Ou Bien Le Debarquement Desastreux is the music and words for a theater piece of the same name staged by Goebbels and using texts by Joseph Conrad, his regular collaborator, the late German playwright Heiner Muller, and Francis Ponge. The Conrad excerpts are from his Congo Diary, and the music is fittingly centered around the beautiful kora playing of Boubakar Djebate. His delightful, traditional sound is the stem from which the text is read (in French), and around which various "interruptions" entwine. Harsh electric guitar riffs, trombone squeals, and sampled sounds, perhaps representing Western culture's impingement on Central Africa, explode with regularity, only to be ignored as the kora, along with sympathetic singing from Sira Djebate, proceeds along its way. The pieces are generally short, and several of them are lovely on their own, but the whole doesn't quite add up to more than their sum, and the listener has more of a sense of a string of isolated thoughts than a complete and unified work. Nonetheless, it's an intriguing addition to Goebbels' canon, and the scattered moments of mysterious beauty make it worth the price of admission. ~ Brian Olewnick