FOLK POLICE RECORDINGS

Folk Police Recordings is a Manchester-based independent record label founded by Nigel Spencer, originally active from 2010 to 2013 before relaunching in 2025 with a wider scope and a clear conservation mission. Where the first iteration championed what Spencer called "folk brut and other rough music" — raw, skewed, otherworldly sounds tracing their ancestry back to the Incredible String Band and the first psych-folk explosion — the revived label casts its net considerably further, welcoming experimentalists, ambient composers, modular synthesists, hauntologists, and drone worshippers alongside its traditional folk core. Every release raises funds for wildlife conservation and nature recovery, placing the label at an unusual intersection of exploratory sound and ecological activism. Its two flagship series — The Silent Harvest, which invites electronic musicians to respond to the ballad traditions documented by Ewan MacColl and Peggy Seeger, and Earth Studies Field Trips, which commissions landscape-driven works tied to specific places — give the catalogue a conceptual coherence that most small labels never manage.