As artificial spaces, clubs struggle to embrace the organic environment. The music and arts collective Noise of Art are bridging the gap by working with the charity Trees for Cities, with DJs donating their time to raise funds for planting trees in London. On 17 September, Noise of Art is working with Trees for Cities at Battersea Park and taking over the Village Underground for a fundraising event.

Maxim (b. 1967) who is known for, amongst other things, his mesmerising, somewhat unnerving stage presence (he has a penchant for cats-eye contact lenses and is not adverse to wearing a skirt) is a founder member of the electronic dance group The Prodigy, which emerged on the underground rave scene in early 1990s. The band’s first album, Experience, was released in 1992 and since then they have sold over 25 million records worldwide.

An awful lot of people involved in producing electronic dance music find a niche and stick to it. Many do this with a very po face. Speak to them about it and they may play you a track they think is "poppy" to demonstrate their range. It usually isn't, it's just a teensy-weensy bit less purely dance-floor functional than the rest of their oeuvre. Because all they ever listen to is techno, dubstep, fill-in-the-blank, their ability to make a comparative judgment has eroded.

If you want the distilled sound of global hypercapitalism, David Guetta is your man. A genial, workaholic Frenchman, he has created the sound of superclubs from Miami to Dubai to Kuala Lumpur – the sort of clubs where the VIP section is bigger than the main dance floor, with Guetta's own “F*ck Me I'm Famous” parties in Ibiza as the ideal model – and, thanks to the trickle-down effect, the sound of every shopping mall and taxi from here to eternity. His sound is the cheesiest of Nineties commercial dance music given a turbo boost with every possible megastar from the worlds of rap and R&B relentlessly asserting their heterosexuality on top. It's weapons-grade stuff, thickly layered with fizzing sound (ironically given the album's title), purpose built to cut through any chatter or background sound, lodging in the brain of even the most distracted or brain-dead passer-by, and it is – mostly – entirely foul.

At the start of September, the fourth Outlook Festival takes place in a 19th-century fort on the Croatian coast. Already this festival has become a vital point in the calendar for those involved with dubstep, grime and other UK underground scenes – not only a jolly in the sun (“dubstep's Ibiza”), but the one time in the year when everyone involved takes a break from international touring and comes together in the same place, a time to compare notes and take stock of the progress.

It's always interesting to see how revolutions in music get folded back into the fabric of the culture that fomented them. Dubstep, which changed club culture so dramatically in the mid-2000s, is now an intrinsic part of that culture from mainstream to margins, and the forms it takes as it beds into these various parts of the ecosystem are manifold. And Jazzsteppa – two Israelis named Gal and their trombones – turn their hands to a fair few of those forms.

This is where the delirium kicks in. Tired but happy, the attendees started the third day of Sónar festival slightly boggled by how to pick and choose from the strange delights on offer. Saturday was when the true musical variety of the festival was displayed: straight-up hip hop to eye-popping South African tribal dance displays, balmy ambient revivalism to apocalyptic techno, heartbroken electronica to deranged prog rock: it was all on offer...

Certainly a good cross-section of people were in attendance for the first day of Sónar.