Absolutely Not for Sale Album

Dear Listener,

The twenty songs you are about to hear were recorded between 2020 and 2025 for the Derek Piotr Fieldwork Archive. The Archive is a collection of over one thousand performances of traditional music, tale, and poetry recorded in the field as proof of oral tradition persisting in the twenty-first century.

I traveled to farms, nursing homes, festivals, pubs, and kitchens to document these songs. This took me everywhere from West Yorkshire to western North Carolina and introduced me to nuns, potters, conceptual artists, blacksmiths, historians and doulas, all of whom sang. There are two selections on this CD where the singer provides instrumental accompaniment (mountain dulcimer and acoustic guitar respectively), however the majority of these songs are a capella—performed alone and together with others. This reflects the overwhelming majority of the recordings available in the Archive—unaccompanied singing by an individual or group, sometimes that individual’s first time ever being recorded.

The human voice is the ultimate musical data delivery system—it transmits tenderness and conveys context in a way instruments can only yearn for. Through hearing a voice, one can immediately ascertain the age, health, mood and proficiency of the performer.

Many methods have been used for collecting songs for the Archive—among them, Zoom meetings, telephone calls, and, when in an impromptu situation with an informant, on-the-fly recordings made to Voice Memo on iPhone. With the exception of Frida Haltli’s performance, graciously collected for me by her mother (esteemed composer Maja S. K. Ratkje), all of the recordings present on this disc were made by myself in the room with my informants, using a Zoom H4n hand-held recorder. The recordings on this CD have been edited as to facilitate as seamless a listening experience as possible.

It is absolutely crucial that the content of the Archive is never monetized. This CD is a gift—a primer on the content freely available on fieldwork-archive.com—all Creative Commons music, generously and openly shared by the performers.

Derek Piotr