the listeners album of british butterflies

by Simon Aulman

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Includes unlimited streaming via the free Bandcamp app, plus high-quality downloads of luddite-cum-music, hyperminimal hajj for a fucked country, pondhead, days when the gasman comes at 5-40, scriabin guitar transcriptions, seven final spring dances, luddite works for classical guitar, eight easy luddite spring dances, and 554 more. , and , .

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ltd ed 2xCDR album
Compact Disc (CD) + Digital Album
limited edition 2 x CDR album with one bonus track not on any download - homemade and hand-painted outer, inners made from random magazine pages, hand-painted CDR labels, limited to three copies.

Includes unlimited streaming of the listeners album of british butterflies via the free Bandcamp app, plus high-quality download in MP3, FLAC and more.

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1.	amonia 00:16	buy track
2.	dingy skipper 13:13	buy track
3.	recorder sonata for sunny chalkland slopes 03:27	buy track
4.	pale clouded yellow 15:50	buy track
5.	chloroform 00:15	buy track
6.	silver-spotted skipper 14:23	buy track
7.	potassium cyanide 01:19	buy track
8.	long tailed blue 11:29	buy track
9.	crushed laurel leaves 00:25	buy track
10.	comma 11:22	buy track
11.	setting 03:44	buy track
12.	high brown fritillary 29:15	buy track
13.	recorder sonata for cloudy chalkland slopes 03:11	buy track
14.	balloon net 00:24	buy track
15.	duke of burgundy 14:31	buy track

about

.
When I started making this album I'd hardly seen any butterflies all year. Then I went to Thorney Island on what felt like the hottest day of the year and I saw thousands. So that's good - except that it's taken the wind right out of my sails, because I was going to write a rant about the death of nearly all the butterflies in the UK over the last few decades.

As a child I had loads of books on insects, including of course The Observer's Book Of British Butterflies. You'd find a copy of that book even in houses where no one was much interested in insects. I've got rid of all my books several times throughout my life. But my innate acquisiviteness reasserts itself from time to time and I recently got an early edition (1942 reprint of the original 1938 edition) of the book in Romsey's Oxfam Books for a quid - rather battered, which I like - it's all there, cover and all - the plates rather blurry - making it pretty much impossible to tell most of the blues apart, most of the hairstreaks apart, the skippers etc.

I'm no longer the sort of person who actively looks for caterpillars. So, like everyone, I only spot them when they're big and striking and marching off across the path in front of me as they search for somewhere to pupate. A couple of weeks ago a drinker moth caterpillar did just that, with its distinctive hairy tail and hairy horns. That was great. It was almost like it was telling me that, though things are bad, maybe they're not as bad as all that.
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(recorded july 2021, words by WJ Stokoe, art and cover photo by me)
.

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released July 12, 2021

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Simon Aulman Southampton, UK

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