It’s the day after results day. Hungover, covered in unidentifiable bruises and somebody else’s vomit, you trudge downstairs and, to your delight, discover that the elves of Oxford have already delivered your Freshers’ pack (by owl?!) to your doorstep. Filled with naive excitement, you read everything from electrical regulations to stupid second-year in-jokes with equal attention. But beneath the pieces of brightly coloured paper and jolly pictures lurks something badly photocopied, shoddily formatted, and not fun to read. Your First Reading List.

If, holidaying in Europe or hiding under the stairs, you have not yet confronted this document, let me enlighten you. The list will, like all the worst things in this world, be long, difficult, time-consuming, and potentially very expensive. Even English students, supposedly safe in the knowledge that they will spend their degrees reading ‘stories’, will baulk at the fact that most of these ‘stories’ are written in a fake-sounding combination of Anglo-Saxon and French and the rest are set in a time when nobody had sex and authors were obsessively preoccupied with the goings-on of old people in provincial towns.

But fear not. For while there are few tricks to get round this scary institution of Oxford life, what tricks there are I have laid out below.

1. NO MATTER WHAT YOU DO, when you arrive in October there will be people who have read more than you, and people who have read less. There will be people who say they have read everything Tolstoy ever wrote, but who have in fact spent the summer reading ‘One Day’ over and over again, sobbing convulsively into their pillows. There will also be people who don’t appear to know how to read at all and who only got in because they are magic. Don’t let any of these people put you off. Ignore them.

2. IF YOU ARE A SCIENTIST, a quick glance at the list- or the fact that you don’t have one at all- will show you how lucky you are. Anything that says ‘may benefit from reading’ or ‘we suggest for those who are interested’ means you don’t have to read it. Enjoy it while it lasts- once term starts, you will be spending four hundred hours a week doing stupid experiments while arts students are asleep, drunk, or watching boxsets of Peep Show. Second years I’ve spoken to do say it’s a good idea to refresh your misty memories of the chemistry/maths you’re already supposed to know to prevent embarrassment when you’re asked to draw a line with a ruler in first week and can’t remember what a line is.

3. IF YOU ARE AN ARTS STUDENT, the bad news is that you are going to have to read something. But that’s what you signed up for, right? The unfortunate truth is that during term time, you don’t have a lot of time for reading- with an essay a week on up to three primary texts, you don’t have time to read both primary and background material in just a few days alongside your hectic schedule of iPlayer and clubbing. A good rule of thumb for the summer is to try and tackle your novels/plays/poetry for Languages, cases for Law, and background reading for History subjects. The idea is that, on seeing your topic for that week’s essay, you don’t have to Wikipedia it on Monday for a tutorial on Friday. Having the background knowledge beforehand helps enormously.

4. DON’T rush out and buy everything on the list. Using the criteria above, work out what you actually need to have copies of yourself- usually, primary texts/novels, and maybe one background/overview book. Look on Abebooks and Amazon marketplace, because believe me, nobody wants to hold onto these things when they’ve finished studying them and secondhand copies are cheap. As an added bonus, these volumes will probably be studded with inane annotations in the margins, such as ‘I agree!’ or ‘THIS IS BOLLOCKS’. A lot of stuff is also available online: check googlebooks, and have a look at the Oxford library system’s ebooks and journals. And don’t forget that in the Oxford libraries, they have all the books in the world. Even Twilight.

5. CHECK whether the list is for first term or the whole year. We have crazily long holidays because of the emphasis on holiday preparation- so don’t bother reading anything for second or third term this summer, as you’ll have loads of time in December before everyone else gets back from normal universities, and you’ll have forgotten it all by April anyway.

6. BE SENSIBLE. I know Oxford Admissions don’t exactly focus on taking people full of common sense- the cleverest person in college is always that girl who doesn’t know how to make a slice of bread or how to brush her own hair – but by reading the list carefully, it is usually quite obvious what you need to have read. Look at the major topic for each week and give yourself enough grounding to know roughly what the title of the essay means. Beyond that, you can bluff and waffle yourself through most tutorials.

Just don’t be that guy who asks why George Eliot is in drag in his portrait, or the girl who interrupts a first-week Law lecture to ask what those numbers next to the books on her summer reading list were (they’re page numbers, buddy). Because in front of your world-renowned tutor, or three hundred undergrads braying for blood, the last thing you want to look like is stupid.

‘It’s much more focussed on making straight ahead pop songs,’ Hugo Manuel of Oxford-based four piece Jonquil told me at this year’s Field Day festival as we discussed the band’s upcoming, and as yet untitled, album. Not that this was a surprise to hear. Ever since their earliest incarnation rooted in the folk revival of the mid-naughties, Jonquil have been tracing a steady arc away from the abstract meanderings of their first releases towards the more streamlined sounds of Vampire Weekend’s sunny Afro-pop. This musical evolution culminated in 2010’s mini-album, One Hundred Suns, which, to these ears, stood out as one of the most effortlessly contagious records of that year.

Soaring gloriously between dizzying highs and lows accompanied only by a lone keyboard, Hugo’s vocal melody that opens Mexico, the first single to be released from Jonquil’s upcoming album, certainly would not feel out of place on One Hundred Suns. A vocalist of significant talent, Hugo’s delivery is reminiscent of Panda Bear’s in its purity but muscular in a way that distinguishes him from that artist’s swathes of imitators and as Mexico gains momentum his voice is enveloped in a sparkling mix of jangling guitars, horns and keyboards. This is the same restrained sonic palette used to such effect by the band on One Hundred Suns but on Mexico the African tinge of that album has given way to a more Western melodic and rhythmic sensibility. Whilst not a bad move per se, there is a nagging feeling that Mexico lacks some of the mystery, the intangibility, that made tracks like It Never Rains and Get Up so exhilarating. That being said, though, the wordless backing vocals that chatter on the periphery of the track, calling to mind Sung Tongs-era Animal Collective or Sigur Rós’s Gobbledigook, make for a welcome addition to Jonquil’s sound and Mexico’s seemingly endless stream of gorgeous hooks is ultimately undeniable.

Of all the brilliant music being made in Oxford today, be it the fidgety indie of Spring Offensive or the warped neo-soul of Pet Moon, Jonquil’s rush of unpretentious warmth and melody remains perhaps the most affecting. From its opening keyboard stabs to the swirling instrumental that closes out the song, Mexico sees Jonquil continuing on their quest for pop purity and, whilst there may have been casualties along the way, I dare you not to have a smile on your face by the end of its four minutes.

“Sometimes we enjoy playing live, but generally it’s more of a relief when it goes well,” Keith Freund of Trouble Books told me before the final show of their brief UK tour. Perched on the curb outside London’s Café Oto alongside his wife Linda, the only other permanent member of the group, Keith’s manner is as engaging as it is eccentric, fielding my questions with an excitability that allows for only occasional contributions from his more reserved partner. “There are so many variables when performing live and it’s nice to be able to control them more with recording,” Keith went on, perhaps getting to the heart of the duo’s aversion to playing to an audience.

Trouble Books’ music is probably best described as ambient pop, filtering sugar sweet boy/girl duets through a love of Brian Eno and lo-fi recording techniques such that each song inhabits its own, entirely unique, soundworld populated by bubbling synths and swooning guitar loops. It would be fair to say that the power of the duo’s music lies in the minutiae – subtle textures and atmospherics – rather than any visceral emotion that would lend itself to the live setting. Indeed, Keith described to me their unwillingness to “jam” as a group, preferring instead to carefully sculpt and “tinker” with their songs as they are recorded.

Despite expressing a desire to command the precise details in their sound, with their most recent release Trouble Books surrendered some of their creative control by collaborating with Emeralds guitarist Mark McGuire. “It’s one of those rare occasions where you have a dream of how something would turn out and it actually pans out that way,” Keith smiled with, I might add, absolutely no degree of arrogance. Simply entitled Trouble Books and Mark McGuire, the album represents a rare occasion when two established – and wholly idiosyncratic – artists have come together to produce something that effortlessly exceeds the sum of its parts.

“I think we had a sense that it was going to lock up pretty well,” Keith went on, describing the process of working with McGuire, “he adds an extra energy that we lack and he’s much better at guitar so he can fill in a lot of space that we already left empty.” Throughout the record, McGuire’s sparkling guitar loops weave around the songs, enveloping Keith and Linda’s more sparse arrangements in a shimmering gauze of sound. “It was really easy to work with him,” Linda added, “neither of us is accustomed to jamming but he is so when we came up with something he could take it in a completely new direction.”

Having garnered a sizable cult following both in their native USA and across Europe – during their set, Keith told the audience of a “very sincere” Belgian boy who had expressed to the band his penchant for making love to their Endless Pool EP – the duo seem reluctant to expand their operation in order to cater for their growing fan base. “I think Lin and I are tired of going to the post office every day during our lunch breaks,” Keith laughed as I asked him whether we’d be seeing a wider release of Trouble Books and Mark McGuire, only 50 copies of which were initially made available through the band’s UK distributor, MIE Records. However, I certainly do not sense a lack of ambition from the duo. Perhaps it would be more fitting to say that Trouble Books lack the ruthless drive necessary to achieve more widespread recognition, measuring their success instead through their own levels of artistic satisfaction.

The duo’s set later that evening was, as expected, endearingly amateur, though a far cry from the ramshackle performance that Keith’s comments had lead me to expect. In fact, the only song to really fall flat was the only one that was taken from Trouble Books and Mark McGuire, as the duo attempted to compensate for the loss of their friend’s guitar playing. But it is in this amateurism that the group have their greatest asset. Far from a polished “product”, the music Trouble Books make is touching in a way that only homemade music can be and as I watched them play in the candle-lit Café Oto it was almost impossible not to fall in love with it even more deeply.

Trouble Books – Endless Pool EP by Mie Music

[mm-hide-text]%%IMG_ORIGINAL%%3937%%[/mm-hide-text]

[mm-hide-text]%%IMG_ORIGINAL%%3926%%[/mm-hide-text]

[mm-hide-text]%%IMG_ORIGINAL%%3941%%[/mm-hide-text]

[mm-hide-text]%%IMG_ORIGINAL%%3935%%[/mm-hide-text]

[mm-hide-text]%%IMG_ORIGINAL%%3924%%[/mm-hide-text]

[mm-hide-text]%%IMG_ORIGINAL%%3925%%[/mm-hide-text]

[mm-hide-text]%%IMG_ORIGINAL%%3940%%[/mm-hide-text]

[mm-hide-text]%%IMG_ORIGINAL%%3936%%[/mm-hide-text]

[mm-hide-text]%%IMG_ORIGINAL%%3939%%[/mm-hide-text]

[mm-hide-text]%%IMG_ORIGINAL%%3938%%[/mm-hide-text]

[mm-hide-text]%%IMG_ORIGINAL%%3927%%[/mm-hide-text]

[mm-hide-text]%%IMG_ORIGINAL%%3928%%[/mm-hide-text]

[mm-hide-text]%%IMG_ORIGINAL%%3932%%[/mm-hide-text]

[mm-hide-text]%%IMG_ORIGINAL%%3930%%[/mm-hide-text]

[mm-hide-text]%%IMG_ORIGINAL%%3929%%[/mm-hide-text]

[mm-hide-text]%%IMG_ORIGINAL%%3933%%[/mm-hide-text]

Balam Acab is Alec Koone, from Pennsylvania, whose electronic compositions emerged a couple of years ago alongside the short-lived witch house movement; but it’s also the name of a bow-wielding Mayan rain god. It seems appropriate therefore that Wander / Wonder, Koone’s first full-length release (well, it’s over half an hour long) has a fluidity about it: it’s a slow-moving subterranean river of an album, which takes time to gather its full force.

The first half of Wander / Wonder is a frustrating listen: a series of ambient tracks are aborted just as they’re getting into gear, slow-building tributaries that lead nowhere. On ‘Welcome’ and ‘Motion’, crunching percussive loops and sampled water effects are awash with mounting synth lines, but the building pressure has no storm to relieve it, no catharsis and no consummation. ‘Welcome’ rises up into a euphoric synth line, but it’s just teased the ear before it fades quickly away. Most interesting are the vocals, choral or pitch-shifted but always uncanny, which orbit the aural field but refuse to be drawn into sense or centre. Bass synths and skittering drums pile up, and loop crashes against eerie loop; ‘Apart’ is like a Burial off-cut, but heavier and more unearthly.

It is with ‘Now Time’ that the album starts to grow in strength: after all the interesting but slightly soulless ambience of the first four tracks, this sounds almost like an actual song – albeit a remix by a talented madman. Doing clever business with simple elements, this is the first sign on Wander / Wonder that Balam Acab can do structure as well as texture. ‘Oh, Why’ is even better, another almost-song that stands out with a sound like CocoRosie recording for Hyperdub. It even has a verse/chorus thing going on, even if the only distinguishable lyrics are the title.

Thereafter it’s back to looser structures, but ‘Await’ makes more sense than the album’s opening tracks: it’s a fragmentary epilogue to its more conventional predecessors. The album closes with more sampled water, more shifting, uneasy drum loops and bass synths but this time there’s a climax. It all comes together, huge and mighty forms lurching, slowly, in time. Finally, in the last ten seconds of ‘Fragile Hope’, it starts to rain.

The main vexation of Wander / Wonder is the delay of the central, structured tracks, the way they’re prologued by too much ambient aimlessness, intriguing as it may be. The first twenty minutes here are interesting and often engaging, but only occasionally affecting. It’s a mystery why early EP tracks like the enticing ‘See Birds’ have been excluded; a single further example of Balam Acab’s gift for actual songcraft would make this several times the album that it is.

Perhaps, though, the problem isn’t Wander / Wonder itself, but with the mindset with which it’s approached. For the most part this is an album of half-light and half-lucidity, of slow-moving water deep underground: dreampop without the pop. By conscious, critical standards it’s worthy, and grows notably stronger in its second half; but it’s probably unfair for anyone to make a final judgement unless heavily sedated. Maybe the dead ends, shifting thresholds, and loops accumulating like sonic stalactites would all make sense in a semiconscious state. You may as well give it a go.

Bombarding the audience with an audiovisual assault of strings and flashing lights almost before they have sat down, Acorn Productions’ version of this darkly comic (or should that be comically dark?) dinner party begins with a stormy energy that sets the pace for an evening of sustained tension.

Despite having only one setting, sensitive direction from Anna Fox and Robert Nairn meant that there was enough movement to avoid a sense of stagnation, without creating the feeling that the cast were playing musical chairs, as the six guests and their waiter moved about the table during the course of the meal. Similarly, the widely divergent characters represented in what terrifyingly blunt hostess Paige (Charlotte Mulliner) calls her ‘interesting mix of guests’ could easily have ended up as camped up caricatures, but instead were played with a maturity and depth that belied the cast’s (sometimes difficult to ignore) youth.

I admit that I groaned inwardly when a ‘Working Class’ character, Mike (Alfred Enoch), was suddenly introduced to the fray, fearing that Moira Buffini, after providing a series of brilliantly awkward middle class mishaps, would spoil it all by providing a predictably down to earth foil to their affluent extravagance and host Lars’ (Will Hatcher) cringeworthy philosophical flights of fancy.

However, Enoch (whose astronomically inconsequential role in the Harry Potter films was inexplicably trumpeted as a major selling point in the marketing material), despite a somewhat dubious ‘generic common accent’, did a nice turn as the unwilling guest, delivering untempered comments and taunts with a studied impudence that contributed believably to the eventual boiling over of Hatcher’s super laid-back philosopher/guru Lars.

Another notable performance was that of Alice Pearse, who played artist, vegetarian and all-round hippy character Wynne with a beautiful mix of gormlessness, wounded innocence and a pinch of old fashioned British fairplay spirit thrown in for good measure. She evidently had a lot of fun with brilliant lines such as ‘Actually my parents were working class, I’m only middle class through education’ and in describing a certain four letter word as a ‘beautiful orchid’, but again, aided by Buffini’s writing, remained a believable person with real emotion rather than a cartoon character of a new-age victim.

Finally, Rhys Bevan provided the most believable performance as a forty-something as microbiologist Hal. Something about his slightly stiff movements, his grumpiness, his insecure leching (not to mention his beard) created the sense of a man in the midst of a midlife crisis. Bevan was also notable for his comic timing, something that was sometimes lacking in Mulliner’s valium monotone delivery and Hatcher’s langourous drawl.

If I had any complaints, they would relate more to the set and props than to acting and direction. Whilst the plain black of the table, chairs and background might be thought to emphasize the nihilism of Lars’ vacuous philosophy and the lives of his and Paige’s guests, the fact that parts of the plastic chairs showed through as the cast dislodged black cloths, the cheap plastic lobsters and the unconvincing violence (another show by the same company, Mojo, had spectacular stage effects and dressing) made me feel that these aspects had been overlooked.

That said, the performances were almost universally excellent, and I was pleasantly surprised that what at first seemed an example of a tired genre of writing managed to surprise and affect me, despite seeming to pile cliché after cliché in character, plot and thought. How many times has the need to live and seek goals been contrasted with the essential pointlessness of existence? Answers on a self addressed postcard please.

The balance between surrealism, observationally comic dialogue, impassioned speechmaking and dramatic tension was at times strange, which might lead a less sympathetic reviewer to dub it as a bit of a hatchet job. However, the sometimes incongruous mix of deep philosophical wrangling and petty details of characters’ sexual indiscretions struck me as entirely appropriate if neither was taken too much at face value, and Acorn Productions’ canny handling of a potentially risky play certainly left me wanting seconds.