The Process of Longing

Jeremy Irons Hosts the Five-Part Working Shakespeare Educational DVD Series of Historic Shakespeare Workshops Conducted by the Royal Shakespeare Company's Legendary Voice and Speech Teacher Cicely Berry. Twenty actors from both sides of the Atlantic, most of whom had never met before, convened in New York for three days of intensive Shakespeare training workshops. The group, which included Emily Watson, Helen Hunt, Samuel L. Jackson, Victor Garber, Blythe Danner, Lindsay Duncan, Toby Stephens, Claire Danes, Cherry Jones, Tony Goldwyn, and Robert Sean Leonard, didn't sign up to demonstrate "how to" perform Shakespeare for the general edification of the theatre-going public.

Hymn Binding has a musty scent that rises up from its ink-stained pages (or inky bars of music) once opened, but it has an inner strength, and an inner resolve, in spite of its age-old music. Solemn strings openly roam through its shadowy tracks, searching for something lost – they have known heartache and the desperate tug of despair – but the ill-light only deepens their disappointment as the unfulfilled strings return home with empty hands. Aged piano melodies perform a melodic ballet beside the strings, and occasionally a clearer electric guitar will cut through the low, overcast clouds. From The Mouth of the Sun’s third album – and their first for the excellent American label, Lost Tribe Sound – has a gloomy, mournful air to it, but its music weakly stands up to the slow freefall of gradual decline. Systems are failing. Everything looks to be crumbling, fencing the music in, but its rust still darkly gleams. The piano is dusty and creaking, but wise, and the strings seek them out.

A limited guitar player at best, and with a voice that hardly spans a couple of octaves, Leonard Cohen has nonetheless fashioned a legacy of gorgeously realized songs that reach deep into the heart of lust, ill- and well-fated romance, hope, and redemption, and if he doesn't sing like an angel, he could certainly mesmerize one with the melody, lilt, and power of his songs…

Chris Weeks: "The Grey Ghost of Morning is an experimental/ambient record which was written in a seven week period, during April-June 2017. It is a personal body of work, highly influenced by my having to come back to the UK and be away from my fiancée in the USA during that time. My sleep patterns, altered from the time-difference, never truly got back to normal. I was haunted by insomnia and was writing and recording well into the early hours of morning. By this time, the hazy morning light had already began to stream into my room. Being that I'm in Wales, more often than not, this light was accompanied by a thick, languid grey mist, rolling-in over the Preseli Mountains, near to where I live. This regular occurrence determined the title of the album…