile admirers (Karen O, Matt Groening and Sonic Youth), there is a sense that following the release of their new album The Runners Four (released on 17/10) they might be on the cusp of moving well beyond their cult status. Such is the theme of the night, there is a suitably experimental support. Expect an aural assault from Australian band The Drones -- their sound combines fierce rhythmic intensity and a garage punk energy. Opening solo singer Alexander Tucker has been steadily developing his unique shambolic approach to acoustic and free noise electric guitar for many years now; his style encompasses dynamic shifts from finger plucking, psyche-electronic, Dictaphones and spooky vocals.

The BBC have decided in their infinite wisdom to call October 13th John Peel Day. Commemorating the death of the broadcasting legend, who died in October 2004, a suitably frazzled cacophony will be spearheaded by a sold out event at the Royal Festival Hall on the 12th to be broadcast on Radio 1. It'll be amusing to see and hear the likes of New Order, The Fall and, erm, Venetian Snares cope with having to play for 20 minutes at a time. Some might argue that 20 minutes is about as much as anyone can take of The Fall. For those unlucky enough not to see this spectacle, there are a hundred other events happening on the 13th that the great man would be proud of. In the London area, we reckon that Leafcutter John at the Ritzy Cinema in Brixton might tweak your knobs. The monthly CocaDisco night serves up electro-frenzy with Catnip live and Merz turns the brightness down at the Spitz. John Peel, KultureFlash salutes you.

NB: for the full programme see the BBC website.

Piano Circus were originally formed in 1989 in order to perform Steve Reich's minimalist classic; Six Pianos, but have continued beyond this orginal function, commanding new works and arrangements for six keyboard instruments. They have also collaborated with composers and groups in larger works, including Future Sound of London. The highlight of this concert is a 45-minute arrangement of Heiner Goebbels' Scutigeras for two grand pianos, four sampling keyboards and spinet -- mixing together baroque with urban sounds. Alongside it are Reich's classic, Four Organs and world premieres by up and coming composers Colin Riley and Philip Kocher.

NB: part of the BMIC's ongoing Cutting Edge series.

In The Metapolis Dictionary of Advanced Architecture (Actar), architectural theorist Marcos Novak defines music as the historical art of time, and architecture as the historical art of space. Today, Novak argues, the two have merged into space-time, and this demands that we conceive of a new artform: archimusic. One paragraph above this statement, his colleague Jose Miguel Iribas is even more radical. "(S)pace," he concludes, "has become a mere instrument for selling time." In a literal sense, architect Bernard Tschumi's factory and headquarters for the Swiss watchmaker Vacheron Constantin might be the perfect answer to these two statements: a gigantic instrument for the making of some 15,000 watches a year, and a corporate statement built with as much steel as the company would need to make 83 million watches. Whether that sounds like a consonant or a dissonant archimusic to you, this discussion between Tschumi and Princeton professor Beatriz Colomina is bound to take us on an interesting journey through the architecture of space and time, and if we are to believe the blurbs "the relationship between architectural forms, the events that take place within them, and modern institutions of representation."

NB: on the same day from 10am - 12:30pm catch Bernard Tschumi as he conducts Supercrit #4: Parc de la Villette at the University of Westminster. This event is free but advance booking is required.

It's fair to say that we are obsessed with music. It is how we identify ourselves, how we find each other, and what makes us feel like we are revolutionaries in our own right, just because we own a CD player. Or an 8-track as the case may be. The Uncontainable festival takes a closer look at some of the people, places and circumstances that led to the creation and distribution of the tracks that motivated each of us to get out and "do" something, whether it was thumb a ride to a punk show, or dance for three days in the rain at a techno festival. Ahhh, the good old days.

High Tech Soul: The Creation Of Techno Music
This film in particular tracks the history of a doomed city, and the rise of a new age of music out of the ruins the automotive industry left behind. High Tech Soul provides a guided tour through the strange history that led to the creation of America's first large-scale urban ghost-town, and tracks the music that has since emerged from this most peculiar and concentrated of social climates. Following the birth of Detroit techno, High Tech Soul sheds light on the emergence of a music trend that swept the globe direct from the horse's mouth, with interviews with old school producers and DJs from Jeff Mills to Juan Atkins. A far cry from the light-hearted rock-umentaries that pepper late night terrestrial TV, HTS provides an acute and informed picture of where it all began. (Catch director Gary Bredow for a post screening discussion after the 14/10 screening.)

NB: High Tech Soul screens on 14/10 and 19/10. The Uncontainable festival runs till 20/10.

Paris Ballet: Angelin Preljocaj's Le Parc
Sadler's Wells
Fri 14/10 and Sat 15/10 @ 7.30pm / Sat 15/10 and Sun 16/10 @ 2:30pm
It has been 20 years since the Paris Opera Ballet last visited London and with Le Parc by Angelin Preljocaj the return promises to be triumphant. Le Parc is an hymn to love and erotic feelings (so far so French) set to some of Mozart's most evocative piano concertos. Think of Dangerous Liaisons by Stephen Frears and the pure geometry of 17th-century French gardens as inspiration for the set and costumes.

Catherine Diverres: San (Beyond) and Stance II
South Bank Centre: Queen Elizabeth Hall
Tue 18/10 and Wed 19/10 @ 7:45pm
Dominated by striking visuals and poetic gestures, San (Beyond), Catherine Diverres' provocative and profound homage to German abstract painter Oskar Schlemmer, is set to a sublime choreography that conjures up the shapes and colours of Schlemmer's pioneering work. Stance II was influenced by Diverres' time spent with Kazuo Ohno, a seminal practitioner of the post-war Japanese dance form Butoh, and echoes the beauty and grace of classical Chinese and Japanese paintings.

Mark Morris
Sadler's Wells
Programme I: Tue 18/10, Thu 20/10 and Sat 22/10 @ 7.30pm
Programme II: Wed 19/10 and Fri 21/10 @ 7:30pm / Sat 22/10 @ 2:30pm
Celebrating its 25th anniversary the Mark Morris Dance Group tours the UK, returning to Sadler's Wells with two specially chosen programmes. Mark Morris makes contemporary dance as welcoming and accessible as it could ever be. His dancers comes in every shape and size; he himself, now aged over 40, still dances and always opens that door of self identification that draws you in to the show. The excitement doesn't stop here. With your ticket to Mark Morris you can also discover one of Britain's rising stars: Rashpal Singh Bansal, with two works, Dissonant and Parallels. Jaspal, an East End choreographer, brings very refined and delicate moves deeply rooted in Chinese philosophy or in one's inner emotional turmoil. (On 20/10 meet Mark Morris after the performance.)

NB: Dance Umbrella 2005 runs till 13/11.

Special Offer: call the Queen Elizabeth Hall Box Office on 08703.800.400 and quote "KultureFlash e-list offer" and get a 2 for 1 ticket offer for Catherine Diverres' performance on either 18/10 or 19/10.

If Madonna is the President of Reinvention then Kylie must be Cabinet Minister for the Dept of Identity. One of Miss Minogue's favourite choreographers Rafael Bonachela has helped her create an award winning album, selling her sexy, fun, non-threatening image, and now he along with Union Dance is exploring these themes at ROH2. We all use the tools we have to try and create a self we think will impress others, and we change, we invent and reinvent, or at the very least wish we could. Dance is probably the best way to scour these issues, making the visible even more visible and finding the wood in the trees. Mavin Khoo joins Bonachela, adding his Malaysian influenced modern/classic dance, and making Sensing Change a chance to not only discover more about the self, but possiblly an opportunity to pick up some hot moves!

Preposterously named but admirably mental club night Bang Face -- helmed by champion of techno, old school and breakbeat St Acid, a man who looks like he would be more at home in a Wizzard covers band than behind the decks spinning old hardcore tunes -- returns with a line-up that will make ravers old and young drop their glowsticks and gibber with anticipation. Electronica heroes Kid606 and Ceephax Acid Crew rub shoulders with none other than Shut Up And Dance -- early '90s breakbeat scene-setters turned modern-day superstars and producers of some of the most exciting, urgent and stripped-down urban breaks sounds the scene has to offer. Kid606 brings sliced-up old-school tunes, deconstructed in very unusual and floor-friendly fashions, to the mix, and further support on the night comes from St Acid himself and creator of unusual splicings of television clips and downbeat rhythms Cassetteboy. The mix of styles on display and unquestionable calibre of the DJs makes this an unmissable night for fans of electronic music.

In theatre, the actor and viewer remove themselves from a certain reality, which both know exists. It is in this between that Alessandro Raho's paintings seem to wait, held in a timeless surreal reality of the everyday. Raho's work provides a jittering contemporary hit, bringing with it a distinct sense of the knowing. He manipulates the tradition of portraiture and landscape painting by presenting the familiar with a tinge of something unable to be grasped, which sits comfortably with the theatricality of the fashion photography of Guy Bourdin. Raho plays on the notion of the theatre, the boutique and the gallery as spaces familiar, yet outside daily life, which continues through Bourdin's exposure of the hyper-reality as the place we desire. Meanwhile, Raho's paintings have a stylised cleanliness interjected by the everyday such as Bianca Maria's walking stick. Here the stick acts as a theatrical prop, while the gaze creates a sense of the individual within the everyday, tangled with the reality of the not-knowing that perhaps lies behind every image. Presenting an artificiality, Raho paintings question the significance of nostalgia, asking where the place of real life and theatre begin and end.

NB: runs till 15/10.

In 1998 Wes Anderson and Owen Wilson wrote the near-perfect script for Rushmore. The film is a cross between two masterpieces of cinema Harold And Maude and The Graduate. It stars Jason Schwartzman as an eccentric child genius whose makes an unusual friendship with a rich, lonely and depressed businessman (Bill Murray), Rushmore manages to deliver everything The Life Aquatic or The Royal Tenenbaums didn't quite do. The stylish visuals Wes Anderson is so well known for look all the more meaningful when used to tell a great story. Murray's performance opposite the talented young Schwartzman is truly fantastic. The master of deadpan has to say his lines more flatly than ever before to stop Schwartzman from stealing every scene. When the two friends' relationship turns ugly and they start fighting for the attention of the same female there is an edgy competitiveness between the old master and the young gun, cleverly pitching Murray's sharp-witted dry humour against Schwartzman's fiery passion.

NB: Rushmore screens at the NFT on three nights (Sat 15/10, Mon 17/10 and Wed 19/10) and is part of this month's Bill Murray season (runs till 19/10).

It must be fun being Trevor Jackson, effortlessly (or at least it seems so) flitting between producing genre defining records, running one of the best record labels in the country, DJing all over the world and in your spare time knocking up the odd classic record sleeve or poster for your mates in bands like Soulwax. And then when you get bored of staying in watching re-runs of Casualty on UK Gold you can call up a few of your mates and throw the sort of party that will have expensively dressed fashionistas queuing around the block and pulling each other's directional haircuts to get in. This Saturday sees Trevor and a few of his chums, people like Tiga, MU and the really rather fabulous Oscar Melzer, descend on a secret London venue, for what should be a night packed to the rafters with impossibly good looking young girls from art college, coke addled thirtysomething blokes from media-land and the finest twisted electronic disco to be had in the country.

NB: full event details will be available at www.outputrecordings.com from 13/10.

The contact sheets, cameras, letters, notebooks and volumes from Diane Arbus' personal library on view at the V&A provide insight into the intellectual and aesthetic foundation underpinning her offsetting art. Before her suicide in 1971, at age 48, Diane Arbus' work had only been exhibited in a handful of museum exhibitions, but since then, she has become photography's most compelling and controversial icon. An affluent New York Jewish girl, Arbus married Allen Arbus, an aspiring photographer at age 18 and together they began producing glossy commercial imagery for fashion magazines such as Esquire, Harper's Bazaar and the New York Times Magazine. But when in 1955 her husband decided to abandon photography and instead try acting, their marriage started to dissolve and Arbus began creating the arresting, almost always unnerving documentary portraits of eccentric and alienated individuals for which she is now known. Many critics, such as Susan Sontag, found her striking portraits, particularly of adults with Down syndrome, cruel and voyeuristic. Sontag even condemned her work as an "anti-humanist... assortment of monsters and border-line cases", yet one might argue Arbus was not condescending to her often vulnerable and estranged subjects, but including them in her visual "family album" for all humanity.

NB: runs tills 15/01/05.

It may be hard to think of a giant rubber dinosaur as a political figure, much less a symbol of the most profound fears around the effects of radiation and the aftermath of the Hydrogen bomb. But Godzilla (or Gojira as it was originally tagged in the Japanese release) was not written as we received it in the West. Our version was brutally butchered, edited and re-edited to include familiar faces (like Raymond Burr) and to enhance a particular brand of hysteria that would cast the film forever into the archives of distinct and harmless kitsch. Godzilla, however, may well have paved the way for the Western fixation with Japanese cinema, perhaps igniting our love affair with Takashi Miike and Hideo Nakata or whetting our appetites for Japanese anime. Either way, the West has since become thoroughly enamoured with the plethora of fantastic forms the Asia Extreme revolution has taken since our first taste in 1956. This "new" version of Godzilla as it was originally released in 1954, previously unreleased in the UK, may change the way you look at the monster. What became a prototype for kitsch classics everywhere, was in Japan a representation of real fears associated with life after the bomb.

NB: Godzilla (Gojira) screens at the ICA from 14/10 till 26/10.

Ah, it's Turner Prize time again. Yet this year the thousands who will pay good money at Tate Britain just to be given the opportunity to bitch about contemporary art are in for a shock. The bookies' favourite Gillian Carnegie paints in a traditional style with flowers and portraiture being among her subject matters. The way she handles her paint, said to exquisitely bring the subject alive, was singled out by the critics of her show at the Cabinet Gallery. Standing out from the crowd, our favourite, who happens to be a former KF artist in residence and is also gracing this week's issue with his artwork, is Darren Almond. Past works of Almond's have seen him investigate concepts of time, including a 1996 photographic piece that documented all 1440 minutes of a day. His interest in the matter, which is expressed through a variety of media, is not all conceptual however, with very personal pieces documenting time's effect on him and his family. Jim Lambie is also nominated for his sculptures and installations that more often than not reference pop music -- a nod to his part-time DJ and band life. The final contender is Simon Starling for his large, intellectually complex, installation pieces. Whatever the outcome the four should make for a very strong show this year. (Runs till 22/01/06.)

NB: the winner will be announced on 05/12. Catch three of the shortlisted artists as they give talks at Tate Britain, Jim Lambie on 09/11, Simon Starling on 23/11 and Darren Almond on 29/11.

Try inserting Karlheinz Stockhausen on the "find a similar artist" section in LastFM and names such as John Cage, Sun Ra, American Morton Feldman, Christian Vogel and Jamie Liddell's Super_Collider or Ryoji Ikeda will pop-up. This is only one of many signs showing why Stockhausen is surely one of the most influential living composers. This leading figure in contemporary classical/electronic music, who studied with French composer Olivier Messiaen (1951-53), expressed a mutual respect for The Beatles (stating John Lennon as the most important mediator between popular and serious music of this century). For this year's Frieze Art Fair music programme, the attention will be on one monumental and singular performance by Stockhausen himself at an astonishing venue. The evening's performance will consist of his 1960 piece for piano, percussion and tape Kontakte, a mediation between electronic music -- filtered through 4 groups of loudspeakers around the audience -- and instrumental music with live piano and percussion, and the more recent eight-channel tape Oktophonie (1990). Some would probably find the ticket price for this event off-putting but, truly, how on earth can this be missed?

NB: Stockhausen will also be delivering a lecture at Frieze Art Fair on 21/10 (5pm) as part of the fairs' talk series.

Being "groomed" is too often only mentioned in the negative alongside words like "chat", "room" and "call me Unkie Herb", but unbelievably sometimes grooming works for the power of good! All wannabes directors (and some of you tired, soulless sohonians) imagine if, as an apprentice at Sheffield's Crucible, you were appointed to Artistic Director at the Royal Court, and then suddenly Working Title (Four Weddings etc.) spotted you and decide to "groom" you with a three picture deal. You make a short called Eight, and then debut with some film called Billy Elliot, and next thing you know you've bunged a fake nose on Nicole Kidman, made The Hours and won lots of Oscars and Baftas. It is good to know that like the bad things in life the good things are repeated, so as part of The Stanley Kubrick Masterclass series at the Curzon Soho with Script Factory, Stephen Daldry has come home to influence you. Take time out to groom yourself and go.

Trust Bloomberg to give the corporate environment of the City a pinch of culture and some food for thought on the human condition. Snapshot, Gillian Wearing's new, commissioned work, confronts you through the large window panes of Bloomberg's gallery. Quite in line with the minimal, bright-colour-bound building aesthetic, the show at first appears like a neat display of seven enlarged, black-and-white and colour album photos of women of different ages in different eras. The photos are, however, moving -- some more obviously than others. The 1997 Turner Prize winner researched old photographs in order to film these "snapshots" that represent different decades of the 20th century. With them she aimed to show the passing of time, and the various phases in a woman's psychology throughout her lifetime. From a little girl playing the violin to an old lady sitting in her living room, reminiscing, the "snapshots" stylistically run through the previous century and subtly but decisively exude a rainbow of sentiments combined with self-imaging and society-dictated behaviours. In fact, if you were looking for an expanded, enhanced, contemporary take on Klimt's The Three Ages of Women, you might well find it in Finsbury Square.

NB: runs till 12/11.

A life lived can feel like nothing but a search for the right short cuts. Walking may take you from A to B but this is not always the case. Sometimes walking is a condition. Francis Alys' documentations of city walks fill the huge rooms of an impressive 18th-century mansion with The Guards as the main piece. The film stars no less than 64 Coldstream Guards choreographed according to a generative plan for walking the streets of London. They take off alone and group when meeting peers to finally create a square formation. Thereupon they march to the nearest bridge and dissolve. The beauty of the film is the almost wordless organisation. They march on the spot and synchronise their step to march on together. It may happen someone shouts out and they change the position of their heavy hi-tech weapons. Yes, these are fully armed guards. Yet, you may sympathise with the lonesome guard straying the streets -- like a stray fox let loose in a museum at night caught on CTS camera, as in the piece shown at the National Portrait Gallery. There is something very disturbing about lost soldiers and wild animals in cultural institutions. (Runs till 20/11.)

NB: four celebrated artists, curators and writers reflect personally on Francis Alys' work and lead walking tours of his installation at 21 Portman Square. Cuauhtemoc Medina kicks them off on 19/10, Andrea Phillips on 26/10, Richard Wentworth on 02/11 and Jeremy Deller on 09/11.

This show is a must. The most complete exhibition of Araki to be held in Britain is an almost overwhelming immersion into the world of the Japanese photographer -- a man who has been both taking photographs and producing pictures for nearly half a century. In an exhibition that makes great use of the Barbican exhibition space we are plunged into "Arachy", as he likes to put it, surrounded by over 4,000 images from all stages of his career. Araki basically photographs two subjects: women (mostly naked) and Tokyo -- although that hides both the huge interest, and enormous outrageousness of much of what he produces. The promotional material warns "Araki: Self.Life.Death contains work of an adult nature... parental guidance is advised" and this is something of an understatement. However Araki is a tremendously important photographer with, as this show clearly demonstrates, the ability to make the whole very much more than the sum of the parts. Make sure you check out the Polaroid room and the documentary Arakimentari, shown as part of the exhibition. And, throughout October, Araki is curating a series of films with some fantastic (if perhaps unlikely) selections.

NB: runs till 22/01/06.

As Bret Easton Ellis knows, the danger of being precocious is to never mature. Starting with Less Than Zero, a glittering and grotesque odyssey of hedonism and decay in LA which Ellis sold to Penguin Books at age 21, he has become one of contemporary literature's most compelling icons and strongest talents. Since American Psycho was first published in the United States in 1991, every cold-eyed coke-fuelled i-banker suddenly seemed like Bret Easton Ellis was feeding him his lines. However, creating searing satires of society's soulless has also earned him the reputation of being a callow egotist, loudly self-destructing in public.

Few writers have produced such sleek, slick and sharp representations of their era. Now relatively grown-up and self-reflective he is unnerved by being frequently confused with his chic sociopath characters, and his just published novel, Lunar Park (Picador), shows him questioning the depth of his own shallowness. At times facile, yet overall insightful, the novel tells the story of a fictional fashionable writer (named Bret Easton Ellis) whose suburban zip-code does little to temper his drug-use or apathy until his past and characters from his (and the "real" Ellis) novels begin to cross into his physical reality requiring him to realize the difference between being a writer and an adult.

To read the interview click here.

KultureFlash is a free, weekly newsletter covering contemporary culture in and around London. Each week we track down some of the more unusual and interesting events taking place in the Capital and deliver them straight to your inbox. Featuring art, gigs, films, talks, clubs and more -- we are committed to bringing you an eclectic mix of the most stimulating events in London.

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