Georg Friedrich Händel of Halle probably never came here. Other great men certainly did: long after the official foundation of Göttingen's Georg August University in 1734 - the year in which the composer wrote a masterpiece, Ariodante, in another spa town, Tunbridge Wells - would-be or successful students included Goethe, Heine, the Brothers Grimm, Schopenhauer and Bismarck. It's hardly a Baroque town, either, though its beauties are manifold.

Seasick Steve Wold (b 1941) has achieved widespread popularity over the last five years with his raw, rootsy, blues-flavoured sounds. He's also renowned for his customised guitars, such as one featured on his new album, You Can't Teach an Old Dog New Tricks, that's made from Morris Minor hubcaps, and for his stage patter which combines US Southern charm with hobo lore and anecdotes.

Over the past five years, Justin Adams and Juldeh Camara have made two albums and an EP together, but it’s only now that they’ve got round to doing what most bands can’t wait to do, which is give themselves a groovy band name. Even though I’m a poo-pooer of most band names (they’re usually either stupid or pretentious, or both) I actually rather like "JuJu". The double “ju” represents the first two letters of Adams’s and Camara’s first names, and the resulting word has a nicely sinister black-magic ring to it. It also has the onomatopoeic bonus of sounding like the band sounds, with their heavy cyclical rhythms topped off by the sustained voodoo scream of Camara’s ritti (a Gambian one-string fiddle) - like Hendrix rising from the dead – playing throughout every track.

Watching bookaholic punters tramping down windswept country lanes in hiking boots, anoraks and rucksacks instantly alerts you to the singular quality of the Hay Festival, though it's surprising that nobody has grasped the glaring opportunity to set up a tent selling Alfred Wainwright's fell-walking guides and Kendal Mint Cake. But where else can you find such a high density of starry names and media taste-makers in a soggy field on the Welsh border?

On the Jutland coast, Aarhus is Denmark’s second largest city after capital Copenhagen. Its attractive continental atmosphere is amplified by the presence of this week’s temporary population, which includes visitors from Britain, Estonia, France, Germany, Luxembourg, the US and the other Nordic countries. They’re here for SPOT, Denmark’s annual festival showcasing homegrown music. It’s a good moment as electro-popper Oh Land is making significant waves in the States. Bands like Efterklang, The Ravonettes and the seminal Mew are embedded in the international musical landscape.

Be different - take a festival break in Europe instead of the UK, and catch a different landscape. While artists in both new music and classical are constantly circling the world in search of more picturesque settings, you can find your alternative Glasto in Denmark or Belgium, or you can find favourite chamber musicians in Austria rather than London. theartsdesk brings you listings of this year's major European festivals: rock in Sonar, Sziget and Stradbally, opera in Bayreuth, Verona and Salzburg, dance in Vienna, Epidauros and Spoleto, visual arts in Istanbul, Zurich and Avignon. This is the indispensable clickable guide to a cultured break in Europe.

Subtlety is overrated. I've always thought so. Critical consensus too often rates nuanced, emasculated emoting over music that smashes you over the head with an iron bar. From hardcore punk to gabber to speed metal to the sort of dubstep that sounds like four-storey bass bins begging for mercy, music that's ballistic doesn't leave room for quibbling. You're either on the bus or you can piss off and listen to Bon Iver in your bedroom.

One of the highlights of this year’s Brighton Festival, curated largely via web chats and long-distance phone conversations by Aung San Suu Kyi, is Kutlug Ataman’s silent film installation Mesopotamian Dramaturgies. The leading Turkish artist, a favourite of international biennales and arts festivals, has taken over the town’s Old Municipal Market to show two multiple-screen works. And in this vast, disused space, as gloomily dark and dank as it is cavernous, we find the perfect backdrop against which Ataman’s films shine.

During the 1960s, when decolonisation movements were sweeping the world, it was joked that, after achieving independence, a country had to do three things: design a flag, launch an airline and found a film festival. Western Sahara has a flag but no airline and, despite a 35-year struggle, has yet to achieve independence. The closest Western Sahara comes to its own film festival is the Sahara International Film Festival (known as FiSahara), the world's most remote film festival, whose eighth edition took place this month in a refugee camp deep in the Algerian desert.

It's time to dust down your tent and ice-box and plan some summer breaks with theartsdesk's definitive clickable festival guide - listings and links for all the UK festivals this summer, from rock by the lochs to DJs in London parks, and catching classical and opera on the way. See theartsdesk's invaluable European festivals 2011 guide too.

SCOTLAND