The Breath

A rather unusual musical encounter emerged on the Manchester music scene toward the end of the 2000s. On one side: Irish folk singer Ríoghnach Connolly, with an enormous voice, roots in traditional music and a love for the unpredictable. On the other: Manchester guitarist Stuart McCallum, known from the legendary ensemble The Cinematic Orchestra, with jazz, electronics and an almost nerdy interest in everything that can happen to a guitar when you connect it to an effects pedal. Then they started making music together. Today they are The Breath – a band that essentially sounds like exactly this encounter. Irish folk music, soul, jazz, ambient and electronica glide in and out of each other, sometimes beautiful and floating, other times with tremendous force. But beneath the grand arrangements and the enormous soundscapes lies something quite simple: two musicians who are very good at listening to each other. McCallum has described their collaboration as «two halves of a single songwriter». Connolly describes the dynamic between them a little differently: «Stuart is the yin to my yang. He has one face. I have many. He's very measured. I'm not. I like mayhem. He doesn't.» That's quite a good picture of The Breath. The duo has released three albums on Peter Gabriel's legendary Real World Records. The debut Carry Your Kin came in 2016 and established a distinctive landscape where Irish folk music met rock, ambient and electronic textures. Connolly's voice can be both raw and tender, while McCallum's guitar work builds layer upon layer of sound around her, as if a traditional folk song slowly opens up and becomes something far larger. On the follow-up Let the Cards Fall from 2018, they went even deeper into this landscape. Here there are large, almost cinematic arrangements, but also stories about Irish history, cultural loss and what it means to carry something forward. It is music with a lot in it, but it never feels overcrowded. When they toured with Let the Cards Fall, Connolly and McCallum decided to do something that on paper might seem like a limitation: They hit the road just the two of them. No full band. No big production to hide behind. Just the voice, the guitar and what arises between them. It turned out they didn't need more. In the stripped-down format, the songs took on a different weight. What could have become smaller became larger. Connolly's voice got more room, McCallum's guitar could move from the completely naked to the almost orchestral, and the connection between them became impossible to overlook. Perhaps it is precisely this that makes The Breath so fascinating: The music can sound like an entire landscape of people, instruments and sounds. But at the center there are really only two people. One who likes mayhem, one who is «very measured». And both who know exactly when to listen, and when to get going.