To begin, Mahuna's new single “Far-Off Summer’s Night” does not fill the room with sound so much as it hollows out a small, reverent space within it. This is a song that arrives like a fog from the fields of Monaghan, a gentle haunting born of a Belfast past and a Berlin present, carrying with it the DNA of quiet sorcerers like Nick Drake...

With the release of the single "Play Me A Christmas Song", Stephen Dowd manages to bottle the very specific, blue-hued silence that falls over a living room once the wrapping paper has been cleared away. It is a curious thing, really, how a melody can act less like a sound wave and more like the smell of a candle that was blown out five...