Peter Beard

Mary Beard is a Professor of Classics at Cambridge University. She is the editor of The Wonders of the World which is "a small series of books that will focus on some of the world's most famous sites or monuments." Several books have already been published, including Beard's The Parthenon (Wonders of the World), Beard's and Keith Hopkins' The Colosseum (Wonders of the World) and Cathy Gere's The Tomb of Agamemnon (Wonders of the World). Keith Miller's first book is a worthy addition to the series…

Jonathan Beard creates music for media and the concert stage. As a composer, his recent projects include scoring the feature film Frank vs. God; serving on the composing teams for video games Star Wars Battlefront and Star Wars Old Republic: Knights Of The Fallen Empire; and guest-composing for ABC's Once Upon A Time. For the stage, Jonathan co-composed the oratorio The Passion Of Anne Frank for the Los Angeles Master Chorale as part of their Voices Within residency, and his original theatre-score for Driving Miss Daisy received an NAACP Theatre Award nomination. He also recently completed the I-Park Foundation Artist Residency for his in-progress electroacoustic opera Cesare, Child Of Night.

In the fertile terrain of New Zealand's 1980s post-punk scene, few figures loom as large as the Jefferies brothers. Graeme Jefferies and Peter Jefferies-the primary forces behind This Kind Of Punishment-wrote some of the best music to come out on Flying Nun, Xpressway or elsewhere. A dizzying mix of pastoral ballads and DIY experimentation, TKP's songwriting was at once classic and acutely raw. Among This Kind Of Punishment's myriad recordings, A Beard Of Bees best outlines the collective vision of the Jefferies brothers. Their classic second album feels more meticulous than it's predecessor, proffering a grey, near-Mancunian influence that serves as both touchstone and springboard for the proceedings. The unique maneuvering on "Trepidation" is a marvel: guitar sweetness shifting toward melancholic piano and ending with their combined shimmer. Conversely, the augmented VU-inspired noise of "East Meets West" positions itself as the album's prime moment of severity, creepily building toward horror-show screams that inch to a buried, found-sound resolution. Originally self-released in 1984, A Beard Of Bees has been out of print for almost 25 years.