The Breath

Ríoghnach Connolly and Stuart McCallum are the creative heart of The Breath.  And for them, it’s all about the song. Manchester-based guitarist Stuart McCallum and singer/flautist Ríoghnach Connolly met on the city’s gig circuit in the late noughties. An unlikely pairing though it was, he an acclaimed guitar whiz, ex long-time member of The Cinematic Orchestra and a softly spoken Manchester urbanite, she a folk singer with a larger-than-life personality and a powerful voice to match. Connolly writes the only way she knows how; a stream of poetic consciousness giving rise to honest, personal, heartfelt songs as likely to touch on childhood summers and first love as cultural dislocation, post-colonial injustices and grief. But it’s her deeply soulful, utterly engaging, stop-you-in-your-tracks voice – whether delicate and hushed or powerful and gutsy – coupled with Stuart’s understated brilliance and their exquisitely crafted songs, that give The Breath such emotional depth. ‘Land Of My Other’, their third album, is a place of memories and melodies, lyricism and lore. A place of sunlight, faerie-tales and rowan trees; of grief, incarceration and thunder in darkness. A place where ancestral trauma and colonial injustice meet blazing pride, romantic self-rule and hands held  in a circle in the sea. Ríoghnach Connolly received an RTÉ Folk Award nomination for Best Folk Singer and won Folk Singer Of The Year at the 2019 BBC R2 Folk Awards for which the duo were also nominated as Best Duo/Group.