(Lío Press)
Zurich-based musicians Benedikt Merz and David Hänni meld krautrock, punk and big beat into tripped-out, swampy grooves that reach dizzying heights

After almost three decades of friendship, Zurich-based musicians Benedikt Merz and David Hänni moved into a studio together in 2019. They found common ground over their shared love of psychedelic music and spent long, woozy nights jamming together. But while one wanted to focus on live electronics, the other secretly wanted to start a band. The outcome was Dâdalus & Bikarus, a project which sits somewhere between these two worlds, welding elements of krautrock, punk and big beat into tripped-out dancefloor rhythms.

Their second album, Off the Shelf, captures the obsessive energy of those early nocturnal experiments, which they’ve since built a reputation for in their live shows. Anchored by drawn-out loops, each track slowly builds tension to dizzying, near-erotic heights. On Erebros, this takes place across a hefty 11 minutes: led by propulsive drums and a scuttling bass riff, the track pushes and pulls, eventually developing into an angular acid-punk workout. In Kill Your Feed, another standout, a simple drum sequence gradually kicks into a shuffling Madchester-esque groove, with plenty of feedback along the way. For all their repetition, the instrumentals are moreish and never dull, thanks also to the ominous sirens and metallic clangs scattered throughout. Merz’s vocals are similarly enticing, channelling Peter Murphy’s moody drawl at points, and gruff EBM-style yelps at others.

From Oklahoma! and Singin’ in the Rain to The Big Lebowski and Maestro, these showstoppers give a blissful hit of dance. A Rodgers and Hammerstein triple bill at Regent’s Park Open Air theatre reawakens the tradition

‘They’re annoying and stupid and slow everything down. Nobody likes a dream ballet!” That’s a quote from Apple TV+’s Schmigadoon! , the musical theatre parody that could only have been made by people who absolutely love (almost) all things musicals. Drew McOnie is having none of it. “Maybe we should put that on the poster,” he jokes, since he has commissioned a triple bill of dream ballets for his inaugural season as artistic director at Regent’s Park Open Air theatre.

What’s a dream ballet anyway, you may ask. It’s the bit in a musical where the dialogue and songs stop and dance takes over, often to delve into the psyche of a character at a crossroads. Agnes de Mille’s original dream ballet for 1943’s Oklahoma! was called Laurey Makes Up Her Mind – she had to decide between two suitors – and it was a major moment for dance on Broadway. Other famous dream ballets include in the 1951 film An American in Paris, where Gene Kelly and Leslie Caron spend 17 minutes dancing through elaborate painted stage-sets of Paris , or Singin’ in the Rain’s Broadway Melody, a film within a film.

Federico García Lorca’s poems were printed anonymously in 1983 after being hidden away by family for 50 years

In the autumn of 1983, dozens of carefully chosen readers received an envelope containing a slim, red booklet of sonnets that had been locked away since they were written almost 50 years earlier by the most famous Spanish poet of the 20th century.

While those behind the initiative gave no clue as to their identities, their purpose was made abundantly clear in the dedication on the booklet’s final page: “This first edition of the Sonnets of Dark Love is being published to remember the passion of the man who wrote them.”

An immensely readable dive into the ‘predictive processing’ hypothesis, our best guess as to how the mind really works

The process of perception feels quite passive. We open our eyes and light floods in; the world is just there, waiting to be seen. But in reality there is an active element that we don’t notice. Our brains are always “filling in” our perceptual experience, supplementing incoming information with existing knowledge. For example, each of us has a spot at the back of our eye where there are no light receptors. We don’t see the resulting hole in our field of vision because our brains ignore it. The phenomenon we call “seeing” is the result of a continuously updated model in your mind, made up partly of incoming sensory information, but partly of pre-existing expectations. This is what is meant by the counter­intuitive slogan of contemporary cognitive science: “perception is a controlled hallucination”.

A century ago, someone with an interest in psychology might have turned to the work of Freud for an overarching vision of how the mind works. To the extent there is a psychological theory even remotely as significant today, it is the “predictive processing” hypothesis. The brain is a prediction machine and our perceptual experiences consist of our prior experiences as well as new data. Daniel Yon’s A Trick of the Mind is just the latest popularisation of these ideas, but he makes an excellent guide, both as a scientist working at the leading edge of this field and as a writer of great clarity. Your brain is a “skull bound scientist”, he proposes, forming hypotheses about the world and collecting data to test them.

This indulgent but madly watchable documentary showcases Minnelli’s tremendous star wattage alongside the tragedy of a life lived in the full glare of show business

To watch this indulgent but madly watchable documentary about the life and times of Liza Minnelli is like snorting a pound of uncut showbiz glitter through a rolled-up copy of Variety off Joel Grey ’s naked back on the Studio 54 dancefloor – though as ever with documentaries about celebrities facing the destructive power of drink and drugs, there is no mention of the limelight and praise addiction which they are expected to maintain.

I was sorry that Minnelli’s marvellous, underrated film New York, New York with Robert De Niro is passed over relatively quickly – conveying the wrong impression that, aside from the iconic song, it’s a blip on her CV – and sorry also that her late-masterpiece comic performance on TV’s Arrested Development gets hardly a mention. But otherwise this is a richly sympathetic and thoroughly enjoyable portrait of an authentic queen of American musical theatre and movies; there is some wonderful modern-day interview footage of Minnelli, talking with waspish candour about herself, and apart from a slight vocal tremor, very robust. There is a great moment when, after having a FaceTime conversation with Mia Farrow, Minnelli is shown looking sharply at her own face in the little box in a corner of the screen: she instinctively frowns, pouts, assessing herself.

Adam Curtis offers up another startling deep dive into recent British history – and the new show from the creator of Dawson’s Creek is like Succession … for a fishing dynasty

The first people we see in Adam Curtis ’s latest documentary series are Jimmy Savile and Margaret Thatcher. It’s hard to think of a more fitting pair to embody the disappointments of Britain in the late 20th century. Curtis’s signature style – a mix of archive deep dives and uncanny juxtapositions – still startles. Loss is the theme of Shifty: it’s a story of Britain losing industry, community and empire, and struggling to come to terms with the individualistic complexity that replaced these certainties. It takes a while for the narrative to sharpen, but Curtis’s films are often best understood as impressionistic art installations so maybe abstraction is their natural final destination.
BBC iPlayer, from Saturday 14 June

Lee Mack’s excellent family sitcom explores empty nest syndrome. Plus: Alison Hammond bonds delightfully with Lenny Henry and Sam Thompson’s on a mission. Here’s what to watch tonight

9pm, BBC One
Lee Mack’s broad family sitcom switches things up for its 14th series by jumping a few years forward. The kids are grownup and gone, which means that Lee (Mack) and Lucy (Sally Bretton) are empty nesters and looking to downsize. When they view their “for ever home” it, of course, turns into a farce of a broken toilet, koi carp and the couple pretending to be brother and sister. The laughs may be light, but they are consistent. Hollie Richardson

Work by Elizabeth Peyton from 1996 shows ‘quiet tension’ between Noel and Liam at their Oasis peak, expert says

“Where you gonna swim with the riches that you found?” Oasis asked in All Around the World . Maybe in the art market, buying a portrait of Noel and Liam Gallagher at the height of their fame for a possible £2m.

Sotheby’s has announced that a 1996 painting of the brothers by Elizabeth Peyton is to be part of its June contemporary art auction in London.

Ahead of her new film – in which she fights, dives and wrangles horses – the Oscar-winning actor discusses sunburn, age-gaps and hanging from helicopters

Julianne Moore has played some right mothers in her time. There was Amber Waves in Boogie Nights, whose pornography career and cocaine addiction costs her access to her child. Or Maude, the outre artist – “My work has been commended as being strongly vaginal ” – whose determination to conceive drives much of in The Big Lebowski . Moore was the infernal, domineering mother – the Piper Laurie role – in the 2013 remake of Carrie, and a lesbian cheating on her partner with the sperm donor who fathered their children in The Kids Are All Right . In May December , the most recent of the five pictures she has made with her artistic soulmate, the director Todd Haynes, she became pregnant by a 13-year-old boy, then married and raised a family with him after her release from prison. Shocking, perhaps, but then she had already played a socialite with incestuous designs on her own son (Eddie Redmayne) in Savage Grace . Imagine that lot as a Mother’s Day box set.

Her latest screen mum is in the jangling new thriller Echo Valley. She has a lot of heavy lifting to do as Kate, a morally compromised rancher whose farm is falling apart, along with her life. Some of that lifting is emotional: Kate left her husband for a woman (“I’m the one who ‘ran off with the lesbo ranch hand’,” she sighs) who then died. To add to her woes, Kate’s daughter ( Sydney Sweeney ), who has addiction problems, calls on her for help after accidentally throwing away $10,000 worth of drugs belonging to a dealer (Domhnall Gleeson).