The Girl in His Mind

Microphone Music is a 2003 double CD compilation by The Raymond Scott Quintette. It is "a collection of unreleased titles, radio performances, first-rate rehearsals and forgotten gems by the Raymond Scott Quintette recorded between 1936 and 1939." (The size of each version are correct, due to this being a mono CD and what it results in when converted to each format.)

The first feature directed by Japanese actor Joe Odagiri brings together a platinum cast and crew to recount a Zen-like tale. Japanese actor and musician Joe Odagiri, known at home as a gothic rebel with a reliably huge female fan base, makes the leap to the other side of the camera in his mind-teasing feature film bow, They Say Nothing Stays the Same (Aru sendo no hanashi). It’s a dreamy, unexpectedly rigorous debut that starts frustratingly slowly but ends with an emotional bang, implying more festival appreciation after its premiere in Venice's Giornate degli Autori. Its path is lit by some dazzling modern credits from cult DP Christopher Doyle and Armenian jazz pianist Tigran Hamasyan.

Long associated with the music of Gabriel Jackson, in 2020 the Choir of Merton College, Oxford and their director Benjamin Nicholas won a BBC Music Magazine Award for their recording of The Passion of our Lord Jesus Christ, a work which grounded its narrative of Christ’s suffering and humanity’s redemption in texts associated with the history of the College.The Christmas Story, again with a libretto assembled by the College’s chaplain the Revd Dr Simon Jones, takes the same approach to tell the story of Christ’s birth. Spanning the period from Advent to Candlemas, it mixes biblical narrative with liturgical texts and four specially commissioned poems by members of the College.The new poems are given to the College’s girl choristers (an independent part of its choral foundation since 2016), while the main body of the work is carried by the full choir and by an ensemble of flute, percussion, strings, saxophone and three trombones – the latter recalling the hieratic sonorities of the seventeenth-century works by Schütz and others which Jackson had in mind while composing The Christmas Story.