Who We Were and Who We Are Now

Folk Police Recordings was last a thing over a decade ago. It was a pretty ephemeral affair - the label existed for a scant three years and only managed a handful of releases. It’s fair to say it was a labour of love with a rank amateur at the helm, attempting - often unsuccessfully - to navigate a course between full time work, parenthood, running a label and occasionally sleeping. Still, people said quite nice things about us when we were gone: A Year in the Country concluded that we were 'a label that seemed to sidestep the more strict tradition-gatekeeping aspects of folk music and put out work that while it could be experimental, was also particularly listenable to and accessible. Not always an easy fence to stay stood upon. They seemed to have a lovely ear for such things.' Well, thank you!

Back then, we said of ourselves,'We are purveyors of folk brut and other rough music. We like our folk skewed, raw and otherworldly. We’re basically traddies at heart, but we also like stuff that can trace its ancestry back to the Incredible String Band and the first psych-folk explosion. We like a bit of folk rock too, but not when it’s cunningly disguised pub rock, and we even like some singer songwriters, especially if they’re a little deranged. And we are always on the look out for the new Bert Jansch – all self respecting labels should have this as one of their goals.' Whether we managed to live up to such lofty ambitions is, of course, not for us to say.

Fast forwarding to 2025 and our musical perspectives have changed a little. Whilst folk music and - more broadly - folklore will remain at the heart of what we do, we aim to be musically far more eclectic and amorphous. As well as bonafide folk musicians, you’ll be hearing from experimentalists, ambientologists, modular synthesists, psychedelians, hauntologists, worshippers of the drone and all sorts of other wonderful musicians, of whom we’ll be asking the question, 'what would this sound like if you got your hands on it?'

Our initial releases - a series we've called The Silent Harvest - will be loosely based on The Long Harvest, an incredible 10 LP set of recordings of English, Scottish and American variants of traditional ballads sung by Ewan MacColl and Peggy Seeger, and released - very bravely or foolishly - by Argo Records in the late 60s. The first of these releases - coming in summer 2025 - will feature some of our favourite modulists, hautologists, kosmische wanderers and other electronic musicians, who have each been asked to choose a ballad to musically respond to in any way they see fit. There will be more on what exactly this might mean this in a future edition of the newsletter, as well as more on the Long Harvest series itself and why we are so intent on investigating it from as many angles as possible.

Finally- and again we’ll expand on how exactly this will work another time - every one of our releases will raise funds for wildlife, nature recovery and conservation charities and campaigns. Globally, we are experiencing a biodiversity emergency linked to and at least as significant as the climate emergency, with around a million species threatened with extinction, populations reduced by nearly 75% in 50 years and unprecedented habitat destruction on land, in the ocean and in our rivers. If Folk Police Recordings can make any kind of financial contribution to those working tirelessly to reverse this catastrophic biodiversity loss - whilst bringing you a succession of what you will hopefully come to think of as quality albums - that will at least be something.