NYT Watch: enmansband och Kanye Wests rymdopera

The spectacle is framed as a sci-fi space odyssey, with Mr. West as a lone explorer whose starship crashes on an unknown planet. He's stranded in a landscape of colored lights, billowing smoke -- probably enough dry ice to cool Death Valley -- and gorgeous, panoramic video images of clouds, galaxies, fireworks and cosmic eruptions. He converses with his computerized ship, named Jane, and with shooting stars. He raps with barely a respite, and bounds around the stage: striding, hunching, pumping his fist, falling to his knees, grinding against the stage, flailing, shouting his rhymes. It is a show of stamina and lonely self-determination that takes on its own obsessive momentum, like a Samuel Beckett scene staged by Robert Wilson and George Lucas.

Pallett's remarkable solo performances are a key part of why Final\nFantasy first attracted notice. Using his computer as a looping station\nto record a number of brief musical progressions and play them back at\nthe click of a pedal, Pallett constructs his songs in real time,\nbeginning, say, with a rhythm tapped on his violin's sound board or a\nhandful of plucked notes, then adding arpeggios and spiccati and\nfinally his impassioned, slightly mannered vocals, until his\nperformance takes on a richness and scale that the music itself can\nonly partly account for. The effect is both mystifying and perfectly\ntransparent: watching Pallett add each new layer gives a keenly\nvicarious pleasure, an oddly initiatory thrill, not unlike watching a\nsleight-of-hand performance from over the magician's shoulder.