Seeing Tom Jenkinson (aka Squarepusher) perform live is a disheartening experience for fans. Through his records, Jenkinson weans his core audience onto the genres of Intelligent Dance Music (IDM), drill-n-bass, and experimental electronica. In concert, however, he eschews his in-studio sensitivity to particular timbres, instead bombarding his public with a stream of distorted noise more reminiscent of a heavy-metal band. Clad throughout in his preferred stage outfit (the yellow anorak, of course), he occasionally takes off his hood to voice debatable propositions such as “Squarepusher’s gonna eat your fucking face off”.

Jenkinson draws heavily on his subversive live sound in Shobaleader One: d’Demonstrator, infusing the simple logic of his production style with some virtuosic bass-playing. The promotional video for the album testifies to this acoustic-digital dichotomy: we witness both Jenkinson’s finger-picking mastery and his rave-adapted, LED-illuminated face. It reminds us of two things: first, that this man can play the bass guitar better than any other drum-n-bass artist; and second, that he is more capable of self-parody than any of his drum-n-bass contemporaries. Both traits are on full display in d’Demonstrator. The result is a wonderful fusion of different genres that exists somewhere between Squarepusher on iPod and Jenkinson onstage.

If you were one of the many disappointed theatre-goers who weren’t able to get tickets to last week’s run of Murder in the Cathedral, the first thing to know is that you did not miss out on seeing a play. Rather, you missed a nearly indescribable fusion of poetry, performance art and religious experience. But Cherwell, as always, is here to try to describe the indescribable to you.

Had you gotten one of the coveted tickets to the performance, you would have entered Christ Church Cathedral to the sound of echoing voices and a chorus of medieval women would have appeared all around you singing and chanting.

You would have waited breathless with them for Thomas Becket’s arrival and stately walk down the nave. It would probably have taken you the first twenty minutes of the performance to adjust to T.S. Eliot’s mix of verse, dialogue and bizarre poetic imagery that reverberated off the Cathedral’s vaulted ceilings.

But any difficulty in hearing what was actually being said would prove well worth the experience of witnessing Thomas Becket’s arrival, temptation and death in the only Oxford chapel that evokes the medieval grandeur of Canterbury Cathedral itself.

Once you let go of expecting the performance to be like any other play you may have seen, Murder in the Cathedral mesmerized with its eclectic mix of history, language and devotion. When Becket is ultimately stabbed to death at the feet of Christ Church’s gilded altarpiece, you’d likely stand up with the rest of the audience, craning your neck to get a better view.

The hollow cries of grief, red rimmed eyes and tears of the chorus would yield the feeling that you are not watching a performance, but witnessing an event whose meaning is just beyond your grasp. As the lights fade into the black at the end, you would sit in silence before applauding, unwilling to break the spell of a different level of experience created through the performance.

Like medieval mystery plays, Murder in the Cathedral is the modern equivalent of a ritualistic reenactment of a historical and spiritual moment. Unlike most performances of mystery plays, it succeeds in captivating and transporting one to Canterbury in 1170. In a proudly secularized culture, can Eliot’s play about spiritual temptation and martyrdom speak to a society that predominantly views God as a bedtime story for adults? Last week’s production answered that question with a resounding yes.

He’s not exactly one to embrace the conventional – he used to work at a sex shop – but the establishment sure is willing to embrace him. Derwin, the man behind Gold Panda, has garnered accolades from the likes of Pitchfork and NME for his remixes and EPs; but all this praise leaves him slightly nonplussed.

‘It feels weird that I’ve had such a good response, such good press’, he says, comfortably ensconced in a black leather armchair. ‘I feel like there might be a point where it’ll turn around and collapse. The good thing is that a hobby has become a career, a job that I can do and enjoy and not have to worry about wearing a suit or going to work’.
Derwin is indeed highly preoccupied with his work-wear. With his skinny jeans, ubiquitous indie t-shirt and requisite trucker cap, he blends right into the crowds at Washington D.C.’s notoriously indie club The Black Cat, where I meet him. But it hasn’t always been this comfortable for the DJ.

A few years ago, Derwin spontaneously left his home in Essex, selling his entire record collection, to study Japanese at the School of African and Oriental Studies in London. ‘I was pretty obsessed with Japanese stuff’, he explains. ‘At the same time, I was thinking, ‘Aww, I’ve gotta work, I’ve gotta buy a house’. So I tried to get a job in a bank, something using Japanese. So I’d come back from an interview, wearing a suit and shoes and I’d just put my shoes in the bin and be, like, ‘What the fuck am I doing? I’m not interested in any of these jobs’. I just gave up looking, basically.’

Derwin’s, who only began making music in 2008, is a rookie. He got his start remixing bands like Simian Mobile Disco and Bloc Party, but with the encouragement of Wichita Records, he moved onto producing original material. The BBC included Gold Panda in its longlist for the ‘Sound of 2010’; when I bring this up, however, it only elicits a generous murmur of ‘whatever’s from the man. In fact, Derwin’s subsequent assertion that his music is more along the lines of ‘the sound of 1998 or something’ is telling: Gold Panda just doesn’t really care about the boundaries of time.

Lucky Shiner, his recent debut album, proves his point. Its thrillingly eclectic sources of inspiration – we can hear the zither’s whine, the shaman’s wail, and the taxi’s whiz – are broken down and reassembled into perfectly melodious compositions. They’re anything but 2010. But the album is also a highly personal one. The crescendo of the jingle-jangle in ‘You’ and the svelte sense of urgency thrumming in ‘Snow & Taxis’ hint at the complexity of the man inside his shell of music.

For a start, he hates performing and tends to dislike his own material. ‘I think I’m pretty far behind a lot of people’, he confessed. ‘I’ve listened to a lot of other electronic music and I think, ‘Why am I making this basic, stupid music when people are creating more interesting, intelligent stuff?’. People like Mount Kimbie, they’re really great… I just feel like maybe my music is a bit childish compared to what I listen to’.

His thoughts on branding are similarly disenchanted: “Someone mentioned recently, ‘If you want to make a living out of [Gold Panda] you should get a brand going’: ‘Gold Panda’ this, ‘Gold Panda’ that… I suppose that’s a part of it, it’s a business, but I don’t know if I’m really into that. I mean, it seems like things are just going well for me anyway. It’s just like Gold Panda is this thing that people can enjoy. It doesn’t have to be a brand”.

So what’s the key to his success? ‘Luck,’ he says. The establishment begs to differ.

The OUDS elections last year were a flurry of controversy that culminated with the OxStu drama columnist declaring that he was ‘watching OUDS burn’. Of course, the only people who don’t find thesps clique-y are thesps themselves, so much of the drama had to do with petty student politics. But, at the forefront, was a classic battle of the sexes.

It turns out that while most people interested in drama are aspiring actresses reading English, most of the parts available are for aspiring actors reading PPE. This is a familiar phenomenon in both student and professional drama, and the result in Oxford is lots of talented actresses scrounging for bit parts while less inspiring male actors carry away roles like Hamlet and whoever all those boys were in Stoppard’s Invention of Love.

Next week the OUDS battle of the sexes is being staged yet again. The Burton Taylor is proffering the first student production of Enda Walsh’s The New Electric Ballroom, the story of three sisters perpetually caught reliving a shared sexual encounter from their adolescence.

The Playhouse, on the other hand, is boasts Peter Schaffer’s tale of Peruvian pillage and plunder in The Royal Hunt of the Sun. Royal Hunt’s script offers a staggering two parts for women (non-speaking) and twenty one for men, whilst The New Electric Ballroom has three female parts to its solitary male role.

Royal Hunt director Charlotte Beynon speaks of the pressure she felt when bidding for a Playhouse slot with a show of nearly all men: ‘A lot of people told me that OUDS would not want to fund it because it was mostly men’. At the time, OUDS was considering bringing in a ‘gender officer’ to require all funded shows provide an equal number of parts to men and women.

But in a play about Pizarro’s interactions with Spanish soldiers and Inca warriors, it would have perhaps taken away from the historical accuracy if Incan warriors were played by a flock of eighteen-year-old girls. That said, Beynon ended up finding a way to cast 8 women and 15 men in her show – though this partly made a virtue of necessity as Beynon had dozens of women auditioning for the play and only a handful of men.

Meanwhile, Phoebe Éclair-Powell, director of The New Electric Ballroom, says that the gender themes in Walsh’s play did attract her to the work, as it is a play about ‘what it is to be on the cusp of womanhood’. But far from being just a ‘woman’s play’, Éclair-Powell fell in love with ‘the dark humour, great visuals and desperate storytelling’ such that she contacted the playwright directly and negotiated the first ever student performance of the work.

Despite the wildly different themes and male to female ratios in these two 3rd week productions, both Beynon and Éclair-Powell agree that gender and casting is tricky in the world of Oxford drama. Beynon asserts that an official gender officer or policy ‘isn’t the job of the OUDS’.

Éclair-Powell agrees, saying ‘I don’t think they should enforce it but I think there should be more awareness about the choice of OUDS shows in general. We are students and should be tackling plays that allow for greater balance of gender roles before we are catapulted into a world where the chance to do this becomes limited’. Beynon similarly suggests a better role for the OUDS in ‘promoting awareness of plays that have a better balance in gender’.

Ultimately, these two female directors stand together in promoting the importance of artistic integrity over that of gender equality and suggesting that, really, the plays themselves are to blame.

As a former Cherwell editor once famously remarked, ‘Oh hi French Cinema, maybe you’d be interested in using tripods and dialogue in future?’

It’s a sentiment we can all identify with. When you hear, ‘Maybe not a French film tonight,’ it is almost always code for, ‘Please don’t make me sit through two hours of people smoking at a cafe, occasionally saying something meaningful about life and then suddenly having vigorous sex.’ The Auteur theory, the Nouvelle Vague, existentialism – these are all interesting concepts, but not necessarily ones the audience wants to grapple with over popcorn. However, contrary to popular belief, a film can be very intelligent and very French, but still easy to watch and hugely enjoyable.

Director and writer Francis Veber teams his ingenious plots with first class comic performances to make winning French farces. He is still, perhaps, best known for his 1998 release Dîner de Cons (The Dinner Game), a perfect comedy about intellectual snobs who compete to bring the biggest idiot they can find to dinner. If you have seen Dinner for Schmucks, the recent American remake, try to erase this from your mind before giving Veber a go. The American release has been criticised for softening the satire of the class system and using the idea simply as a pretext for getting a bunch of comic actors to act up in a posh dining room, utterly failing to capture the intelligent wit of the original.

Veber has been likened to a modern Molière and perhaps his films are what you would expect from more traditional French theatre, with their intricate plotting and ridiculous situations. The brilliant 1978 farce, La Cage aux Folles, for which Veber co-wrote the screenplay, also originated in the theatre and is, after Amélie, the second highest grossing French film of all time in the U.S.

Another Veber film that’s worth a look is Le Placard (The Closet), a comedy about a man who pretends to be gay to keep his job at a rubber factory. Such a premise could so easily descend into puerile jokes and uncomfortable stereotypes under less skilful direction, but you can trust Veber to see the whole thing through with subtlety, sense and a lot of wit. It helps, of course, that the film contains two of France’s most talented actors, Gérard Depardieu and Daniel Auteuil, who both have a real knack for comedy. Depardieu has starred in everything from Molière’s Tartuffe to the Asterisk and Obelisk films, and makes the recent release Mammuth enjoyable despite a vague and anticlimactic storyline. Daniel Auteuil, though less well known in Britain, is equally versatile. He is in his element in the understated satirical comedy from 2006, Mon Meilleur Ami, directed by Patrick Leconte, where he plays a successful but aloof Parisian who has to find himself a best friend in ten days to win an argument.

So next time you feel like a laugh, it may be worth braving the subtitles; you may find there’s more invention and wit in many French films to more than make up for any existential chain-smoking and louche sexual deviancy.

At a time when the world of animation is slowly but surely becoming saturated with CGI and computer-based media, A Town Called Panic is a welcome coolant for a rapidly over-heating genre. In fact, it’s not just animation but modern cinema as a whole that desperately needs to come up for air: computer animation is suffocating a film’s originality and compromising its integrity for the sake of a superficial sensory cinematic experience. A Town Called Panic marks the reintroduction of stop-motion animation to the market as a testament to raw ingenuity; and what a good time to do so.

With the unprecedented popularity and veneration of the indie, arthouse and ‘alternative’ film scene, it has become difficult for filmmakers the world over to permeate the market with something ‘original’: essentially, creating something experimental and ‘never before seen’ is something that has been rendered impossible. However, just when we thought it couldn’t be done, the team behind A Town Called Panic steps up to the mark. Their feature-length animated tale based on a cult Belgium animated television series of the same name follows three toys – Cowboy, Indian and Horse – who, on their way to reclaim the stolen walls of their house, stumble across the centre of the earth, arctic tundra, and an aquatic parallel world.

However, such incidents do not seem to come as a surprise to our three plasticine protagonists. Ordinarily, they reside peacefully in an undisturbed countryside town nestled in undulating hills and surrounded by vast expanses of luscious green grass (more plasticine, that is). At first glance, this could very well be the setting for an offshoot episode of Pingu. However, we soon begin to notice that their habitat is nothing less than a world of the absurd, complete with a horse with a driving licence and conversational farm animals.
It is the juxtaposition of this infantile backdrop and French fantasy that gives the film that something that becomes immediately apparent; at its first British screening it was introduced as ‘nothing you’ve ever seen before’. I steadily realised that its success as a film is due to the contrast between its visual simplicity and the creative maturity of its plot, script and characters, with the latter portrayed by evocatively nostalgic children’s toys of the kind that were replaced at the turn of the millennium by their digital counterparts. Then, contrast this with the film’s first-class rock ‘n’ roll soundtrack.

In fact, the contradictions just keep on coming: the equine-suited house, opinionated pigs, a next-day delivery of a billion bricks, a waterless under-water house, the centre of the earth a minute down the road and Arctic plains through a trap door.

However, as simple as it may seem at first, the film was by no means simple to make. Their stop-motion animation took 1500 plastic toys and 260 days of production requiring over 200 clones of each single character. On screen, Belgian directors Stéphane Aubier and Vincent Patar make this painstakingly complex technique look casual, effortless and as spontaneous as childsplay.

Known commercially as Pic Pic André in honour of the central characters of their first animated project, Aubier and Patar both have an impressive fifteen year back-catalogue of internationally renowned animation. Over these years they have successfully tamed and honed their style into something unpredictable and thoroughly unique: a killer combination. Even for French cinema, the pair remain unparalleled in their individuality: even the triumphant animated 2003 hit animation Belleville Rendezvous looks almost generic beside Aubier and Patar’s visionary cinema.

Begrudgingly I admit, however, that A Town Called Panic is not going to be a blockbuster of any measurable magnitude. However, it would be a shame if the film remained a secret, and it is worth tracking down during its brief cinema run. Ignored by the Oscars and shunned by the Red Carpet, it is left only to its loyal fans to sing its praises and revel in cinematic history.