This month we have some unjustly hyped rubbish electro-pop, some unjustly ignored brilliant eletcro-pop, some postmodern retro-disco, some dubstep, some grime, some sampledelic New York punk, and, at the top of the pile, one of Britain's brightest young actors proves he's equally adept on the microphone. Thomas H Green and Joe Muggs plough loudly through the lot with glee and the odd barbed word.

Club music has always been hard to keep track of, and never more so than in the current climate of constant genre meltdown and cross-fertilisation. Which is why the DJ's art is more important than ever, particularly in the case of scene figureheads like the indefatigable Gilles Peterson – known for over 20 years as a patron of all things jazzy, but lately proving brilliantly adept at reaching all corners of what he refers to as “left-field dance music”. Shows like his are ideal – necessary, even – for nurturing, contextualising and showcasing new generation genre-agnostic talents like men of the moment James Blake and Flying Lotus who played at Peterson's Worldwide Awards on Saturday night.

The annals of rock’n’roll are littered with complacency, fading stars, and acts who’ve had it and then lost it, forever. So, after 20 years, what makes the Manics different? How come they’re still turning out hit albums? Possibly it’s their hand-on-heart, Welsh-valley principles. Maybe it’s the way they find libraries as interesting a subject as love. Or perhaps it’s the way that they keep recovering from the brink of near self-destruction. Listening to them last night, though, something else became clear.

Luke Haines holds a small cassette player to the microphone, switches it on and the sounds of birds are heard. It’s “Me and the Birds”, one of his new Outsider Music songs. His old Britpop-era band The Auteurs were guitar pop. His next outfit, Baader Meinhof, were edgier, noisier. After that, Black Box Recorder were artier. But this is beyond any of that. He sings of drinking cocktails in the lounge of a Travelodge with the birds he’s heard outside his window. The Suede reunion wasn’t like this.

Now I know why the BBC Symphony Orchestra slunk so easily into Piazzolla tango mode last Friday: they'd danced it under Latin American instruction four years ago. It's all part of their education department's annual Diverse Orchestras week, where performers from another culture come to open the players' fantasy and the onlookers get to learn something into the bargain. And learning has never been more fun than it was last night in the Tabernacle, Notting Hill's vibrant arts centre, where the Fez Andalusian Orchestra under one of the world's great string players, Mohamed Briouel, set a zinging example.

It’s a testament to the authenticity of the Scottish folk ethos that this band even exists. A bunch of mid-career songwriters going on a musicians' retreat, getting caught in the vibe, and deciding to form a band. It sounds like something from the Sixties. So sometimes do they, at least when Karine Polwart goes all Sandy Denny. And they half look it too, with eight of them on stage swapping vocal duties as a musical collective. And then there’s the hippy names like King Creosote and MC Soom T, which sound more jazz than folk. But despite being both experimental and folkie in their approach, their music is something else.

Question: which American star had their third wedding in the Griffith Stadium, Washington in front of more than 25,000 paying fans and recorded the whole thing for release as an album? If you’re wondering how you could have missed hearing about such a quintessential 21st-century publicity stunt it might be because, firstly, this extraordinary event occurred in 1951, and secondly, because the guitar-strumming bisexual bride (who hadn’t even found a groom when the event was arranged) has almost disappeared from the history books.

As part of my homework before last night’s gig at the Scala I played Senegalese singer Cheikh Lo’s latest album Jamm over and over again, waiting for some of its tunes to lodge in my mind - waiting to be compelled rather than feel duty bound to play it again. But no, I just couldn't connect with it. There’s nothing ostensibly wrong with the thing: it’s brimming over with easy-going cheer and passion, it's beautifully played and sung, and it’s all wrapped up in that familiar crystal-clear production that producer Nick Gold is so adept at delivering (his recent work with AfroCubism being another perfect example). But something was missing.

McCartney and Wonder. Jagger and Bowie. Mullard and Baker. Music history teaches us that the star collaboration doesn't always transmute into artistic gold. The Chairman of the Board himself, with a little help from Vandross, Streisand, Bono et al, had a spectacular misfire with Duets Vol 1. Mercilessly butchering many of Francis Albert's best-known songs, the results, artistically speaking, aren't so much a case of, “Yeah, I once recorded with Sinatra, you know,” as, “Number of copies: entire stock.

Clichés about the frozen North aside, music from the Nordic countries is often described as redolent of glacial landscapes or icy wastelands. But the music of percussionist Terje Isungset goes further – his instruments are carved from Norwegian ice. Pulled up from the depths, his ice is 600 years old, crystal clear with no imperfections. Ice Music is literally that: music played on ice. Patting bars, hitting blocks and blowing through his ice trumpet, Isungset reflects Norway’s environment like no one else.