ABOUT BUTTERFLY RECORDINGS
Early in Jan 2004 Youth suggested to friend and sometime musical collaborator-
Simon Tong- that he was thinking of starting a new folk label and would
he be interested in getting involved. They both shared a common interest
in folk/acoustic music ranging from the old troubador traditions through
to the 60’s folk revivals and on to more contemporary movements.
Simon took him up on his offer.
Folk music at its very root is essentially a way of stripping away the unneccessary layers of gloss and letting the music and artist bare themselves fresh from the source with minimal dressings and embelishments. As with the dogma film movement they gave themselves a few loose “breakable” rules to govern the music Butterfly would release.
- To be predominantly acoustic in instrumentation.
- To be predominantly English in origin. (even if influenced by other sources)
- To record the artists in their own intimate environment as much as possible.
The music itself could be from any number of acoustic genres – traditional English folk, pscheadelia, folk/rock, avant-garde, electronica to modern interpretations of country, bluegrass, Americana and other varieties of “post-folk” off shoots.
They took to sourcing, recording and compiling material with the idea of capturing the artists, their music and stories, in their own environments with the tradition of Alan Lomax and the Smithsonian recordings very much as a reference point. From bed sits of Brixton to Weslian chapels of rural Yorkshire, transcendental meditation communities of Lancashire to the university campuses of Exeter. The “What the flok!” compilation presents a “musical road trip” of the burgeoning contempary English folk art movement in the 21st century.
