The Breath

A rather unusual musical encounter took place on Manchester’s music scene towards the end of the 2000s. On one side was Irish folk singer Ríoghnach Connolly, with her enormous voice, roots in traditional music and a fondness for the unpredictable. On the other was Manchester guitarist Stuart McCallum, known from the legendary ensemble The Cinematic Orchestra, bringing jazz, electronica and an almost obsessive fascination with everything that can happen to a guitar when it is plugged into an effects pedal.

Then they began making music together.

Today, they are The Breath – a band that sounds exactly like this meeting. Irish folk, soul, jazz, ambient music and electronica drift in and out of one another, at times beautiful and ethereal, at others fiercely powerful. Yet beneath the expansive arrangements and immense soundscapes lies something quite simple: two musicians who are exceptionally good at listening to each other.

McCallum has described their collaboration as “two halves of a single songwriter.” Connolly describes the dynamic between them somewhat 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.”

It is a rather fitting description of The Breath.

The duo have released three albums on Peter Gabriel’s legendary Real World Records. Their debut, Carry Your Kin, arrived in 2016 and established a distinctive landscape in which Irish folk music met rock, ambient music 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 though a traditional folk song were slowly unfolding into something far greater.

On the 2018 follow-up, Let the Cards Fall, they ventured even deeper into this landscape. It features vast, almost cinematic arrangements, alongside stories of Irish history, cultural loss and what it means to carry something forward. It is music filled with ideas, yet it never feels overcrowded.

When they toured Let the Cards Fall, Connolly and McCallum decided to do something that might have seemed like a limitation on paper: they went out on the road as a duo. No full band. No large-scale production to hide behind. Just the voice, the guitar and whatever emerged between them.

It turned out they needed nothing more.

In this stripped-back format, the songs took on a different weight. What might have become smaller instead grew larger. Connolly’s voice was given more room, McCallum’s guitar could move from the utterly bare to the almost orchestral, and the connection between them became impossible to overlook.

Perhaps this is precisely what makes The Breath so fascinating: their music can sound like an entire landscape of people, instruments and sounds. Yet at its centre are really just two people. One who likes mayhem, and one who is “very measured.” Both of whom know exactly when to listen – and when to let loose.