• The Thin Air’s Top 50 Irish Releases of 2020

    In years to come, when someone asks me what The Thin Air was and represented, I’ll likely direct them to features like the one you have just opened. Much like other publications of our ilk – Nialler9, The Last Mixed Tape, Goldenplec and others – we spend 52 weeks of the year relentlessly championing what truly makes Irish music special and, very occasionally, genuinely world-beating. We all do it in different ways, and to slightly different audiences, but the impetus and desire to shine a light on what we have is one and the very same. Although they’re almost never…

  • Queef – Presence

    There’s a curious video of a live performance from Queef (the collaborative project of Laney Mannion and Claire Guerin) performing at the Monk and the Nun festival in 2016. In a forest clearing, Mannion and Guerin hang chimes and bells from the branches, balance kalimbas on tree stumps, and feedback sounds of the natural world through portable amplifiers. It gives the impression of some middle ground between a biological field study and a meditative retreat: an exploration into the minutiae of the smallest, most familiar sounds that surround us. And through their album Presence, they attempt to bring this soft-eared…