Some people have taken to calling Zola Jesus – alias Nika Roza Danilova – ‘the goth Lady Gaga’. This is, of course, utter rubbish, but it’s only on Conatus that she’s started to demonstrate exactly why. Last year’s Stridulum II was, instrumentally speaking, thin and underpowered, but Danilova finally has the production to match her powerful, chilly voice. Conatus is heavy, cavernous, and darkly beautiful, taking atmospheric cues from witch house but filling out its clattering percussion and throbbing synthesisers with strings and piano – oh, and That Voice. 

The crucial difference between Gaga and Zola is that – unlike the cut-and-paste Madonna pastiches that make up 98% of Ms Germanotta’s back catalogue – Danilova has not only done her homework, but also turned it into origami afterwards. There’s a definite hint of Siouxsie Sioux in the icy splendour of her vocals, and the industrial samples and noise breakdown on ‘Vessel’ are reminiscent of early Nine Inch Nails, but the best tracks on Conatus are those where Zola Jesus keeps her influences at arm’s length.

 In fact, the greatest risk Danilova runs is attracting a different tag: ‘goth Florence’. ‘Lick the Palm of the Burning Handshake’, with piano chords cutting crisply through the electronic haze, and ‘In Your Nature’ are good enough but stick slightly too closely to the formula set by The Machine. Another problem is the favouring of passion over lyrical intelligibility: there’s a hell of a lot of feeling here, but it’s difficult to tell exactly why.

Still, tracks like the thrilling, slow-burning ‘Collapse’, or the mighty ‘Seekir’ – a proper dance track – prove that Zola Jesus has the ability to do something that’s entirely her own. The fact that this album begins not with a potential hit single but with the deep, pulsing, minute-long instrumental ‘Swords’ suggests that Danilova is willing to reject the easy option. All she needs to do now is resist the temptation to become Florence Welch with thicker eyeliner, because Conatus shows that she can do something far more interesting.

Things to hold on to are precious in Adams’ world. Just as his characters cling to their own sense-making objects – a towel, the phrase ‘Don’t Panic’, or a cup of tea – Adams gives us a Guide, for moments of disorientation and hopelessness. To use the Telegraph’s recent definition of a cult novel as ‘the sort of book that people carry around like a totem’, Hitchhiker’s Guide is a paradigm case.

Adams’ ironically named ‘Guide’ proves as arbitrary a thing to hold onto as anything else. Absurd and inexplicable, filled with the horror and humour of paradox, existence here is inescapably senseless. Reflecting on Earth throughout the galactic adventures, Adams notes the insanities of modern life: why do we need the instructions on a pack of toothpicks, detailing a technique which cavemen mastered 600,000 years ago? The most mundane areas of human behaviour are made to reveal the great delusions and assumptions we hold.

Equally, the grand and important is brought crashing down to the mundane. Adams’ jokes, and his story arcs, resolve themselves via anticlimax and surprising inversions. The series does not celebrate its heroes’ ability to overcome problems; Arthur Dent rarely wins his battles through any intentional action of his own. He is plucked from trouble, as he is deposited in it, by bizarre coincidence. Adams’ work is beyond traditional linear sci-fi narratives, with masterful intelligent life forms in control of their own fates. The most masterful intelligent life forms in Hitchhiker’s Guide, like the Ruler of the Universe, are figures of resignation.

Perhaps the emotional immediacy of this comes from how Adams makes an organising principle out of what existence feels like at its worst and most baffling of moments. His characters are repeatedly squashed by enormous frustrations – pointless cruelties of fate. They are not rescued by any divine system of justice, but by fluke.

He then gives us characters who shrug, and hold onto their towel. There is inspiration even in this conceptualisation of a random universe; we may not have the Answer (or even the Question), but we have something to keep us going. Adams’ vision is not bleak; it is always delivered with warmth, and there is companionship in the way he sees a universe we recognise. This is the comfort which the Guide gives us, and why it has been a ‘totem’ for 30 years and counting.

Full disclosure: I probably shouldn’t be reviewing this. I first heard Feist back in 2006, and something about the sultry vocals and acrobatic turns of her delivery touched my adolescent heart. I was hooked. I listened to 2004’s Let It Die obsessively, as well as the 2007 follow-up The Reminder – a chart-topping and critical success, due in no small part to the notorious iPod ad – and even scoured the internet for her under-the-radar self-pressed debut in 1999, Monarch (it’s worth the search). 

For reasons that I can’t quite fathom, I, who would rather listen to anything but the unending hordes of ‘female indie singer-songwriters’, am an unremitting and incorrigible Feist fan. Yet despite my heightened anticipation, I couldn’t have been prepared for Metals, her latest and first release in four years. Gorgeously produced by Gonzales and Valgeir Sigurðsson (noted for his work with Björk and Nico Muhly), the lush Metals is a work of understated but unmistakeable sublimity.

 Managing to be at once restrained and wholly enveloping, the semi-orchestral instrumentation beautifully accompanies Feist’s already striking vocal ability. The emotional ‘Graveyard’, where her voice touchingly strains on her repeated pleas to ‘bring them all back to life’, is perfectly accompanied by dirge-esque horns, organ, and hushed cymbals. The rapturous ‘A Commotion’, on the other hand, pits Feist’s multi-tracked vocal chords against the roar of circular-breathing driven saxophone  blasts. 

But the most affecting of the Metals roster is the trio at the halfway mark: ‘Bittersweet Melodies’, ‘Anti-Pioneer’, and ‘Undiscovered First’, each of which starts softly but erupts in a cathartic and unique climax. ‘Bittersweet Melodies’ makes use of light crash cymbals, strings, and a shimmering piano, while ‘Undiscovered First’ resorts to a rougher guitar backing (sprinkled with tambourines) complemented by a host of back-up singers. ‘The Circle Married the Line’, however, is where Feist’s utterly breathtaking voice takes centre-stage, jumping octaves alongside swelling strings, breaking slightly in moments of wrenching emotion. I’m taken all over again.

I’ve always been intrigued by viral marketing. Some campaigns are incredibly successful, like Cadbury’s drumming gorilla, whilst others are serious flops. Big wigs at ad agencies the world over go grey in their attempt to find their holy grail – that elusive ingredient that actually creates ‘buzz’.

There is no definitive, repeatable formula, as Anneloes van Gaalan says in The Medium is the Message: ‘Ultimately, every rule related to, or governing, advertising is ridiculous’.

So when @TodaysArt started following me on Twitter (@harryscholes FYI), I was close to blocking them. What is TodaysArt and who are these internet hypesters? Over the next few weeks, the name kept cropping up all over my Internet reading: they were mentioned on the fantastic mnnl ssgs blog and people started @-mentioning it in their tweets.

It turned out that TodaysArt is a two-day festival held annually in The Hague. By day it is an arts festival, with a focus on visual and performance art in an urban setting. This year the theme was ‘leap into the void’ and the philosophy behind the works was a comment on cities present and future.

There were an overwhelming number of workshops, installations, exhibitions and concerts. Of particular note was Martin Messier’s Sewing Machine Orchestra whose sound sources were eight Singer sewing machines. The mechanical clicks and whirrs are then processed to create extremely varied results. Each of the Singers is linked to a lightbulb which pulses with the music adding an intense visual aspect to the performance.

At night, the timetable shifts its focus to music – techno being the dominant genre. Following serious disappointment when I was informed that Hiroaki Umeda’s dance and lighting show was sold out, I started queuing for Murcof two hours early and was first in line (keen, I know). Murcof teamed up with the artist AntiVJ who produces immersive, slowly morphing visuals that were projected onto a transparent screen and responded to Murcof’s rich soundscapes in real time.

The bloggers from mnml ssgs also curated a stage on both nights, and the lineup was fairly similar, at least in philosophy, to the Labyrinth festival which took place the weekend before in Japan.

Nuel kicked things off with a deep, downtempo set: a sound he and fellow Italian Donato Dozzy have been pushing lately. Later, Raime left the crowd a little confused – their slow, disjointed post-punk beats aren’t the most danceable, but they made up for this with the sheer quality of their productions. The innovation continued on Saturday night with Robert Henke presenting his ‘Monolake Live Surround’ set which made effective use of a surround sound speaker set up, the first of its kind, and generative visuals courtesy of Tarik Barri. Peter van Hoesen closed the night off perfectly with his trademark restrained, driving techno.

This was a different festival to what you will be used to. Combining art, music, and graphics, it was truly innovative and took place in venues across the city, which limited your possibilities, but did mean you could eat and sleep well. Everyone I talked to in The Hague described TodaysArt as a ‘very nice’ festival. It was very nice, but it was also much, much more than that.

When I met Dan Bejar, the mastermind behind Destroyer, at this year’s Green Man festival it would suffice to say I was distinctly underprepared. Armed with a set of questions written mostly by my co-editor, a self-professed Destroyer obsessive, my knowledge of Bejar’s music extended no further than a cursory acquaintance with his most recent album, Kaputt. Such is the level of almost religious devotion that Bejar commands from his cult following, I felt like something of a charlatan entering into the interview with little more than a passing interest in the man’s work and I can’t deny I felt a sizable degree of pressure as I made my way to meet him.

Released back in January this year, the slick 80s production of Kaputt had presented a considerable barrier to me on listening to the record. Arriving just as the blog driven fad of cheap new wave pastiche reached its most widespread, and its most grating, Kaputt’s wash of synths and canned beats, topped off with rich, jazzy horn arrangements, came with all the wrong connotations. “The record took a long time to make,” Bejar explained in his reserved near whisper as I strained to hear him above Wild Nothing’s set blearing from the nearby tent, “and even during the course of a year and a half I did notice that more and more bands were glomming on really thin, questionable sounds that came out from the commercialisation of 80s new wave.” 

Quick to distance himself from that trend, which had arisen from the bastardisation of the hypnagogic movement’s lofty – but admirably sincere – aspirations to recontextualise the most throwaway aspects of 80s pop culture, Bejar assured me that it was never his intention to latch onto the snowballing success of the sound. “I always wanted to make a record that was just as lush and detailed as possible – which is something that the 80s did have going for it,” he told me, describing his personal vision for Kaputt, articulating his artistic motivations with an understated eloquence. “They sacrificed really strong signal paths for the sake of creating these vaguely exotic aural spaces, and I liked that,” he continued, describing his fascination with the era, “I knew I wanted to make a studio heavy record, and for me that will always mean an 80s record.”

Well aware he was running the risk of drawing accusations of “style over substance” and “kitsch for the sake of cool”, with Kaputt Bejar made the album he had always hoped to make in spite of, not because of, the current trends. Indeed, delving further into Destroyer’s back catalogue it becomes clear that Bejar is an artist who is constantly forging his own, defiantly unique, path. Running through his work is a staunch refusal to temper his eccentricities, both as a songwriter and as a singer, instead celebrating the distinctness of his voice with darting, off-kilter melodies bursting at the seams with torrents of – in Bejar’s own words, typical of his endearing self-awareness – “the most adamantly poetic lyrics possible”.

Over the sixteen years since the project’s inception, Destroyer has explored countless different styles and genres but the great unifying constant has been Bejar’s unmistakable personality, tying his sprawling body of work together as a whole. “I’d say Kaputt is the first pop record I’ve ever made,” Bejar described how he views the current incarnation of Destroyer, “to me, that means it’s an album that focuses on production more than anything else.” Kaputt certainly has a tighter focus than any previous Destroyer album; the arrangements are lean, the production smooth and Bejar has calmed his often dense lyrical style, affording the music new space to breathe. “It’s different from other Destroyer records where it seems like something of a battle between the band and the singer – I like that as well but it just wasn’t what I was interested in on this particular record,” Bejar told me, expressing his desire to step back from the more elaborate style of composition that has characterised his previous albums.

One of the most impressive aspects of Kaputt as an album is that whilst it is clearly a carefully controlled, streamlined production – “we went in with a strict palette of sounds to use and we stuck to it,” Bejar told me – the overall feel of the record is remarkably loose. Bejar described the process of recording with the large group of musicians that he had assembled for the record, accounting for its improvisational feel, “it was totally free. It was just go in and play whatever you feel like, wherever you feel like.” Throughout the album, decorative horn parts scatter the songs, highlighting the most melodic and emotionally involved passages, and the longer tracks slide gracefully from ambient clusters of synths and woodwind to more propulsive, vocal-lead sections. 

“I’ve tried to make all sorts of records and they’ve all ended up slightly left or right of the mark,” Bejar laughed as I asked him whether he was satisfied with Kaputt as Destroyer’s first “pop” album, “and I’m sure this one did as well. Some of the parts that make it up are some of the least pop things I’ve ever heard put to tape in a Destroyer studio; it’s mostly just free jazz and ambient synths.” Not that failure is something that worries Dan Bejar. During the brief period of time I spent researching for our meeting, a statement that he had made in a recent interview had piqued my interest: “I think more people should fail at art.”

Having paused for a moment when I asked if he could elaborate on that comment, he told me: “I guess I meant that I like flawed records and flawed works of art that aren’t afraid to completely fall on their face, there’s something in bold gestures that make it worthwhile. I find that people make a lot of safe choices, especially in pop music.” By this point in our conversation I had realised how wrong I had been to dismiss Destroyer on hearing Kaputt only a handful of times; far from a sterile exercise in style, the album is borne of Bejar’s steadfast ambition to realise his artistic visions. Behind Kaputt’s polished facade, the bright sheen of synths and horns, there lies a vulnerability, a humanity, betrayed in Bejar’s wavering voice and deeply immersive, evocative lyrics. He laughed, “I tend to like things that have ridiculous goals, really extreme visions that are maybe really personal and exclude the world somehow. Things like that show a certain strength.”

Bejar added, perhaps describing the guiding principle behind his work as Destroyer, “that’s all you can really do, to aim to please yourself. I don’t make a lot of conscious moves.” So wrapped up in his own creative world, it seems only incidental to Dan Bejar that there might be other people out there who feel some sort of connection with his music, “it’s all really super instinctual. I don’t write the way I write because I want it to sound awkward or strange. It’s just how it comes out.” This sentiment was carried over to his performance later that evening; an utterly mesmerising front man, Bejar seemed almost completely unaware of his audience, only adding to his irresistible air of mystique on stage.

Dan Bejar is an all or nothing artist. Not only in the way that he approaches making music but also in the way one needs to listen to his music. A body of work as wildly ambitious, complex and fully realised as Destroyer’s is a rare and wonderful thing in today’s musical climate of instant gratification and disposability. Throw yourself into Bejar’s work and you’ll quickly become lost in his idiosyncratic world, carried away on winding melodies and the vivid imagery of his poetry. After our brief meeting that’s exactly what I did: I have been well and truly converted.

Oxford isn’t known for its galleries, but if you look hard enough it’s filled with small, unexpected (and usually free) exhibition spaces which are perfect for procrastination and an escape from college life.

Working from the traditional downwards, several Oxford museums are showing interesting anthropological collections this autumn. The Ashmolean has a collection of Chinese graphics, while the Pitt Rivers Museum is hosting a never-before-seen series of 1950s Cape Town photography by Bryan Heseltine and, of course, Angela Palmer’s Ghost Forest (those giant tree stumps outside the museum).

The Museum of the History of Science is running a mysterious exhibition called Eccentricity until October 16th, where they will display a selection of eclectic objects along side ‘irregular behaviour’ from museum staff.

Delving into its enormous collection of Old Masters, Christ Church Picture Gallery is curating Clouet to Claude, a selection of French Master drawings, and entry is free to University members.

Featuring a great cafe and shop, with some art thrown in, Modern Art Oxford (across the road from Camera) is running two exhibitions until the 20th of November: a collection of installation, sculpture and sound by Mexican artist Abraham Cruzvillegas, and a film installation called Dead Star Light  by Kerry Tribe.

The O3 Gallery in Oxford Castle is another option for fans of contemporary art, and opening on 15th October is a collection of haunting pinhole photography taken at the castle by Mary Foulkes. Replacing it in mid-November are etchings and drawings inspired by fairy tales, created by Flora McLachlan.

For the intrepid (or the lucky few that live in Jericho), Art Jericho, open Wednesdays to Saturdays, is hosting the Society of Woodcutters annual exhibition, endearingly titled Against the Grain, until October 23rd.  The space will then be displaying Querty, text-based art by four international artists.

And finally, The Jam Factory arts centre (also home to a restaurant and marmalade shop) on Park End Street is showing a collection of drawings by John Buckley, and is ending its Marmalade and Manners exhibition today (October 5th) with an art auction for charity, so run along there right now and you can start your very own gallery in your tiny student room.

Destroyer – Streethawk: A Seduction (2001)

The lo-fi modesty of Streethawk – the real standout of Destroyer’s early catalogue – masks pitch-perfect songwriting, and, of course, Dan Bejar’s trademark lyrical complexity.

 Destroyer – Trouble in Dreams (2004)

An almost exaggerated culmination of Destroyer’s pre-Kaputt work, Trouble in Dreams is a melodramatic MIDI-infused masterpiece, like the score to a one-man futuristic-chivalric musical.

The New Pornographers – Twin Cinema (2005)

The discography of Destroyer betrays a certain pop sensibility at times, and Bejar finds his true outlet in Canadian indie supergroup The New Pornographers, of which he is a part. Incontestably their best, Twin Cinema is a power pop triumph.

Swan Lake – Enemy Mine (2009)

Enemy Mine is the product of a three-way collaboration between Bejar and fellow Canadian songwriters Carey Mercer (of Frog Eyes) and Spencer Krug (of Wolf Parade and Sunset Rubdown), who release under the moniker of Swan Lake. Bejar’s contributions include the wonderfully downtrodden lamentations of ‘Heartswarm’. 

Destroyer – Kaputt (2011)

Surely one of the best releases this year, Kaputt is a triumph of Bejar’s honed musicianship. Atypical in its relative lyrical and structural straightforwardness, its distinct melodies and hazy soundscapes invite repeated listening. 

When Bonnie Greer cheerfully tells me that she is staging a new opera about the television programme Question Time, I become a little lost for words. I am speaking to Greer only a few days after the London Philharmonic Orchestra has suspended four of its musicians who signed a letter, published in The Independent, calling on the BBC to cancel a concert by the Israel Philharmonic. Wherever you stand on musical boycotts, the London Philharmonic’s bizarre claim that ‘for the LPO, music and politics do not mix’ only feeds the overwhelming public perception of classical music as a gilded cage, incapable of anything beyond a slavish devotion to the past. An opera about Question Time suddenly feels like a breath of fresh air.

 Greer of course appeared as a panellist on the BBC programme two years ago, alongside the BNP leader Nick Griffin. The experience was to be life-changing for her. ‘When I was asked to do Question Time, I was a little aware of its significance but since I wasn’t brought up in the United Kingdom I really didn’t know how important this broadcast was to so many people’, Greer tells me, ‘and suddenly this universe opened up to me that I hadn’t actually known was there. I was stopped on the street by people I didn’t know who gave me their opinion about what they wanted to have in the broadcast and how they felt about being British. I was totally unprepared for that kind of emotional outpouring because for me it had always been just another programme.’ Opening newspapers to find herself being discussed and rated was clearly an overwhelming experience for Greer, who did not have the luxury of a politician’s entourage to fall back on. ‘For me, looking back at the broadcast is always about something other than what happened on that day. I just remember all the things I went through in the run-up to it’.

 Watching the audience members expressing themselves was the most moving experience for Greer as she sat through the actual broadcast. ‘It didn’t matter what the politicians were saying. It was as if the audience had to say something about how they saw the United Kingdom, what they thought it was, what problems they thought it had and how they thought these should be solved. As I sat there I had so much time literally on my hands because I didn’t really speak that much. And I guess my playwright’s mind sat there and I thought this is really a piece of art.’

 It was immediately apparent in Greer’s mind that she had an opera on her hands and in January last year she approached Deborah Bull, the Creative Director of the Royal Opera House. ‘I said, look, I would like to do Question Time as an opera — something for the Royal Opera’s experimental wing, the Linbury. I wanted to create a piece of experimental opera that wouldn’t last more than an hour. People who weren’t used to the opera form could come and see it.’ Contrary to various reports in the media, Greer is adamant that she never had any intention of writing something that had Nick Griffin singing in it. ‘I just didn’t want to be a part of anything like that and I didn’t think anybody wanted to hear anything like that.’

 What Greer wanted to capture in an operatic sense was the psychic turmoil that she witnessed in the run-up to the Question Time broadcast. ‘If you know the Hitchcock film Rear Window, then it’s as if I’m looking at these windows and they’re all different people from all kinds of ethnicity and ages, talking about the Britain that they know and how no-one is listening to them and no-one cares about their point of view — it’s really the nation up until that broadcast. The opera’s title, Yes, is about all of us being in a nation on the brink of so much change. We can say yes to being citizens of it instead of fleeing.’ Greer sees herself working in reaction to the passive experience often associated with much of the classical tradition. ‘People can walk out after the opera asking questions as opposed to the kind of experience where you sit back, absorb and enjoy it and clap. This opera should be the beginning of something for people’.

 With Greer’s libretto and music written by the British composer Errollyn Wallen, Yes is the first time that Covent Garden has seen two black women collaborate on a new piece. ‘I’m very aware of the fact that we’re two black women and I don’t think any major house has done this before’, Greer acknowledges, ‘but the door can be opened. We have not been dictated to. This is our point of view, our way of seeing the world. I hope people can see that opera isn’t some fusty, dusty, old piece of work that doesn’t have anything to do with anybody. Once you get involved in opera, it’s the most perfect way of doing art because it just combines everything. It’s a play and yet it’s also music at its most complex. Opera is the work of people coming together at one of the highest levels that you can come together as a creative process’.

 The process by which her playwright’s mind adapts to the operatic tradition fascinates Greer. ‘In the theatre the playwright constructs a play and everything must be built around that. There the composer is still an addition. In opera that is reversed and the music is now first. It’s been a learning curve for me. I have to build within the places that the composer allows you to be in. It’s a great discipline and also teaches you how much music means to humans’, she enthuses. ‘When you work in opera you realize that music is literally another language. It’s become quite addictive for me now to get involved with opera because music is really bigger than words’.

 Given Greer’s obvious enthusiasm for the medium, I’m interested to see whether she agrees that the classical music community has nevertheless slipped into social complacency. ‘I think it has become bourgeois over the years’, she concedes, ‘since a lot of really political opera has been shut down and opera composers have had to prettify what they’re trying to say. These trends get promoted because it is a very expensive art form and it has become a plaything of the wealthy’. But Greer is passionate in her defence of opera in itself. ‘Working class people in Italy go to the opera at night and they take their friends and their kids to sit and listen to Puccini and Verdi. Verdi himself was writing during the Risorgimento and all of his operas were a call for the Italian people to rise up. The people were able to absorb the metaphor of the opera even though the opera itself may seem frivolous.

 ‘There’s a scene in Yes where a man is painting something that he doesn’t understand. Suddenly he stands back and realizes what he’s painting. He’s painting his nation and he’s painting his inner self in relation to that nation. He says now he understands its relevance, that this nation is baking in its own shit and he’s not part of it.’ It is clear that Greer revels in taking aim at the elitist posturing, high camp and other loaded stereotypes unhappily associated with opera today. But it is a very personal compulsion that has been the main driving force behind Greer’s opera. ‘I think that the liberal left has become too comfortable. We have too many professional leftists and people who espouse a certain point of view but actually don’t have a clue about it. Why are there black guys in the English Defence League? It says something to me about how smug the liberal left has become. To write this opera is my march. There’s still room in society for one person to say something.’

It is refreshing to hear someone enthuse about opera as something subversive, defiantly political and still necessary. ‘It’s not a universal statement, it’s a tiny statement’, Greer adds, ‘It’s my snapshot of a moment in time from my camera. You accept or don’t accept the snapshot. But it’s an hour long and you’ll have some good tunes to hum’.