• Julianna Barwick – Healing is a Miracle

    July 29, 2020 - By 

    In the four years since her last full-length release, Julianna Barwick uprooted herself from New York City, her home of sixteen years, and relocated to LA. A move spurred on by the need to discover “joy and delight” again, it was in the wake of this change of life and landscape that her aptly-titled, luminous new album, Healing is a Miracle was formed. In the spring of last year, Barwick began work on a new project; sitting down with a pared back array of her “most trusted” pieces of gear, she began shaping melodies, and looping her voice around skeletal,…

  • A Sense of Wonder in the Particular: An Interview with Perlee

    October 4, 2019 - By 

    Perlee are an Irish-bred dream-pop duo based in Berlin. Made up of Saramai Leech and Cormac O’Keefe, their first release ‘Chains of Coral/Feelings of Plenty’ is out today. Saramai sits down with Maija Sofia to discuss her creative process, her inspirations and Perlee’s plans for the future. Catch them tonight in The Grand Social Ballroom as part of Ireland Music Week. So having lived in both rural Ireland and Berlin, do you think both of these geographical locations have influenced your music? Listening to the songs it feels like there’s a sense of rural wilderness but also a kind of…

  • Jenny Hval – The Practice of Love

    September 14, 2019 - By 

    On the 13th of August, Jenny Hval shared an image of herself on twitter, with the accompanying caption; “a new song is out today – High Alice. This one is a labyrinth. Link on the internet. Suggested reading list: Clarice Lispector.”  Lispector was a surrealist, mystical Brazilian writer; broadly speaking, her work centres around women suspended in a moment of spiritual or creative crisis, often on the precipice of revelation. Lispector has a knack for warping the lens through which we view everyday objects – a flower, for example, or an insect – so that what is familiar is curdled…

  • Avenues For Belonging: David Berman soundtracked the strangest and saddest parts of life, but also the most beautiful

    August 8, 2019 - By 

    Songwriter and The Thin Air contributor Maija Sofia reflects on the profound and unwavering influence of  late Silver Jews frontman David Berman, and remembers a peerless, uncompromising artist who not only comforted the lonely and lost, but brought them together. I remember very clearly the first night I ever heard Silver Jews, I was sprawled out on the carpet in a big curved room in North London, lying on my stomach with my laptop open and a bottle of Sainsburys’ wine half-finished beside me. It was early summer and I had the window open to the hot dust and the sound…

  • Purple Mountains – Purple Mountains

    July 25, 2019 - By 

    David Berman quit music in 2009. The reasons for retiring his two-decade spanning cult indie-country-rock project as Silver Jews were characteristically bleak. The disbandment, Berman revealed, was because he felt “the SJs were too small of a force to ever come close to undoing a millionth of all the harm” wrought by his Washington lobbyist father, known to many as Dr Evil.  He also, relatable, just wanted more time to read and work on his poetry. Surprisingly then, this year came the announcement of Berman’s first album in ten years, the unexpected eponymous Purple Mountains – and it’s a tentative…

  • Cate Le Bon – Reward

    June 8, 2019 - By 

    The songs on Cate Le Bon’s fifth album, Reward, came about as the result of time spent in a cottage in England’s rural Lake District, where she lived for a year in almost total isolation. Retreating from several years of going through the looped motions of touring, writing, and recording, there in nature and solitude Le Bon spent her days learning how to build furniture from scratch and her nights pouring over a second-hand piano, where she found herself writing the most introspective and personal songs of her career. Unsurprisingly then, location plays a vital part in Le Bon’s writing,…

  • Bitflower Bb – Mastalgia

    May 24, 2019 - By 

    The word “Mastalgia” is a medical term referring to the heavy, dull tight breast pain commonly experienced by most women, and usually without utterance. It’s also the name of the new six-track record from Dublin’s Bitflower Bb (the side project of DJ and producer Dream~cycles.) A lush, evocative blend of electronic and organic sounds, it’s a close, intimate collection of bedroom-pop songs produced throughout 2017-2018. Simultaneously dreamy and affecting, at times Mastalgia recalls the lo-fi experimental pop of Galway-native, Dublin-based Maria Somerville or the vast soundscapes of Grouper, but overall, it’s an undeniably unusual record.  The title’s reference to a private, interior…

  • Big Thief – U.F.O.F.

    May 2, 2019 - By 

    There’s a mysterious quality to Big Thief, their songs have a familiar warmth that feels as though they could be made up of melodies you’ve known for years, but at the same time they don’t sound quite like anyone else. This makes listening to a new Big Thief album an oddly nostalgic experience. On U.F.O.F, the band’s third album and their first on 4AD, there are moments when their sound feels like it could belong to an esoteric forgotten 1960s folk album, another Vashti Bunyan-esque rediscovery, while there are other times when the fragile timbre and turns of Adrianne Lenker’s…

  • Aldous Harding – Designer

    April 24, 2019 - By 

    Aldous Harding embodies many selves. Often flickering between different characters in a single song, she weaves between evocations of the tragic, world-weary chanteuse and the elfin and spirited jester seamlessly. She’s not afraid to unsettle, and it’s this fluidity that is the crux of Harding’s appeal – the adamant refusal to be contained by any static identity for too long. At the heart of her work is a lavish commitment to the theatrical. Designer is Harding’s third album, reuniting her with esteemed producer John Parish for a second time, after 2017’s exquisite Party. This time however, we find Harding departing from…