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.

Nightclub Tähti is on the seventh floor of an anonymous-looking building along Tampere’s main shopping street, Hämeenkatu. Black-suited security wave you into a lift which zips straight up there. After surrendering your coat at the cloakroom – obligatory in Finland - a walk around the bar reveals the dance floor. The couples occupying it are doing the Finnish tango, a measured, understated version of the dance. Finnish schlager is the soundtrack, a sort of native-language Eighties’ electropop with emotive crescendos. It rarely strays from the mid-paced.

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.

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.

“It’s a place where human beings don’t belong,” says Efterklang’s Rasmus Stolberg. “It’s a very inspiring place, but a very sad place”. The Danish band’s new album, Piramida, is built around sounds they recorded in Pyramiden, a former Russian mining settlement on the island of Spitsbergen, north of Norway, close to the North Pole. It was abandoned in 1998. The climate means nothing decays.

Iceland’s kings of heavy metal Momentum are launching into an assault called “The Creator of Malignign Metaphors”. It’s broad daylight and they’re playing about 10 meters from the kitchen window of a suburban-looking house. The stage is sited on an AstroTurf football pitch, with one of the goals pushed to the side of it. On the opposite side, kids are shimmying down a blow-up slide. Very little about G! conforms with the standard festival experience.

It could have been a cow lowing in the distance, the sound drifting across a barren landscape. Its tone transformed after echoing through hillsides and ravines. Actually, it was Karl Seglem blowing into the horn of a goat. Suddenly, he stopped and began wordlessly chanting. The other two musicians on stage at St Luke's kept their heads down and continued providing the sonic wash knitting together this collaboration between the classical, jazz and uncategorisable.

“This is such fun”. Martin Horntveth, Jaga Jazzist’s drummer, can’t contain his excitement. Standing up behind his kit, he radiates joy. Considering that he and his band are Norwegian, typically not given to overstatement, what he describes as fun would be off the pleasure scale by non-Nordic standards. The meeting of Jaga Jazzist and The Britten Sinfonia was an unqualified success, one of those rare one-off concerts where band and their temporary collaborators seamlessly connect.

The use of Sigur Rós’s aural drama for the soundtracks of Life on Earth, Vanilla Sky and its subsequent sound bed ubiquity has meant their music has become divorced from who they are. The enthralling Valtari emphasises that these four Icelanders are a band rather than a machine supplying lazy directors with ready made atmospherics. Even so, Valtari’s “Ekki múkk” and “Varúð” are so spectacular they’ll no doubt warm the hearts of filmmakers world wide.

For a Brit navigating Denmark’s annual showcase of home-grown music, it’s impossible to eradicate thoughts of the Danish TV seen in the UK recently. Obviously, detecting Borgen-style intrigue while wandering around is unfeasible. But something else might be more obvious. However bright the sun, the wind is cold and warmish clothing is essential. Yet no one sports a Sarah Lund jumper. It’s a reminder that TV drama isn’t a guidebook. SPOT’s cutting-edge crowd has no idea about foreign notions of what might constitute Danish.