Rhys

Sadness Sets Me Free is, by his own estimate, about the 25th album from Gruff Rhys, if you include his work with Super Furry Animals and all of his various side projects. As with so much of what has gone before, it’s a finely balanced mix of melancholy and joy: heavy subjects and a lightness of touch. They Sold My Home to Build a Skyscraper – about cultural spaces being razed to make way for luxury flats – is a case in point, its downbeat lyrics (“They floored my people down with sandpaper”) at odds with its gloriously…

Noel Gallagher recently stated that Super Furry Animals were the best band to come out of Wales. Do you have any wild stories from the 90s involving Oasis or other Creation Records’ bands? RobJ1982Plenty of wild stories! We were in an incredible situation, where we grew up listening to records on Creation as teenagers and then got signed by the label. I pinched myself many times. Oasis took us on tour and were generally really warm and generous to us. We had front row seats for some of the madness.When we played the…

Gruff Rhys has never been shy of an ambitious recording project – a concept album about the life of Welsh explorer John Evans, say, or making an accompanying theatre production of his 2007 album Candylion, or sneaking into a condemned recording studio to make a record in its final days. By comparison, his latest solo album, Sadness Sets Me Free, is a relatively back-to-basics effort. At the end of a tour in Dunkirk in 2022, the Welsh iconoclast and his band hot-footed it to La Frette studios on the outskirts of Paris and…

When I arrive, slightly late, at the small restaurant near Paul Rhys’s home in central London, there he is, all in black, camouflaged against the dark walls, a thick journal in front of him. “I have to write every day or my head explodes,” he explains, putting it to one side. He has 30 years’ worth of material, which surely would make a brilliant memoir. I’m picturing witty asides about great co-stars, while he excoriates himself – and the tale of how a working-class Welsh boy became a posh actor, made some eccentric…

Jonathan Rhys Meyers has played everyone from Elvis (in 2005 miniseries Elvis) to Dracula (in 2013 TV series Dracula) and Henry VIII in The Tudors (the latter earning him two Golden Globe nominations.) On film, he’s helped out Tom Cruise in Mission: Impossible III, played bisexual glam rocker Brian Slade in Velvet Goldmine and, of course, coached football to Keira Knightley and Parminder Nagra in Bend It Like Beckham. And let’s not forget Woody Allen’s Match Point, in which he plays social climbing tennis pro Chris Wilton…

How a 3-line algorithm provides a decent alternative to ray castingImage by Autodesk Research . (Used with permission)In my previous article, A Short and Direct Walk with Pascal’s Triangle, I explain how grid-based pathfinding can be improved to yield highly direct walking paths without using line-of-sight tests. This follow-up article will show you a related technique called grid-based visibility, which computes visible regions without line-of-sight tests. Grid-based visibility is virtually unheard of in the computer…

When Matthew Rhys messed up his Bond audition with a joke(Photo Credit –IANS/IMDb) Actor Matthew Rhys has added his name to the long list of British actors who, despite their best endeavours, will not be James Bond. The star of ‘Perry Mason’ and ‘The Americans’ told The Times of London that he managed to royally mess up his meeting with 007’s producers, back when they were looking for a replacement for Pierce Brosnan, reports ‘Deadline’. Matthew Rhys remembered when he was invited to their office in the centre of…

Get our free weekly email for all the latest cinematic news from our film critic Clarisse LoughreyGet our The Life Cinematic email for freeMatthew Rhys has recalled every excruciating detail of his failed James Bond audition.The Welsh actor is best known for starring opposite Keri Russell in the hit series The Americans, which ran from 2013 to 2018.Prior to that, however, Rhys had been considered for the role of 007 following Pierce Brosnan’s exit as the character in 2002’s Die Another Day.Before Daniel Craig landed the…

Bertha Mason, the madwoman in the attic from Charlotte Brontë’s 1847 novel Jane Eyre, despite being the first wife of Edward Rochestor, remained dehumanized and faceless until Jean Rhys decided to bring her to literary life in 1966 through her hugely popular work, Wide Sargasso Sea. 432pp, ₹1399; William Collins Rhys recreated Bertha’s (Antoinette Cosway in Wide Sargasso Sea) childhood and youth as a Creolean heiress, her first meeting with a young Rochester and marriage to him, and her eventual breakdown, all…

How pathfinding algorithms can be improved by counting paths“Short Path Blue Watercolor” by Zach Kron on buildz. (Used with permission)Classic pathfinding algorithms like Dijkstra’s Algorithm and A* are used to generate travel routes in applications such as video games, mobile robotics, and architectural design. Despite the popularity of these algorithms, the paths they produce rarely go straight. In this article, you’ll learn how to compute highly direct paths using a counting technique inspired by Pascal’s Triangle.…