Land of My Other The Breath

• 1 Don't Rush It 04:59
• 2 Little One 03:57
• 3 Land of My Other 03:33
• 4 Burning Away 03:36
• 5 Cliona's Wave 05:04
• 6 Remembering the Flood 03:47
• 7 Head Down 03:46
• 8 Letters From Long Kesh 04:46
• 9 Without You in It 06:34
• 10 Every Time It Comes Around 05:12
• Total Runtime 45:14

Info for Land of My Other

Land of My Other. The third studio album by The Breath.

Land Of My Other 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.

Where songs are sung with feeling, instruments are everywhere and music lives deep in the bones.

Produced by renowned composer/pianist Thomas Bartlett, and with the wildly acclaimed duo that is singer Ríoghnach [Ree-uh-na] Connolly and guitarist Stuart McCallum at its core, it's a project that grabs you by the scruff from the off.

Ten original tracks. Raw, gorgeous, acoustic-minded music. Synths and effects so subtle they might be invisible. Negative space created, shaded, created again. Lyrics with meaning, power and an often terrible beauty. Songs that tell stories in ways that soothe, thrill and hit like a sucker punch.

“We work like two halves of a single songwriter,” says McCallum, the Manchester-based composer and producer. “Imagine a guitarist and a singer who are not separate but are separate people. We just have this really special connection that lets us listen, adapt and evolve a piece of music together.”

Connolly nods her agreement. “Stuart is the yin to my yang,” says the reigning BBC Folk Singer of the Year, her north of Ireland accent untempered by two decades of Manchester living. “He has one face. I have many. He’s very measured. I’m not. I like mayhem. He doesn’t. I know where I am with him.”

Such a remarkable bond might have intimidated a lesser producer. But the Ireland-born, US-based Bartlett, famed for his work with the likes of Sufjan Stevens, St. Vincent, Florence Welch and Irish/American supergroup The Gloaming, intuited how to frame The Breath’s distinctive brand of art.

“The main aim was to capture the duo” he says of a work that was recorded in Manchester and at Real World Studios. “I’d sit at the piano not playing very much, just locating the energy and helping to focus it in a way I wanted it to happen. Sometimes I wanted to join in the fun.”

Ríoghnach Connolly, vocals, flute, shruti
Stuart McCallum, acoustic and electric guitars
Thomas Bartlett, piano, mellotron, op-1, Rhodes bass, programming

Recorded at Real World Studios by Katie May, assisted by Louis Rogove and at WR Audio by Biff Roxby and Dan Watkins
Mixed by Patrick Dillett
Mastered by Guy Davie, Electric Mastering
Produced and arranged by Thomas Bartlett

Please Note: We offer this album in its native sampling rate of 48 kHz, 24-bit. The provided 96 kHz version was up-sampled and offers no audible value!

The Breath Ríoghnach Connolly and Stuart McCallum are the creative heart of The Breath. And for them, it’s all about the song.

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.

‘Let the Cards Fall’ – with pianist John Ellis, bassist Sam Vickery and drummer Luke Flowers – is the follow-up to their 2016 breakthrough album, ‘Carry Your Kin’. A bewitching collection of songs allowed to mature and breathe without losing the widescreen, multi-textured kaleidoscope of sound that marked their debut, while refining their trademark Manchester take on alt-folk.

This album contains no booklet.