It was 1966, and Brian Wilson had high hopes for the follow up to The Beach Boys’ critically acclaimed Pet Sounds. Smile would be a concept album, further eschewing the ‘surfer’ sound that The Beach Boys had been successful with and painting a coast-to-coast soundscape of America. A sandpit was built around the piano, fireman’s outfits donned and over $50,000 spent on the recording of one track alone. Smile was going to be The Beach Boys’ pièce de résistance. It didn’t happen.

Drugs, mental illness, fights and frustration set in and the project was shelved. The tapes were cherry-picked to cobble together 1967’s Smiley Smile, countless bootlegs were produced, and Wilson re-recorded the album in 2004, but the full original recordings have now been released for the first time ever as the The Smile Sessions. “Maybe I’m just trying to look for something that isn’t there.” Wilson can be heard musing on one of the hundreds of outtakes included in the complete 5-disc edition. 45 years after recording began, is the The Smile Sessions what fans are looking for?

Wilson’s genius is clear, and the album could arguably be propped up by ‘Good Vibrations’ alone. Over ninety hours of tape were edited down to 4 minutes of sonic delight. It simmers with the sensuousness of summer, romance and youth, with a bit of Electro-Theremin and the Doctor Who theme-tune thrown in. Elsewhere ‘Heroes and Villains’ excitedly whirls along like a surreal fairground ride, its refrain rippling through ‘Do You Like Worms (Roll Plymouth Rock)’, whilst ‘Surf’s Up’ hauntingly laments ‘a broken man too tough to cry’. Other gems include the nonsensically didactic ‘Vega-Tables’ and the serene ‘Wonderful’. But The Smile Sessions sometimes stutters and stumbles, with bridge songs, elevator music and clattering cacophony.

Nevertheless, for those interested enough to wade beyond the first disc, The Smile Sessions is a treasure trove for procrastinators and aficionados, with outtakes revealing both Wilson’s quirky humour and painstaking search for perfection. The Smile Sessions isn’t a masterpiece, but it’s almost there: a tantalising glimpse into what might have been.

Damon Albarn is doing good for the world, and the product is really not bad at all.

Working in conjunction with Japanese-American hip-hop maestro Dan the Automator and over 50 local musicians from the Democratic Republic of Congo, Kinshasa One Two is a strange, but not unpleasant record that seriously warrants a second listen. And most commendable of all, all proceeds head directly to support Oxfam’s work in the DRC.

The aesthetic is primarily African, with a hefty dose of more standard abstract, instrumental, mid-tempo dance music. All in all, it sounds less like Blur, and more like Thievery Corporation on an African minibreak.

The original premise is a baffling one: Albarn and the Automator flew into the D.R.C. with iPads clutched in their hot little hands, and worked with local musicians playing tomato tins. It is unsurprising that Kinshasa One Two is consequently a little bit scrappy, not least because this fusion of Afro and Beats had only five days to simmer.

The moody electronics that punctuate the release are pretty standard for a Warp release, but they often don’t quite work within the Kinshasa framework.  At times, the album seems oddly disconnected, and occasionally mired down in a bog of squeaks and beeps. Nonetheless, there are some simply superb individual points.

A particular highlight is opening dub track ‘Hallo’, a duet between Albarn and Congolese Nelly Liyemge, and the only track on which Albarn sings. While the African influence is admittedly fairly light, and the Gorillaz presence very noticeable, the result is well-balanced.

At its best, this is an excellent and well-formed mix of instrumentally driven hip hop, 1970s funk and Congolese dance music. At its worst, it’s a clumsy fudge of electronica and African beats, hastily and awkwardly assembled. All in all: an interesting and largely effective record with truly rewarding moments amongst the dross.

Swedish musician Axel Willner, alias The Field, is a hard one to pin down, even within an electronic music scene that moves at such a pace that genre titles are increasingly redundant. His tracks seem to evade pigeonholing, and you get a feeling that that’s exactly how he likes it. ‘What I’m hoping for,’ he tells me, ‘is that as a listener you can have it in any context and it would work. The Field is made for me and I’m not the clubbing type, really.’

He works within the resolute, starchy 4/4 that could on first listen be described as techno, but his keen ear for atmosphere produces something more akin to ambient. Rather than setting out to make a track for a club or for a headphone listen, Willner uses the rigidity of a beat-driven template as a jump-off point to cram in as many different moods and influences as possible.

Now living in Berlin, a new environment he finds ‘very influential’ and ‘ever evolving’, Willner still seems an anomaly when placed alongside those who conjure up 3am floorfillers. His first LP, 2007’s From Here We Go Sublime was a huge success – that rare example of a proper electronic album that doesn’t feel like a mishmash of disparately recorded tracks, or a nullifying variation on the same theme. Its recording bridges the gap between production and true songwriting. The whole album was recorded and mixed in one live take, and on ‘Sun & Ice’, one of the earliest singles from the album, you can even hear background distortion Willner didn’t edit out of the mix. It might be an attempt to bring the human back into the electronic, or maybe he forgot to turn his phone off.

Another particularly startling moment comes at the end of ‘A Paw in My Face’, a track that rides a blissful sampled guitar loop over a beat that wouldn’t sound out of place on a Robert Hood track. At the song’s climax, the melody stretches out and slows down to reveal itself to be from ‘Hello’ by Lionel Ritchie (who doesn’t often get played in Berghain). ‘It’s been the same things that always inspire me’, he confesses,  ‘Everyday life and the things that happen, but also the music that is constantly around me. Like hearing ‘Hello’ can be very inspiring!’ This kind of honesty, only slightly tongue-in-cheek, is Willner wearing his musical memory on his sleeve and deploying it with a sense of homespun warmth, giving his audience the possibility of an emotional connection with his work that eludes the more po-faced of his electronic contemporaries.

Tracks like ‘Over the Ice’ have the kind of harmonic density in their loops that feel more like post-rock than another faceless button-presser, though with the kind of euphoric rush that constitutes the best in dance music. That said, it may have taken time to carve out an audience with his idiosyncratic style. ‘I think the borders are more or less gone by now but we had our fair share of sour faces. “What is a drum kit and bass and guitar doing in a club”, or “what are all these electronics doing in this venue?”

He seems amused by the responses he provokes, but you get the impression he relishes the challenge. His recent live shows for the release this year’s Looping State of Mind have all been performed with a full band. This is a return to his earliest musical experiences, ‘I’ve been in bands since I was a teen,’ he says, ‘so the translation into a band was just very natural for me.’ The new record is arguably less beat-driven than its predecessors, but through its use of live instrumentation, vocal loops and washes of sound, it creates an atmosphere all of its own: organic and electronic, energetic and languid, but always compelling, rich, and emotionally resonant.

High praise for someone who raised the money to record his first album working in the Swedish equivalent of an off-license. He was even willing to recommend the perfect drink to go with the new album, ‘I can recommend a red wine for the album as it is released in autumn, the Italian Nipozzano by Frescobaldi. A lot of taste for the little buck.’ No MDMA for this one. Much like the music itself, he’s going for something far more subtle and rich.

Visually, Woyzeck on the Highveld is a feast: the puppets are extremely well-created, designed by the talented Adrian Kohler. There is a screen at the back of the stage which is continually filled with ever-changing black and white sketches depicting the interior of a house, a hillside, a set table, to give depth to the set as the puppets move around.   

The set was delightful and the play engaging but as a whole the production was mystifying. The plot line and characterisation are not made clear to the audience and the script lurches oddly between light-heartedness and gravity. 

Directed by William Kentridge and produced by the Handspring Puppet Company, a lot of effort has obviously gone into producing and acting Woyzeck on the Highveld. It’s just a shame its surreal aspect prevented complete enjoyment, and the writing could have been made less obscure so that the audience feels more engaged in the plot and can care more about the characters’ lives. A collection of random images and objects sketched onto the screen at the back (telephones, shower cords, ears to name a few), that did not seem to have any real sense attached or any real relation to the action of the play left the audience feeling even more adrift. 

While the puppets were wonderfully designed and their expressive faces helped convey the characters’ different personalities, the illusion was somewhat affected by the fact that the puppets appear in full view alongside the actors that manipulate them and talk for them. Even when the humans using the puppets were supposed to be hidden from view, they could be easily glimpsed by the audience, mouths and hands moving as the puppets jerked across the stage.  

The script is based on a nineteenth-century German play by Georg Buchner. Woyzeck on the Highveld is set in South Africa in the 1950s, but seems a clumsily re-hashed and overly-philosophic version of the original in term of its writing.  

The play has several truly dark moments, and the use of puppets adds to this sinister dimension. The appearance of a wooden rhinoceros in one scene is both strange and disturbing, as it is hit with a stick by its master before having a gun attached to its tusks, apparently succeeding in turning the weapon on itself, intentionally or otherwise.  

From snatched snippets of conversation overhead at the end of the performance, it seems the rest of the audience was left equally bewildered by the performance and did not know quite what to make of this odd little offering. 

3 STARS

This week, for the first time in a long while, I left the BT after a play – in this case Peterson –  not knowing what I thought, a very unsettling experience. In this, reassuringly, I was not alone, with my theatre-going companions sharing a sense of bewilderment. The play began in medias res, with the main character Abel sitting at a table, writing.

His sudden launch into speech was not preceded by a dimming of the lights (this happened some time later) nor by any of the other traditional markers of beginning. The next unsettling element was the audience, one of whom, an older gentleman, had not, it appeared, been informed of the need to lower the volume of one’s voice when conversing with one’s companion during a play, and thus interjected loud, mundane explanatory notes at regular intervals. Highly off-putting, especially when combined with another audience member who appeared to be getting the humour on a much deeper level than anyone else in the audience and responding with laughter that can best be described as a rich, guttural bellow. Perhaps a paid claque, perhaps a relative, perhaps just a fan of Matt Fuller’s writing: whatever their motivation, they scared the living daylights out of me.

Having reviewed the audience comprehensively, it is perhaps right to turn to the cast, among whom without doubt the stand-out performance was given by Thomas Olver as Abel Peterson, the eccentric man who lives on a hill. Olver held the whole show together by sheer charm; his characterisation was engrossing, his tone amusing and his accent adorable. I hope we shall see more of him in Oxford drama. Caitlin McMillan’s portrayal of Peterson’s surly teenage visitor from the village was not quite on Olver standards, but was respectable: a fairly boilerplate sullen adolescent with touches of more interesting characterisation, and Fen Greatley and Lizhi Howard delivered their several monologues solidly, though I did feel the use of the monologue was a little excessive, giving the feeling of a pair of slightly underwhelming commentators appearing from time to time to fill in the gaps in the narrative.

Peterson also suffered slightly from what seemed like straightforward tech errors, mainly in the lighting, which unfortunately cannot fail but bring the audience for a time out of the action of the play and back into the less entertaining world of the BT’s physical space. All in all, Peterson offers charming and intriguing writing with a strong cast led by a particularly brilliant Abel; if you want something to make you think, to draw you out of the monotony of 6th week, something quite out of the ordinary for a BT show, then Peterson is what you need. 

3.5 STARS

It is fair to say that the publishing industry is, if not dying, at least undergoing an unprecedented transformation. With the onset of e-books, digital media, celebrity biographies, and a general decline in reading, publishing houses are signing fewer and fewer authors and commissioning less traditional novels and nearly no collections of short stories.

Prajwal Parajuly is an answer to this trend. Currently studying a creative writing MA at Kellogg College, he has recently signed a two book deal with publisher Quercus, for a collection of short stories and a novel, the first of which is due out in December 2012.

His book of short stories, The Gurkha’s Daugher, was researched by travelling across communities in the US, Asia, and Britain and hearing the stories of refugees. Parajuly says he had not realised the extent to which the short story market was shrinking, but says ‘I am thankful that I was ignorant. Chances are I’d have never started the project had I approached it with a pragmatic attitude’. Citing Tom Wolfe as his favourite living author – a man who, using traditional forms of the novel and short story, subverted norms and blurred genres – Parajuly has faith in fiction. He says ‘I don’t think I could be happy doing journalistic writing. When you’re writing fiction, you have the power to do what you want with your characters…you can mix fact with fiction.’

He seems to ascribe to the literary theory that fiction exerts some control over a fragmented world, and admits that he grew up with ‘an identity crisis of sorts’. In the short story form, characters with different stories, the same heritage, but different lands, all co-exist in a format which both admits their disparity but also implies their inter-connectedness, as Parajuly says: ‘I thought encapsulating the lives of Nepali-speaking people spread everywhere in the world in an anthology would be wiser than doing so in a novel.’

Parajuly’s novel, tentatively titled Land Where I flee, also examines idea of nationality and place. He says the title comes ‘because the characters are constantly moving around, there’s a lot of escaping in the novel…the world has become a small village. Because I divide my time among three continents, I don’t even know how to answer ‘where are you based’ questions anymore.’

As someone who lived abroad growing up, I remember desperately trying to deny my status as an outsider and trying to fit in, shirking from questions of my heritage. Yet Parajuly revels in the interchange and dialogue that comes from discussion of our differences. He talks about moving to small-town America, where people ‘had never ventured out’ of the US, and says ‘people were always asking you questions, fascinated by you.’

He views this as a positive, saying ‘I am so glad I got to experience that part of the country…I would never have known an America like that existed.’ Parajuly’s cultural relativism is refreshing, and betrays his belief that the world is indeed a ‘small village’, where we all can benefit from sharing our stories. The process of growing up in different places and between Nepalese and Indian cultures, (something he says ‘informed my writing immensely’) seems to have been a process of accepting both your heritage and those around you: ‘With time, you learned to be proud of your roots. So what if they weren’t as conventional as those of your friends?’

Keble’s Cuppers performance of “Edward Gant’s Amazing Feats of Loneliness” could be described as ‘amazing’ in the way it shows how, “Every act of creativity is an amazing thing,” as the narrator Gant says at the end. It turns pimples into pearls. The main character Sanzonetta is seen with a mask covered with acne. She is tempted to pop them, wishing to get rid of them. To her surprise, at the first pop of a pimple, a pearl comes flying out, and her envious sister soon makes a business out of her previous misery.

I wish my puberty went so well, even if the wealthy teenager’s husband leaves her for an oyster. It’s her bursting pimples that attract him in the first place. That is, they attract him because they pour forth pearls, instead of “cheese.” But the girl who’s lucky enough to get the “shallow man,” also has a sister who tries to get her man by growing a pimple larger than hers, so I guess it’s fair. However, instead of pearls, nothing but brains burst forth. In a repulsive way, the themes of beauty and wealth are played with, finding the beauty in acne and the shallowness in requiring riches.

Overall, it seemed a good choice for a play that is only suppose to be around twenty minutes long, picking the best part of the actual full production. Even though the performers rushed through some scenes, the audience easily understood the simple story line and the speed just ended up increasing the humor.

However, the ensemble seemed to be confused at what their job was. It wasn’t clear if they were just people randomly pulled from the audience. If so, their confusion was slightly distracting while so much was going on, making the set up of some scenes sloppy. However, the principle players held attention in their commanding grace of the stage and the acting was strong. I believed each of the characters as they each showed their faults to the audience —from pimpled face to greediness and could both laugh and feel sick at the thought.

Despite some lines that were stumbled over, Keble did a fabulous job this year, making their performance come alive with painted white faces, marvelous costumes, and elaborate humor. It made me wish I could watch this performance as a full-blown staged production with the same actors and costumes. I wanted more, and that’s a good thing.