Another week, another album of music with dubstep's soundsystem heft, an indie sense of melancholia, and skyscraping electronic orchestrations that seem to hark back to the most grandiose experiments of 1980s acts like The Cocteau Twins and Echo & The Bunnymen as much as to anything in the club music canon. Stubborn Heart, Stumbleine and Planas, and in a more subdued form Madegg, Kyson and Memotone, all to some degree hit this vein of sound. 

“If shit were music, you’d be a brass band”. Bish Bosch is no easy ride and that lyric, from its 22-minute centrepiece “SDSS1416+13B (Zercon, A Flagpole Sitter)", is typically abstruse, emblematically challenging. Although the album has clear themes and becomes less impenetrable the more it is lived with, it’s never going to achieve the cosy familiarity that future cult items so often exude on early passes. If anything, Bish Bosch is an anti-cult album, one that seeks to jar, disorient and remain inscrutable.

At the beginning of last night's show, Herbie Hancock looked like he was going to perform with the dignity and serenity befitting a 72-year-old with some 50 years playing experience. The improvisation that launched from a base of Wayne Shorter's “Footprints” was elegant, charming, tasteful and often very beautiful. The synthetic instrumental loops that he triggered via a couple of iPads mounted on his grand piano as backing were unobtrusive to begin with and had a delightfully loose groove.

Herbie Hancock has never stood still. He hit the ground running, joining Miles Davis's second great quintet on piano in 1963 at the age of just 23, and from that moment on demonstrated a Stakhanovite work ethic and appetite for the new which saw him on the crest of wave after wave of revolutionary music.

Ah, this starts so well. The idea of Claudia Brücken, arch-Teuton ice queen vocalist from high class synth poppers Act and Propaganda, covering the Bee Gees, Bowie and ELO is just too much fun to ignore. And her version of Julee Cruise's “Mysteries of Love” from the Blue Velvet soundtrack is damn near perfect – its lusciously sinister textures just right for her perfectly-controlled deadpanning. The downtempo take on Stina Nordenstam's “Memories of a Color” is tasty enough to keep hopes high.

It’s not quite Iggy Pop strutting across the hands of the crowd, but Efterklang’s singer Casper Clausen's departure from the stage reinforces the bond the Danish mood musicians have with their fans. Trying to keep upright while wobbling on the backs of seats, he is held in position by those close by. This isn’t about attracting attention, but a bridging of the gap between artist and audience. Earlier, Clausen and bassist Rasmus Stolberg had retired to the side of the stage to take in the Northern Sinfonia’s performance of their music.

Ah, cosmic disco. We’re not supposed to call it that anymore as the DJs and producers who popularised it half a decade ago don’t like it - but that’s what this is. To cut a long story short, a bunch of Norwegians rediscovered a sound that had been popular in Italy in the early Eighties, disco’s electro-funk groove but extended and spaced out, somewhere between Giorgio Moroder and a big fat spliff. The main names among these Scandinavians were Todd Terje, Prins Thomas and Hans-Peter Lindstrøm.

A lot has blown in since the last Scandinavian round-up. The most recent releases sifted here include singer-songwriter intimacy, various forms of electropop, several shades of jazz experimenta, joyous dance-pop and some distinctly non-Scandinavian flavours. High points are many. Satisfaction is a certainty.

Matthew Herbert (b 1972) is a leading experimental musician. His work is sometimes as much sonic exploration as music and mostly inhabits territory where the two realms meet. Recently made Creative Director of the newly resuscitated BBC Radiophonic Workshop (who have an open day at the South Bank’s Ether Festival on 7^th October), he first came to public attention through Nineties electronic dance releases as Radio Boy, Wishmountain and Doctor Rockit, melding club beats to his own “found sound” field recordings.

Sometimes, it doesn’t matter who you are. You might be a charismatic performer, or the most energetic band in the world. But some settings can’t be outperformed. Holding Berlin Festival at the city’s astonishing out-of-commission Tempelhof airport sets a challenge that’s almost impossible to rise to. Although it began working in the late 1920s, the surviving buildings were completed in 1941 and form a single block over a kilometre long, wrapped around an open quadrangle. The gleaming, pale buildings dwarf anything.