Behind The Label: Butter Sessions

Fifteen years ago, childhood friends Maryos Syawish and Corey Kikos, better known as Sleep D, were teenagers in a beachside suburb an hour south of Melbourne, trying to find a way to make their own noise heard. They did not wait for a label to come knocking. They built one themselves.

That became Butter Sessions: part record label, part party engine, part weird little ecosystem for the music forming around them. Melbourne’s underground got into its bones early. Bush doofs, warehouse raves, all-night sessions, wrong turns, good accidents. You can hear it in the records: acid squelch, humid bass, bent house, ambient fog, techno pressure, and tracks that sound better when the sun is starting to come up and nobody is speaking properly anymore.

Sleep D have always been at the center of it. As producers, DJs, live act, label heads, and fixtures of the Melbourne underground, they have kept the whole thing close to the hands. Maryos handles the art direction while Corey looks after mixing and mastering.

Nearly 100 releases in, Butter Sessions has become a home for the kind of artists who do not sit neatly in one lane. D. Tiffany, Jennifer Loveless, Roza Terenzi, Iti, Guy Contact, Nori, Kate Miller, Suki, and more have all helped stretch the label outward without sanding off its edges.

Butter Sessions is loose, strange, stubborn, stunning and deeply local, even when the music is moving worldwide. We caught up with Sleep D to talk about the scrappy beginnings of Butter Sessions, the Melbourne underground that shaped it, and why keeping that DIY community spirit at the core still matters. Watch the full video below.

Listen to Butter Sessions' three-part 15-year anniversary compilation series below!