In Post Tenebras Lux (light after darkness, in Latin) Mexican writer-director Carlos Reygadas casts a spell which transforms the ordinary into the extraordinary. The human condition is eye-poppingly explored in this ambitious, sometimes puzzling work of visual poetry, buoyed by the innocence of children and mired in the contrasting anxieties of their parents. Whether it's sexual neurosis, the natural world, or kids at play it's all too beautiful.

Walking into the auditorium of a packed Heaven last night, we were instantly treated to the sensation of having our bodies invaded by thousands of infinitely complex machine insects. It's rare that a band can have such an instant and disquieting effect, but Fiium Shaark's music, we discovered, is as unusual as their name in many ways.

I laughed quite a bit going round the exhibition to which the Barbican’s latest theatre events are tied, The Bride and the Bachelors. Pioneer Marcel Duchamp’s 1921 “Readymade” Why Not Sneeze, Rrose Sélavy? is funny in itself: a metal birdcage containing marble sugarcubes with a cuttle bone and a thermometer stuck through the bars.

John Cage is funny: this much we know. The deadpan prankster at the heart of 20^th-century artistic experimentalism was always about the inadvertent punchline, the chuckle that comes from unexpected disjunction, the relief that comes from reminders of the absurdity of reality, as much as he was ever about any engagement with progress, technology, the transcendent. It's entirely natural, then, that Stewart Lee (pictured below), who has spent his whole career reaching outwards from the comedy circuit towards the avant-garde, should want to present his work.

Diamanda Galas is a woman who once wrote a book called Sh*t of God and whose avant-garde screeching on subjects like AIDS and schizophrenia frequently takes gothic into an area where it could scare bats. Her CV includes stints as a research scientist, prostitute and drug addict. Unsurprisingly, she isn’t normally seen in context. But then there aren’t many line-ups quite like Antony Hegerty’s 2012 Meltdown, where for a month dissident singers rub shoulders with twilight artists.

There is a shouty lady outside the Theatre Royal in Brighton who takes strong objection to us attending tonight’s Brighton Festival performance of Matthew Herbert’s One Pig.  The show is based around the life and death of a pig, from birth to plate, and includes pork being cooked. We are, she tells us as we enter, “hypocritical vegetarians with the blood of farm animals” on our hands. Matthew Herbert is not a vegetarian but she has hit on a crux contradiction about the evening (albeit in the unfortunate manner of Crazy Cat Lady off The Simpsons).

First a word of warning: The Mars Volta is not for everyone. Their hardcore progressive metal may contain light and shade, but it's also there to show the world that Muse is for sissies. And, for all its delicate moments and complexity, at its most intense it is as discordant as the music played in the interrogation rooms of Guantanamo Bay.

Krzysztof Penderecki's Polymorphia for 48 string instruments dates back to 1962, and still stands as one of the grand milestones of the avant-garde. It epitomised the Polish composer's technique of "timbre organisation", in which the plucking and bowing of strings was merely a small part of an astounding array of effects.

Against all the odds, I find myself going into 2012 with a strong sense of optimism. And the reason? I am a born-again rave zealot. I saw it at Outlook Festival in Croatia, I saw it at Sónar in Barcelona, and I saw it at the Big Chill where I was running a stage; participatory, constructive, creative partying, where the crowds go not just to be entertained but to plug into something bigger, to be part of something.

Stockhausen’s Gesang der Jünglinge (Song of the Youths), composed in 1956, is, in many ways, the mother of all electronic music. I can remember discovering it in the 1960s, before I had acquired my first pair of Koss headphones, lying on the floor, strategically placed between two speakers, my ears opened by the copious ingestion of some red Lebanese. The combination of electronically treated live voices with purely synthetic sounds, so much a commonplace today, was then strikingly new.