Often name-checked as an influence by maverick no-wave saxophone player and composer John Zorn, Mauricio Kagel is nevertheless a little known presence in all but the most adventurous of music circles. However, in much the same way that Frank Zappa famously championed the music of Edgard Varese, whose revolutionary sound world serves as a platform for some of Zappa's more extreme sonic experiments, Zorn owes a similar debt to Kagel with regard to the experimentalism and theatricality of his work. This concert also introduces the no less flamboyant figure of Hans Werner Henze, and includes some Stockhausen, sandwiched in the middle for good measure. It's worth noting that all of these composers are still alive (!) and that all of the pieces being played are new arrangements, receiving their UK premieres under the ever-diligent baton of Oliver Knussen.

Enjoying an unlikely revival, Italo disco has been the soundtrack to some great clubs over the last few years. A frothy mix of analogue synthesisers, upbeat disco rhythms and hands in the air abandon, it has its roots in the gay clubs of Europe and North America of the late seventies and early '80s, whilst in recent years DJs and producers like Legowelt and I-F and labels such as Clone and Citinite have acted as archivists for the original sounds and continued to push things forward. This week Dreck Records' Discombabulate night plays host to a true pioneer, Bernard Fevre, who in 1978 recorded a set of spacey disco, as the Black Devil, that was to be a major influence on the emerging scene. Reissued in 2004 by Rephlex, he has finally followed up the original recordings with the album 28 After on Lo Recordings. Expect Plastic People's dark dancefloor to be filled to the bass bins for this rare performance.

John Lennon was quick to cotton on to the idea that his fame could do more than shift records. The documentary The US vs John Lennon illustrates the singer's frustration about The Beatles meltdown and shows that he was all but adrift. Without a band to provide a home for his creative energies Lennon needed something to tear into, a target. The political climate of America in 1970 was ideal. Already strongly affiliated with the peace movement through Happenings and gigs featuring his side project, the Plastic Ono Band, the combination of Yoko Ono's Situationist nous and Lennon's fame became a media force to be reckoned with. The film centres on the attempts by Richard Nixon's already paranoid administration to silence the outspoken Beatle. When Lennon announced a US tour to promote peace, a mad cap circus of novel press conferences and photo calls captivated a nation. This document recreates the era with some panache and excellent editing. The strong pro-Lennon (Lennonist?) stance is mawkish but this works well as a funky history lesson to all you kids out there who want to know what the original working class hero did next.

NB: The US vs John Lennon is released in London on 08/12.

She smiles, she pouts, she laughs. Marlene Dietrich, as Concha Perez in Josef von Sternberg's The Devil Is A Woman, is irresistible -- with her trademark pencil-thin, domed eyebrows, her wide-eyed, darting glances, her perfectly defined cheekbones, her alabaster skin and her gorgeously stylised, symmetrical features. TDIAW was Dietrich's last film for von Sternberg and yet his camera dotes on her Art Deco beauty as lovingly as ever. Set during carnival-time in southern Spain, at the turn of last century, TDIAW tells an almost surreal tale of two men, the older Pasqual (Lionel Atwill) and the younger Antonio (Cesar Romero), who fall helplessly in love with the bewitching Concha, a lowly factory girl with the most amazing range of figure-hugging dresses and floral headwear. Von Sternberg creates some amazing, crisp angles of light and shade in his frame, while he bathes Dietrich's face in bright light, giving her unique looks a timeless quality. The film is screening at the Goethe-Institute to coincide with Universal Pictures' release of a DVD boxset of Dietrich's greatest Hollywood films. Legendary cinematographer Jack Cardiff, who worked with Dietrich on Knight Without Armour, will attend and introduce the film.

NB: the Goethe-Institut are giving away one of the Dietrich boxsets signed by Jack Cardiff at the screening.

If you've always dreamt of being a royal whore then you can live vicariously through the ribald and boisterous The Bitches Ball which favours vaudeville fun over the historical accuracy of David Starkey. Set in 18th-century England it tells the story of celebrity courtesan Mary Robinson who flaunts her skills as an actress, poet and sex servant to the Prince Regent until all of a sudden her gilded life is swiftly removed. The Penny Dreadful theatre company excels in bringing to life historical stories of ordinary people and on this evidence entertainment is paramount in their modus operandi. The acting is propelled by a breathless verve (orchestrated by Ian Street as the Prince) and despite being a fringe production the design is equally impressive. Add this to a finale that dispenses with all rationale and a sound recommendation to all those with corset breaching comedy on their minds.

NB: runs till 10/12.

London promotion collective Adventures In The Beetroot Field have put on some of the most exciting parties in 2006 and seem determined to end the year on a high note. Sticking two fingers up at the notion that Saturday nights should consist of paying a tenner to spend the night in a sweatbox shuffling your feet to anodyne pounding 4/4 beats, AITBF have gathered together some of the most exciting bands and DJ acts to emerge this year, spread them liberally over three rooms at the vast Canvas venue in King's Cross, and have extended an open invitation to come and shake your hips for free! So if you go down to King's Cross this Saturday, you have the opportunity to catch, among the many bands, Glaswegian noise enthusiasts Shit Disco confounding that stupid new rave tag and north Londoner Man Like Me spitting witty verse over some splendidly bass heavy beats. Not only this but Uffie and Surkin will be representing for Paris fam with DJ sets backed up ably by Gucci Soundsystem, The Filthy Dukes, Radioclit, and two tips for 2007 Duke Dumont and Kissy Sellout. Just to repeat, it's free!

Minimal techno is now mainstream and is so 2006 -- and not a moment too soon for those die-hards out there who would rather stay in and watch CSI than listen to one more funky house track. One institution has been there since 1991 and seen us through the mediocrity of club nights in London and -- what do you know? -- this Saturday is your last chance to get Lost in 2006. Jeff Mills is headlining once again, bringing his legendary old-school minimal techno stylings along with his truly unique and watchable mixing technique from Detroit. The prodigious and prolific Oliver Ho (of Meta fame) will play a set of his eclectic techno fusion, and Warp's Plaid will be throwing out even more unconventional electro in the Red Room. Count on at least one set that ventures a little further into the realm of the experimental, but still stays suitably easy on the ears. The rest of the evening will be a line-up of the usual suspects, with a few surprises, of course.

It is rare that you find yourself in a white cube type gallery space where you are suddenly overcome by a totally uncontrollable fit of laughter -- you know, the kind where everyone else is completely silent, and it just makes it all the more difficult to contain. You try to stop laughing, but you end up just standing there, red-faced and quaking, until you finally submit to making a spectacle of yourself and let it out. Peter Fischli and David Weiss have always sauntered along the artistic median between the weighty and the whimsical, falling into the "serious, but funny" no man's land that lies between the two. An enviable position, because, for skilled satirists, the whole world is a potential source of parody. This Sunday is the first of two dates showcasing the films The Right Way (1983) and The Least Resistance (1981), starring satirical characters Rat and Bear and critiquing the overall state of things, artistic and otherwise.

NB: the films are screened at Tate Modern on both 10/12/06 and 14/01/07 in conjunction with the Fischli and Weiss retrospective (runs till 14/01/07).

Once described as "a kind of heterosexual horticultural Gilbert and George" Heather and Ivan Morison work in close collaboration documenting their international forays and investigations into our fast disappearing natural world. Titles such as Earthwalker, Starmaker and Crystal Worlds conjure an idea of the pair roaming the earth, photographing, collecting, recording, and mythologising their discoveries in a rather home-spun / science-fiction way. Our innate curiosity for the world around us is reflected in slide-projected works combining images of idyllic woodlands and valleys, natural history paintings of majestic wild beasts, and shockingly bright fields of farmed tulips. Set to a soundtrack of electronic sounds from sci-fi films, the Starmaker slide shows capture our fascination with the natural world and strange compulsion to conquer it. Equally mysterious are the shimmering crystalline shapes painted onto grandiose scenes of animals in their habitat. Hovering in the sky above a pack or hyena or caught between the antlers of caribou, these superimposed webs seem at once natural and otherworldly. Befitting the story of their outdoor life, outside the artists have created structures from bee-hives; tangible and physically imposing, the great columns of Crystal Worlds looming in the back garden are rather unsettling.

NB: runs till 10/12. Heather & Ivan Morison have been selected to represent Wales at the Venice Biennale in 2007 and their work was included in the Hayward Gallery's touring exhibition British Art Show 6.

As global warming threatens to change our environment irretrievably, with industrial carbon emissions rising and the hottest year on record, is there No Way Back? These are among the ecological topics addressed by speakers from around the globe in this two-day enquiry. Artists, geographers, ecologists, economists, sociologists, architects, philosophers, anthropologists and others will focus on issues that we need to address as we face worldwide ecological disasters. There will be key-note presentations, workshops, screenings, walks and readings to facilitate dialogues. Artists include among others Jeremy Deller, Tue Greenfort, Gustav Metzger, Heather and Ivan Morison and Klaus Weber. Deller will talk about bat conservation with Katie Parsons, and launch a website for his Bat House Project, which will run an architectural competition to create bespoke accommodation for the flying mammals at the London Wetlands Centre in 2007. Also speaking are Peter Head and Shanfeng Dong from ARUP, designers of Dongtan City on Chongming Island in Shanghai, a city powered by renewable energy, self-sufficient in water and supplied by food sources from local farm land. There will be contributions from Zou Ji, who represented China at the UN climate change talks; writer Ruth Padel, whose books include Tigers In Red Weather; and director of the Hayward Gallery, Ralph Rugoff. This event promises exciting dialogues to lead the way forward for art and ecology.

Giveaway: the first ten KultureFlash readers to return their booking form marked "KultureFlash" will receive a free (normal price £20) copy of the publication Land, Art: A Cultural Ecology Handbook.

Patrick Cockburn, The Independent's Middle East correspondent, has been visiting Iraq since 1978, aged 27 -- an age when most of us these days are still living with our parents. Simon Jenkins is a Guardian columnist and a former editor of The Times. No, it's not a political session at the Hay Book Festival, it's London's ICA on a Monday night. Cockburn's most recent book is The Occupation: War And Resistance In Iraq, researched in Baghdad during 2003 as Iraq collapsed under US occupation, and explores how the three main communities in Iraq -- the Kurds, the Shia and the Sunni -- reacted to the uprising. Jenkins' latest book is Thatcher And Sons: Revolution In Three Acts. Central government is the target of this provocatively titled book. Easily the most thought-provoking event tonight in town, and you'll be home in time for Newsnight or the cricket as well.

Is there anything James Weeks doesn't do well? Composer, conductor, broadcaster, writer and, for this concert, organ recitalist. He'll be putting the organ at St John's, Smith Square through its paces in the first half of the Bmic's Cutting Edge finale, with Christopher Fox's Missouri Harmony; Morton Feldman's only organ work, Principal Sound; and the London premiere of Michael Finnissy's First Organ Symphony, first performed by James in 2003. The second half of the concert will continue the theme of Feldman, however this time it will be the New London Chamber Choir performing the gorgeous For Stephan Wolpe, alongside Jonathan Harvey's How could the soul not take flight. Hearing the Feldman in this setting, with its slow, paced, yet surprising and sometimes tense atmosphere, alongside the Finnissy, Fox and Harvey could be a religious experience.

NB: next Monday (18/12 at 7pm) catch James Weeks at the Shoreditch Church when he conducts Exaudi and Rohan de Saram as part of the Spitalfields Festival.

So you're never going to be a rock star. There's a moment in your life when you have to stop blaming your parents for not taking you to singing / piano / guitar lessons when you were little, and realise that in fact you simply weren't born with any musical talent. And yet -- we've found you the perfect opportunity to jump around a stage like Bruce Springsteen and have a live audience screaming for your knickers. Aireoke is a competition for the best air guitarist and, better than its more famous cousin karaoke, you don't have to sing. You have 60 seconds to rock out to your favourite track, which you can bring from home or pick from a list available on the night. Or, if you're liable to get stage-fright, you can opt to perform as an air guitar duet or band. Even if you're crap (and remember, you'll be up against some serious professionals), it's still good exercise in the run-up to piggy Christmas feasting. How long before your local gym starts a new fitness class called Air-guitar-robics?

NB: this evening will turn into a regular night starting next year onwards -- for those wanting to know more about dates and venue bookmark this site.

Beautifully shot, with incredibly powerful images, Finnish filmmaker Pirjo Honkasalo's multi-award winning documentary is a thoughtful exploration of the human effects of war. Presented in three segments, or "rooms", entitled Longing, Breathing and Remembering, the film focuses on three different locations and three different aspects of the physical and psychological effects caused to children caught up in the long and violent war between Russia and Chechnya. Longing is set in a remote military school outside St Petersburg, where young orphan Russian boys are trained to fight in Chechnya, thereby furthering the conflict. Breathing documents the Russian destruction of the city of Grozny and the lives of its inhabitants, focusing on one disintegrating family who are being crushed both physically and mentally by the war. Finally, Remembering moves to the adjacent Islamic republic of Ingushetia, where traumatised war orphans live in refugee camps and makeshift orphanages, and attempt to rebuild their lives. Although not easy subject matter, the film itself is reminiscent of Tarkovsky with its meditative pace and its surreal and poetic images, and although tackling an often-harrowing topic, it is neither overtly emotional nor resolutely downbeat.

NB: this event is the closing gala screening of Finnish Film Week (starts on 06/12) and is also a double bill with Jouko Aaltonen's Revolution screening after The 3 Rooms Of Melancholia.

Take a pinch of the Penguin Cafe Orchestra, a soupcon of Ralph Vaughan Williams and a smudge of Kate Bush, mix them up in an Incredible String Band blender and you might just get something as deliciously antediluvian as the North Sea Radio Orchestra. The brainchild of Dartington College educated Craig Fortnam, the NSRO are a 20-plus strong ensemble boasting massed strings, woodwind, organ, piano, guitar and percussion essaying Fortnam's elaborate, labyrinthine arrangements, and decorated with wife Sharron's creamily enunciated vocals reprising lyrics by Hardy, Tennyson and Yeats. Theirs is a quirky but uplifting sound, manifested luminously on their recent, self-titled album (Oof! Records) -- which comes highly recommended. Tonight's performance will in addition feature the full North Sea Chorus, whose decidedly pre-industrial sounding ululations will resound evocatively around this ancient, atmospheric venue (where Samuel Pepys and his wife are buried, incidentally).

NB: tickets on sale on the door only.

Three-time Oscar winner Oliver Stone has caused a stir both on screen and off. His CV is mighty impressive when you run through the list of hits: Midnight Express (the script), Platoon, Wall Street, JFK, The Doors, Natural Born Killers and this year's sentimental extravaganza, World Trade Centre, to namecheck a few. Well, he's on our turf at the mo, so here's your opportunity to get acquainted with the chap personally. Since he's not one known for holding his tongue or his temper it could prove both enlightening and incendiary. Head down to the NFT and throw him a curveball, it's sure to be exhilarating. Drugs and conspiracy theories are a good bet. Or you could wade right in there by asking him a question on Alexander, with the opening gambit "what the ****?".

NB: you can also catch Oliver Stone the next day (14/12 at 7pm) when he gives a masterclass with Seamus McGarvey at the Cineworld Haymarket.

"There is more poetry... in a single tree which has endured the years and the seasons, than in the entire facade of a palace," wrote the philosopher Diderot. In Cyprien Gaillard's first exhibition in the UK, The Lake Arches, the modern French artist plays with such enlightenment ideals in atmospheric works of Land art. In one film of an industrial explosion in a forested landscape around a chateau outside Paris, the camera pans a rising cloud of smoke and settles to create an evocative picture of leafy trees framed by a balustrade. Part V of the series Real Remnants Of Fictive Wars, the film disturbs and re-composes the classical view of nature to capture its nascent poetry. And yet, Gaillard appears just as engaged with contemporary spaces. Inspired by the Land artist Robert Smithson (best known for Spiral Jetty), Gaillard travels from France to the Utah in photos evoking global dialogues of political and ecological instability. In Geographical Analogies, the artist juxtaposes Polaroids which detail entropic landscapes: cemeteries and deserts, tower blocks and waterfalls, and solitary trees in built-up suburbs of Europe and the US. Such tranquil insights into hidden corners encourage reflections on the vital need to preserve our natural environment.

NB: runs till 16/12.

Dadadandy is comprised of Italian artist Simon Moretti and Paul Heber-Percy, formerly of Percy-Miller fame and renowned talent spotter. Moretti and Heber-Percy have brought together "Dada", the original chance and auto-destruct movement, with "Dandy" -- that most Wilde-ian of attitudes, as an umbrella term for melding together their interventions with a group of artist's editions, as well as allowing themselves the space for their very own creative play. They have made various guerrilla presentations at art fairs, and even created a biennale bag, but here at Ritter/Zamet they are exhibiting editions. With a Jonathan Monk gold-plated coat-hanger, Goshka Macuga's augmented Dada catalogue, a Vedovamazzei DVD, a Simon Moretti magic wand (for the hairy Potter in you) among others, all displayed on a newly created sculpture / display stand, Space Is The Place is perhaps the best introduction to the duo's tactics. In the back there're even flying Dadadandy banners! It is both modern and contemporary... that is, the look is modern but the attitude contemporary. This strange union of creativity, commerce, projects and "corporation" may well point to a new futurism.

NB: runs till 13/01/07. Jonathan Monk is also currently exhibiting at the Lisson Gallery (till 20/01/07).

Seven screens aligned on one wall of the gallery present what appear to be different points of view on a wild landscape: winding road among the trees, water running under a thin layer of ice. A few hints of a human presence, such as a falcon perched on someone's hand, a white van and a man apparently taking a stroll, punctuate the landscape. Just when you think Seven Minutes Before, Melik Ohanian's video installation, is merely a simple ode to the beauty of nature, wandering musicians and model cities appear, and caravans explode. The insidious power of this work lies in the details. A gripping sense of foreboding is conveyed from the get-go by a roaring soundtrack, and each video sequence was shot in one continuous take, making the transition from the bucolic to the bizarre all the more surprising, as if two worlds had seamlessly collapsed into one another without any warning. This first show in Britain for the Paris-based artist of Armenian descent is a great opportunity to see how he can meld fiction and fact to unsettling effect.

NB: runs till 14/01/07.

Out of all the projects that the ever prolific Alva Noto (aka Carsten Nicolai) is involved with it seems his long-term collaboration with legendary Japanese composer Ryuichi Sakamoto is the one that gains the most attention. And rightly so, it takes the micro-sound palette of his Raster Noton label and supplants it with Sakamoto's accessible strain of classical piano. Yielding two pretty essential albums of post-digital ambience (Vrioon and Insen), this DVD aims to capture their live rendition of the aforementioned works. The widescreen digital backdrop is the main focus. Synchronised to both Sakamoto's chord strikes and Nicolai's frequency manipulation, the results are a joy to watch. But it's the visual contrasts that make this recording. Aside from the high-definition of the generated graphics and the futurist sheen of Nicolai's desk you have Sakamoto's professor-like demeanour, earthy piano and sheet music. And, of course, it's breathtakingly put together. The case has a cardboard cover with special laser engravings and the lavish booklet that accompanies the DVD sharply defines the visual presence of their set (which was recorded in Dolby 5.1 Surround Sound). The extras are involving too: the alternative viewing angles of three tracks and an awkwardly delivered interview with the two creators who obviously haven't really thought about trying to describe this project with words but who have a firm idea of musical and visual restriction. Limitations never sounded (or looked) so good.

To buy Insen Live online 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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