Neil Gaiman and FourPlay String Quartet share "Clock"

Today, on World Shakespeare Day, Neil Gaiman – known for his comic book series The Sandman and books such as Coraline and American Gods – and Australia's FourPlay String Quartet, have shared "Clock" – a track which features Gaiman reading Sonnet 12.

The single follows the album's first outings – 2022's "Bloody Sunrise" and "Credo", as well as its most recent offering, "In Transit".

FourPlay wrote "Clock" in an improvisational manner to a metronome at 60bpm, emulating the ticking of a clock. They let the metronome tick and then created this song in its entirety, in one improvised run from beginning to end.

Talking about the track, Lara Goodridge of FourPlay said: "Neil is an incredibly intuitive artist, as well as being the versatile writer that he is, encyclopaedic in his knowledge on a multitude of literary areas, and so he was able to immediately feel what might work for this piece of music we wrote around the concept of time. Hearing Neil read Shakespeare in itself is a beautiful thing, and we hope that people love it read to the music we've written."

The collaboration between Neil Gaiman and FourPlay String Quartet was born in 2010, when Sydney Opera House's Graphic Festival commissioned FourPlay to write a soundtrack to Gaiman's novella The Truth is a Cave in the Black Mountains.