MP3 Kirk Smith - Despair´s Book of Dreams and the Sometimes Radio: Music From The Play

an extraordinay collection of songs recorded live, featuring cello, guitar, broom, piano, ukulele and crowbar.

10 MP3 Songs
POP: with Live-band Production, POP: Quirky



Details:
Singular poetry, songwriting, and singing . . . unforgettable.
The Austin American Statesman

There's a spark of genius in this remarkable and original work.
The New York Theatre Experience

Smith is in fine form, belting out and whispering songs on a series of vintage microphones. And his voice can rip its way right into your heart.
The Austin Chronicle

A mighty work of despair and longing. Smith skates the lines of mythology that only Elvis and Jeff Buckley occupy.
Citysearch.com

A masterful depiction of emotion and the human mind,
Despair is mesmerizing.
The Lake Charles Contraband

George W. Bush and bolo ties aside, not everything emerging from Texas is implicitly awful. In fact, Despair's Book of Dreams and the Sometimes Radio demonstrates distinct promise. This is very likely better programming than Z100.
The Village Voice


About the play:
"It's the waking dreamscape of a lonely, abandoned man capering through the confines of a house as jumbled and tattered as the ruins of his mind. It's soliloquy and song, music and mysticism, even a scattered meditation on the tenuous phantoms of audio frequency. Or infrequency, as the case may be.

Kirk Smith, in his DESPAIR'S BOOK OF DREAMS AND THE SOMETIMES RADIO, directed by Bonnie Cullum, moves us through a dark night of the soul of a certain Constantinopolous: a man whose memories both nurture and terrorize, who is rebuilding within his heartbreak house an antique radio through which he receives broadcasts from ... somewhere. From the dead, from the lost, from a particularly fevered land of Nod. And all of these 'casts for him, for insomniacal Connie, are in lieu of the dreams his unabating wakefulness will not allow.

It's a dark and jarring story that Smith and his vehicle weave for us, a sad clown's dance through the gory alleys of allegory. If you can imagine U2's Bono, say, wrapping around his songs A Narrative Cloak Sewn From the Discarded Raiment of Madness and Regret, well, it's like that. It would even be phrased that way.

Smith is in fine form, belting out and whispering songs on a series of vintage microphones, wielding a variety of instruments that include guitar and broom and crowbar, and backed by the ubermenschen talents of Alex Krigsfeld on piano, Michael Werst on cello, and Ken Burchanal on guitar. Smith's Connie is singing about divinity, it often seems, or at least the divinity of human love. And his voice -- like that of an angry Seraph, or of a particularly golden-throated demon -- can rip its way right into your heart. Especially with the band he's assembled, especially with lyrics like: "One breath in/One smile/One breath out/One bright angel was mine for a while ... "
The Austin Chronicle

For more:
www.radiodespair.com