A nice farmer wanted to sell his Christmas tree farm—a sprawling beauty with little green triangular forms popping from the ground like garden gnomes. It was too heavy and too messy. There was too much dirt, poop and little prickly needles. The trees were hefty and offended his aging back. He has neither the back power to scatter fertilizer across the plains, nor the brain power to sit in a chair all day in the freezing cold watching people spend hours choosing “the tree.” All the trees were identical. They literally looked exactly the same. Regardless, massive domestic arguments erupted from tree consumers; they stared at each tree like it was an ancient Egyptian hieroglyphics tablet.

Olive and Sabrina wanted to buy this Christmas tree farm.

They were centered around New York City (for the most part), and the Christmas tree farm was nestled in the wooded areas right outside, in a small town called “Annandale on Hudson,” where well-off people tend to buy their maple syrup from vendors at the weekend-ly West Brooklyn organic food market.

Olive and Sabrina discussed The Container Store, an organization emporium. The Container Store is the place you go to sort your life and soul. They have every kind of container ever invented in the history of mankind. They have containers for:

-food

-clothes

-knick-knacks

-tic-tacs

They have containers for containers, all placed in massive shelves that are definitely taller than the largest Christmas tree you’ve ever seen. The store is plastic-y and a bit fluorescent. It may remind you of a waiting room you would see in the Matrix.

The two discussed the farm while trying to buy milk at the store that does not sell milk. They only sell containers. Olive proposed the farm idea when passing an aisle of pink, skull shaped bowls. Olive has seen the plot of land with the white for sale sign a couple days before when she was driving into the city in her car 1970s milk truck-looking car. Olive’s milk truck likes to barrel down hills – she always hoped it would remain loyal to her and outflank gravity’s natural inclination. She wondered who had the authority to plant that for sale sign over the sprawling field of wild trees. She imagined a man in corduroy trousers planting his flag of ownership. His pants were tight in the calves but loose in the thighs. He wore a Dutch style-whaling hat and dragged a long, metal stick across the dirt, one that resembles the plastic cylinders they sell in aisle eight. She compartmentalized the thought and continued driving home. Olive grew up in a town outside of New York City filled with old, New England fisherman houses peering over the Hudson River. Olive enjoyed living there and commuting into the city. Her parents moved away when Olive was 20 and left a sticky note with lots of hearts so she wouldn’t feel abandoned. She didn’t feel like moving into New York with everyone else, so she stayed in her parent’s unfurnished home with a mattress on the floor and lots of empty water bottles because she got thirsty during the night. 

She meant to buy some bottles, there was an entire floor devoted to bottles above. They headed upstairs.

As they went up the escalator, passing rows of plastic, geometric shapes, Sabrina related why she wanted this Christmas tree farm.

1) She passed it on the way to Olive’s house a couple days before.

2) She liked the smell of pine as she biked too quickly down the hill.

She stopped pedaling and lightly put her hands on the brakes as to avoid the roots protruding out of the ground. The small trees popped out of the earth in nice, neat little lines. Their natural, triangular form was far more appealing than the Christmas trees she used to peruse at a Target department store in Mid-Western suburbs. Sabrina came from a place she coined “the suburban wasteland.” She was driven in a BMW SUV with her mother and her brother. In that life, they circled the parking lot and stopped in a space that was not occupied by another SUV. She recalled the neon lights of the department store, similar to the lights that presently peered down over aisles of plastic bottles. Piles of small, fabric snowmen from China welcomed them through automatic sliding doors. Sabrina’s mother wanted to buy a plastic Christmas tree because they do not cause a royal mess. Sabrina touched a plastic tree and liked how it felt against her palm so she turned around and started rubbing her back against it. It really felt quite nice, and she began to wonder if she could ask her mother to buy her a back scratcher. As she continued to scratch her back against the synthetic tree, a cute boy with a red Target vest asked her to please stop or leave. This really hurt Sabrina’s feelings. She grumbled and made her own tree out of red- construction paper once she arrived home.

By this point, Olive and Sabrina had a shopping cart filled with colorful containers. Olive had lots of re-usable plastic water bottles and boxes to store toiletries. They had cylinders, rectangles, diamonds and squares, all in a variety of colors, all to bring an order to things.

Sabrina wanted to buy the Christmas tree farm because:

1) She liked the order of it.

2) She liked how each tree stood next to the other in an organized line

3) It was satisfying. It made her feel in control of things.

Olive wanted the farm because:

1) she no longer had reasons to live outside of New York City. Here friends were there, her job was there, the only thing she has in the wooded “outside” was an old house with a mattress on the floor.

2) The Christmas tree farm would give her a purpose on the outside, she could hide away in a field of geometric trees and get her jeans stained brown by fertilizer.

3) It could be her fairy place away from the world where things really existed.        

They considered going into aisle five. That is where the largest, most prestigious containers are held. They are massive enough to keep a medium-sized Christmas tree actually, and they tower high into the store’s skies. The most majestically colored boxes are on the top—so to retrieve them you must use a very large metal rod. Sabrina thought she wanted one.

They span through aisle four and made a sharp U-turn into aisle five. They peered up into the heavens and saw the plastic squares towering over them. Sabrina reached out. She tried to pull one out but it refused to come down. She used the massive metal pole provided and tried to grab the blue one from the very top. It nudged in agreement but then the tower collapsed. The boxes went everywhere and created a sea of mayhem. A few startled people shrieked and a couple clerks rushed to aid.

There were boxes everywhere. Olive and Sabrina could barely run away. The manager scolded them. They pranced like fairies through the ocean of large containers. They left their shopping cart filled with things and never mentioned the Christmas tree farm again.  

India has wandering ascetics clad in saffron robes; mad streets full of motorbikes and auto-rickshaws; insane city skylines broken up by temple towers painted so colourfully, covered so wildly with sculptures that they look like opium dreams or a perfect Fauvist painting. It also has Domino’s, multiplexes and huge, soulless shopping centres. Coldplay’s new video for their collaboration with Beyoncé, ‘Hymn for the Weekend’, creates a hippy-era psychedelic vision from one very particular side to the infinite complex cultures of the subcontinent, an exoticising, orientalising, othering piece of rather seductive beauty.

The song itself is standard Coldplay stuff : Chris Martin’s trademark falsetto soars over melodic, heart-thudding synths, and danceable bass and drum lines pull you effortlessly through to the end. It’s Queen B, of course, who makes this song worth a listen: her vocals float in and out with the ethereality of a Symbolist poem or of incense drifting above the dawn rites of a riverside shrine.

There are a few wince-provoking moments, of course. Yoncé’s generically ‘Indian’, exotically ‘Bollywood’ hand dancing is just a bit embarrassing, and I’m still not sure how I feel about the religious festival of Holi being ornamentalised for a song, especially one with the refrain “I’m feeling drunk and high / So high, so high.” Let’s not forget, though, that it is a cultural and religious tradition to lace your Holi lassi with massive amounts of bhang (a potent preparation of cannabis leaves).

Questions of culture and religion aside, though, it doesn’t sit terribly well to have that refrain repeated over and again over visuals of children messing around or jumping into sacred bathing tanks. At best, this is just weird. At worst, it reinforces the aestheticising, dehumanising portrayal of these kids as no more than a pretty background to the Western singer. Needless to say, there are moments in this video that are worryingly reductive, borderline colonialist and a touch reminiscent of poverty porn. It is also worth noting the total absence of non-Hindu elements in this video’s image of India, something that’s a little uncomfortable given the context of the rise of Islamophobic Hindu nationalism.

This isn’t quite the trainwreck of exoticism – thank God – that accompanied ‘Princess of China’ or Major Lazer’s ‘Lean On’. In the video Chris Martin seems more like a wide-eyed, vaguely clueless tourist than anything else, and the subcontinent’s cultural richness somehow manages, quite gloriously, to break this caricature.

The sugar-coated pop psychedelia of Coldplay’s guitars and Beyoncé’s soulful vocals plays beautifully with the transcendental aesthetic they’ve formed from their tourism advert lucky dip of appropriation, and – to be frank – I just don’t know if I have the willpower not to be carried away by it.

Americana troubadour Ryley Walker’s psychedelic folk is more reminiscent of the sun-kissed fields of Woodstock circa 1969 than it is of England in February. Nonetheless, Walker is set to play Oxford for the first time on Thursday of Fifth Week.

Hailing from Rockford, Illinois, the singer-songwriter will play at The Bullingdon alongside folk legend, double-bassist Danny Thompson. Thompson has previously played with Nick Drake, Tim Buckley and Bert Jansch, marking him a pedigree of the folk scene. In turning his attention to 26-year-old Walker, who excitedly tells me that “the honour to play a whole set with Danny is overwhelming,” Thompson highlights the younger musician as one to take note of. And I beg we listen: these long-standing folkies know what they’re talking about.

At End of the Road Festival last year, I was surprised to see Walker first on the bill on a sunny Friday afternoon on one of the smaller stages. Walker writes to me as he waits to board a flight at an airport, his touring schedule constantly keeping him on the move. He reminisces about that late summer afternoon in a field with peacocks wandering around the site: “I remember driving a long way to get there from Amsterdam and immediately eating a giant sandwich when I got out of the van. The crowds and staff were lovely people. I had so much fun.”

In many ways, the setting of this performance seemed to encapsulate Walker’s sixties psychedelic-folk sound. His lush, soulful voice croons over warm guitar melodies on ‘Primrose Green,’ the title track from last year’s album which was ranked fourth in Uncut’s Albums of the Year 2015. Speaking of his record’s successes, Walker simply says, “People had a lot of nice things to say which got me around the world and a lot of free drinks”. He seems to embody the laid-back “it’s all about the music (and the booze)” vibe.

With materialistic, dirty, modern music festivals often seeming far away from Woodstock or the Isle of Wight Festival of 1969, it is intriguing to hear what such a down-to-earth musician, who seems at one with the folk ethos he has long been inspired by, thinks of current festival culture. “The right festival gig can be a smash, especially if lots of friends are playing. Both [gigs and festivals] have their ups and downs,” says Walker.

Again, we hear Walker’s expected ‘hippie’ attitude. But the Rockford native hasn’t played in Oxford before, and is just as thrilled about the idea of playing to a new crowd.

Walker enjoys a sweaty city club as much as he enjoys having rolling green hills as his backdrop. He’s a versatile performer wherever he goes and performs. Simply, he tells me, “I just like to play.”

Experimental, intimate, unplugged. Those are all words Nick Hampson and Jack Saville used when telling me in what ways the second Live Session would differ from the first. Despite this description, it is difficult to tell whether Saturday’s gig at the well-hidden Vaults and Garden café in the University Church went entirely according to the two New College students’ plans, or not quite. What is much easier to define, however, is the success of the event. As had already been suggested by the speed with which the tickets sold out, the relatively small room was filled earlier than expected and the audience discovered the four acts of the evening with much enthusiasm.

This successful gig and the recent activity of the duo of founders show just how far Vulture Sessions have come since their beginning a year ago. During an interview in between another session and the finalists’ preparation for their approaching exams, Nick described the origin of this joint project as the result of his frustration with the magazine format. “I wanted people to engage instantly with the content, so I thought it would be interesting to work on something and see the results on that same day.” Organising live events was the next step, which they decided to take last autumn to bring music even closer to its listeners.

Not entirely satisfied by last term’s edition, which featured a series of musicians singing a maximum of two songs and supported by microphones to reach all 180 members of the crowd, Nick and Jack chose to limit the programme of the second session to four artists, each with a set of four songs to play: Barnaby Wynter, Georgia Bruce, Via Sanda and the acclaimed Fusion Project were respectively the chosen ones for 5th February.

Instead of showcasing the variety and number of student musicians in the area, Live Session II aimed to create a coherence between the acts and find voices both suiting and capable of adapting to an intimate atmosphere. “Sometimes people can just be good performers, and we get to see that when we do the videos, but a live session is really the only way to make that accessible,” Jack explains. Nick adds that, “all genres are welcome, from a few weird experimental analogue synthesiser things we’ve had, all the way to a classic girl-with-her-guitar-and-a-lovely-voice type of thing. It’s been a pleasant surprise all along, and the quality has just been so high.”

This was clear to all during the session itself. Mostly written by the artists, the songs they performed had vibrant texts and technically ambitious vocal parts. While Barnaby Wynter’s versatile voice gave the impression of trying a bit too hard, the accents on certain phrases brought movement to the otherwise bare sound of the keyboard’s chords, which were mainly there to set a rhythmic pattern. With Georgia Bruce, the audience was touched by a free sensitivity and a raspy voice evoking nature in a contemplative mood. Via Sanda, which is the name under which Italian musician Robin Finetto goes once on stage, offered a longer guitar intro and a duet. The Fusion Project, performing at St John’s the next day, were the main surprise of the evening, basing their intense music on a harmonious mix of Indian and Western identities and combining three singing styles without sounding artificial.

In addition to the Sessions’ success in Oxford, Nick and Jack have a more global vision. “There aren’t that many ways of finding artists until they’re already big enough. You couldn’t possibly look through the internet to find these people, a lot of stuff gets lost in the mass. Ultimately we’d like to have eyes and ears in all the universities in the world.”

★★★★★

As Public Memory, Brooklyn’s Robert Toher, previously of ERAAS, makes gritty rhythmic electronica. The sounds he weaves on this subtly fierce album are not defined by one genre. Instead, Wuthering Drum treads the line between ambient and urban grit, retaining a stark awareness of rhythm in its hypnotic and brooding dub sensibility.

On opener ‘Heir’, gnarly bass strikes against chimes; or is that breaking glass? The sound of the Korg MS-20 increases the signifi cant dryness of Toher’s melodies. Just listen to the meandering outro of ‘Zig Zag’, which eases only gently, giving way to waves of percussive clamours. This dryness is not a downfall. The album is not outlandishly lush, but sincere in its riffs: here, frank melodies accentuate realism. There is little chance you’ll make out many of the lyrics. But Toher’s snarling tenor is no moody teenager’s utterance, rather an understated nod towards his awareness of layered sounds.

‘Interfaith’ is a darker embodiment of the themes of existential crises Toher explores on this album, as its elements weave round and round each other, creating a hypnotic state that seems hard to break out of.

This album is introspective, full of loops, and often references itself in riffs across its breadth. If there is one thing within Wuthering Drum that I can put my finger on, it is that this intelligent album is very much aware of its own existence.

In what appears to be a growing trend for O’Reilly productions this term, Rosencrantz & Guildenstern Are Dead is sold out. Entirely. Even the Saturday matinee performance – that usual bastion of empty seats – has no tickets left. Whatever marketing magic The Armchair Theatre Company conjured, it worked. Perhaps even one crewmember’s dreadful boast (uttered in the smoking area of Cellar) that this is ‘sort of the BNOC play for this term’ was a planned ruse to stir up attention. Who knows.

In any case, sold out show or not, this production was always going to be notable. Oxford students formed the cast of the very first production of Stoppard’s break-out hit, so there is a nice cyclical feeling here (even if the original production was, I concede, performed at the Edinburgh Fringe). The play’s timing also seems fitting – last term we had the much talked-about but ultimately rather inconsequential production of Hamlet, also at the O’Reilly, so this comes as almost a sort of sequel.

One of the highlights of that production, Ieuan Perkins, returns here, but this time as Guildenstern rather than Hamlet. He is joined by a significant portion of Hamlet’s cast, as well as Cassian Bilton as Rosencrantz. The two work very well together. They comically play off one another more than adequately, but what is really remarkable is their ability to communicate with nothing more than a look. Their rapport has a naturalness evocative of brotherhood.

The casting of Chloe Wall as the Player is an interesting one. Casting a woman in the role adds a new layer to an already multi-layered play, and the gender dimension created by her condescending exchanges with the two male leads is curious, and a more than welcome addition. However, whilst I applaud Wall’s ability to distinguish her character’s weirdness in a play oversaturated with the stuff, she has a tendency to deliver lines either too fast or too quiet to comprehend. If I struggled to hear some of her wit in the second row, I can only imagine the frustration of those sat towards the back of the O’Reilly.

Placing the weight of this criticism solely on Wall’s head is unfair, however, as coherence of oration (or lack thereof) is a problem that crops up throughout the play – Bilton, for instance, is also guilty at times. This may, of course, boil partly down to opening night nerves, but I suspect there is a deeper directorial issue here: that of a directing team that has become too complacent with their own knowledge of an extraordinarily complicated and wordy script. I would argue a little more should have been done in rehearsals (especially dress) to ensure Stoppard’s wit transmits to the audience.

Flora Holmes’s set is simple but clever. The boxes which form the staging are covered in beige canvas and topped with pinewood – something of a blank canvas befitting Stoppard’s description of ‘a place without any visible character’. When, in the third act, the pinewood become the planks of the ship, we must smile at the simplistic ingenuity in the choice of materials. Beige also forms the cornerstone of James Stokes’s lighting design, as whenever it takes over from the otherwise pervasive “Nordic” (the production team’s word, not mine) blue hue we know that a Hamlet scene is not far off. The cues are well-executed and there were, as far as I could notice, no first-night slip ups. Ella Baron’s costumes neatly tie into the colour scheme, with the two leads dressed in inverse assortments of grey and blue (with Perkins in a particularly “Nordic” sweater), Claudius and Gertrude in beige (the former dons a rather comical cricket jumper), and the players in inscrutable black. (Hamlet wears the stereotypical black turtleneck and black trousers.) My main criticism of the technical side of the production falls on the use of ambient music during the dumb shows and the final scene from Hamlet. Why is it here? What does it communicate? It seems merely like an incongruous attempt at edgy soundscaping, much to the detriment of the tone of the scenes it is applied to.

The post-interval third act falls rather flat on its face – it is tempting to say that the play would have been more effective (or at least less flawed) if it had stopped at the end of the second act. But this is a criticism of this production rather than of Stoppard’s text. While there are many, many laughs during the first half, the tone is a little too grave throughout these first two acts for there to be any existential progression in the two leads. This is partly due to Perkins playing Guildenstern rather like he played Hamlet: over-serious and bolshie. Whilst this is perfectly acceptable for Shakespeare’s lead, I point to Stoppard’s character note for Guildenstern – that he is ‘worried’ by the existential implications his musings raise, but that he is ‘not going to panic about it’. His panic should come at the end, not throughout. Bilton does better at keeping light-hearted in the play’s earlier scenes, though this is partially due to the text’s disposition to place Rosencrantz in the role of spectator to Guildenstern’s musings. Subsequently, when Ros and Guil reach their final realisation – whatever that really is – it fails to feel like the endpoint of a journey, but rather takes the same monotonous, odorous tone of graveness that is secreted throughout. If only Stoppard’s postmodern playfulness had been given the space to shine in all its droll glory.