Label Spotlight: Butter Sessions

The thing I’ve learned about music taste, in my time as a listener and a learner, is that true ‘taste’ doesn’t involve closing yourself off to anything new. A taste for everything is, far be it from the slightly exhausting trope of “listening to everything”, a gift that would appear not to be bestowed upon everyone.

For this writer, realising that I, in fact, know nothing, was a release.

Much like many freshly eighteen-year-olds visiting clubs and festivals for the first time, I thought I knew exactly what was good and what wasn’t. For a few years, that disposition suited me well, or so I thought. I learned to DJ with what I knew, formed opinions based on what I knew, and spent my money on what I knew. If no challenge were set to come my way, I may still be that way today.

In 2017, however, my musical palette expanded in a way that, at the time, I saw as being incredibly subtle, but now I recognise as being hugely influential.

I made a new friend that year. His name was, and still is, Bodie. He’s still one of my best friends to this day. This last weekend, my fiancé and I stayed with him, his wife and their two cats.

We became friends over, you guessed it, music.

At the time, among many things, that was watching a Kornel Kovacs Boiler Room set and fanboying over ‘Szikra’, and many other similarly light and encouraging prompts to “get fucked up”. I can’t remember exactly when, where or how, but one evening, Bodie introduced me to a record that would totally change the way I dug for music, & my understanding of what was available here at home.

‘From 50’, the collaborative EP between Naarm/Melbourne-based artists Sleep D and Albrecht La’Brooy was, to a younger me, a total game changer. Groovy, subtle, and totally psychedelic, it’s still one of my favourite records to this day, and the one which introduced me to Butter Sessions.

Butter Sessions is, like Sleep D, the collaborative effort of Corey Kikos and Maryos Syawish. The duo, high school best friends from Melbourne’s outer suburbs, have, in the 15+ years they’ve been contributing to it, become pillars of their city’s more DIY, ‘underground’ and less commercially minded musical community.

The story of both Sleep D and Butter Sessions, projects often indistinguishable from one another given the strength of both Kikos and Syawish’s own creative abilities and the somewhat aligning properties of music across both, is one that’s been told before.

To quote Andy Webb, previously the Australian manager of Resident Advisor, who interviewed the duo in 2017:

“Well before the label began, schoolmates Kikos and Syawish were getting their electronic music education through under-18s club nights in Frankston (which they attended religiously from the age of 15), online forums and big Melbourne radio stations that pumped out commercial dance tunes. 'It was definitely a scene,' said Kikos in the duo's hardware-stacked studio in the suburb of Carlton. 'It was like everyone was pretending to be clubbers, I guess. That's how we started getting into that culture.'

This led to an interest in production and performance. The pair began to make edits using a computer and a MIDI keyboard, as well as DJing at friends' houses. 'That's how we started DJing, we would DJ at house parties a lot, and I guess that gave us a good taste of playing to people.'”

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Butter Sessions was originally the name given to Corey and Maryos’ blog, “which was a way to try and connect with the rest of the scene,” given their distance from Melbourne’s thriving CBD.

That bid for connection is, in many ways, what still drives Butter Sessions today. As the label prepares to celebrate its 15th year, marked already by a three-disc compilation series featuring a who’s who of local and international friends, and set to be celebrated across Naarm, Gadigal Land/Sydney and Ngambri Land/Canberra, one could forgive Corey and Maryos for spending this moment in a moment of reminiscence. Instead, it’s clear that while the duo wants to honour where they’ve come from, they do so for Melbourne, not for their own years gone by.

The 15th birthday in many ways mirrors the label’s 10th, albeit coordinated in a very different world. Butter Sessions’ decade celebration similarly saw the release of a three-disc compilation, seen as a practical answer to a DJ having limited space in their record bag on any given night out, as well as a commemorative book and hometown events. Their 10th had a COVID-19 lockdown to help with the time and energy required to produce such a mammoth offering, and to provide perspective on where the duo had come to since putting their heads down a decade prior.

“We were in a rare position where we had all this time on our hands,” Corey reflected. “It was also a really retrospective look back. We went through all these photos we had, which we kind of hadn’t really done at all, till that point.”

Shared among the newest generation of dance music fans is a clear and intense reverence for the ‘90s. Whether musically, through fashion or even a geopolitical anxiety at an all-time peak in 2026, this generation has understandably become all the more conscious of what ‘good old days’ may have felt like, coupled comfortably with social media’s ability to treat our lives online like our own personal archive.

It appears that Corey and Maryos have had little need to reflect so deeply. Butter Sessions has, for almost half of their lives, acted as an outlet for so much more than just music. With Corey acting as the label’s key masterer and Maryos responsible for almost all the art and design, the duo have used Butter Sessions as a means of better understanding their own creativity, as well as that of the people they work with.

Read: Sleep D, familiar ground, 'Big Sky, Liquid Sun'

The label’s growth has made it a home for so many across a wide musical spectrum, aligned more on outlook and way of being than on sound. In a time where independent labels often look to own a ‘niche’ in hopes of making or breaking a specific ‘market’ of listeners, or to totally operate in what they know best, Butter Sessions clearly has no desire for either.

The '90s-inspired IDM of RBI’s ‘Disseminate’ may feel at odds with Cale Sexton’s 2018 record ‘Melondrama’, or even the prog renaissance catalyst ‘Drinking From The Mirage’ by Guy Contact, but what unites them all appears to be the nonchalance with which they’ve come to fall under the BS umbrella. Since its 10th anniversary, an anniversary at which one might assume a label would be aware of everything its city had to offer, the family has grown, almost to the point of being too much of a good thing, were such a thing to exist in their eyes.

Hasvat Informant, one of Naarm’s most exciting ‘new’ names in techno, released his first track with BS as part of its three-disc 15th birthday collection. While Hasvat, real name Mike Blyth, is by no means a new name to his city, Maryos had bought and downloaded his music for some time before he realised that they were neighbours.

In the case of Jennifer Loveless, whose inaugural Butter Sessions release ‘Water’ debuted with the boys in 2021, the duo had been mixing into her record at a changeover at Rooftop Bar, which at the time didn’t have a home, before taking it back to Butter Sessions HQ for a deeper listen.

While that is true, evident by the sheer number of returning names on BS’ 15th birthday compilation, there’s been no shortage of new additions to its families in the last half-decade. Incredible works by the likes of DJ PGZ & Yikes, Zara & Command D, Iti, Kate Miller, suki, Fader Cap, Unsolicited Joints and many more have proven that that problem is one that Maryos and Corey are very comfortably putting on themselves.

Read: East Meets West on DJ PGZ & Yikes’ ‘Come Round’

That sense of connection is perhaps made no clearer than in the collaborative top and tail of ‘15 Years of Butter Sessions’, opening with a 10-year-old collaboration with Japanese producer Kuniyuki, and closing with one of the toughest and most left-field curveballs Sleep D has done to date, in partnership with fellow hometown heroes Posseshot.

Speaking of the track with Posseshot, Corey shared that the duos’ parallel histories run in very similar straights. After being brought into a creative collective featuring the then local streetwear brand Ruler, run by a Western Suburbs-based childhood friend of Corey, Sleep D were introduced to Kharniclassix and Muscles from Posseshot.

“At the time, they weren't Posseshot,” Corey reflected. “Kharni had just started to make beats, and he would show us, and we would share music. We were hanging out with them because we were catching the train from Frankston to Sunshine so often, and it was quite a long trip. We were probably like, I don't know, 18 or 19.”

Though the pairs had all pursued music in their own way, they had, in Corey’s words, gone down differing paths. That was until ‘Step On It’ would finally bring them together. The beat had been sitting there a long time, but the energy clearly matched the grunt that Posseshot have become so known for.

“This is a collaboration with people we’ve known since the start of the label.”

At the other end sits ‘2015 (Kuniyuki Dub Version)’, a more traditionally Sleep D piece, originally recorded in a jam session with the Sapporo-based maestro, reworked a decade later.

‘Precious Hall’, a track from Kuniyuki’s 2006 record ‘We Are Together’, was Maryos first introduction to the artist. After a “cold call” invitation to play the first anniversary of BS’ club night ‘Mania’, Kuniyuki’s first-ever show in Australia, the artist has become an inseparable piece of the Butter Sessions furniture.

“He’s stayed at my house every time he’s come, which has been almost annually,” Maryos shared. “We felt like old friends from the get-go,” he continued. “There was even a bit of a language barrier, but to a degree that just didn’t matter, you know. The music was the common language.”

Kuniyuki is now but one of many creative connections and friendships that Butter Sessions has grown with the producers, performers and DJs of Japan.

Across the 15th birthday release, this sees BS' ongoing Japanese exchange deepen, also including Tokyo's Mayurashka contributing a chuggy, spacious roller, Gonno providing a mesh of techno and breaks, Tokyo neighbour Haruka collaborating with Rotterdam's Charlton Bakeliet on a sassy, uplifting house joint, and Yuzo Iwata bringing his own self-described EPM (Electronic Psychedelic Music) to the table.

When Corey and Maryos asked Kuni to contribute to the compilation, he shared a recording they’d saved, and he still had access to. In our conversation, the pair warmly reflected on the idea that looking through all of these recordings, which had not even occurred to Corey and Maryos, was something Kuni had already been doing. Such a difference in approach felt, once again, reflective of the duo’s commitment to looking forward and outward, rather than backward, save for one important difference.

A series of satellite events is perhaps the key point of difference for the 15th birthday milestone, where Corey and Maryos have lent their production expertise to new producers and the live-set-curious at a regular haunt for both of them, Miscellania.

Having participated in workshops before, most recently at a small one run by Desert Festival in Alice Springs, and Corey featuring at monthly feedback session Playback, the pair are increasingly lending their skills to educate a next generation of artists, with the goal to spread beyond advising on music, and into helping start independent labels, club nights and more.

“It speaks to the community-building aspect of why we started the label, I think, “Maryos shared. “It started as a blog, but it was really to connect to the rest of the scene, which was a bit, kind of ‘foreign’ to us.”

“We also didn’t want to just put on events that are all about partying,” Corey added. “That’s obviously a big part of what we do, but we wanted to do something that can really give back to the community.”

When asked what that kind of giving back feels like, Corey and Maryos appeared not to have reflected on it too deeply, beyond it feeling like something they themselves would have benefited from greatly on their own journey.

“It’s a bit of a trip,” Maryos admitted. “I’m surprised that people actually want to hear what we’ve got to say about this stuff. I still watch videos from producers that I like, so I feel like I’m the one still learning.”

The landscape in which Corey and Maryos found their feet has changed in inconceivable ways since Butter Sessions started its journey. The two boys from Frankston have often been cited as pillars of their city’s scene, and for good reason. Fifteen years is, in the grand scheme of dance music, a considerable percentage of its existence, and an endeavour fraught with no shortage of challenges, especially in a much younger version of Australia’s now pumping commercial dance music industry.

Regardless of that change, however, it’s clear that BS for the most part don’t plan to change tack. Butter Sessions has long been what Corey and Maryos have put everything into. They didn’t study music business, nor did they go into the label with anything but a desire to invest themselves even more deeply in the culture they revered. What has resulted is a ‘real recognise real’ kind of support from all across the globe.

It’s that support, over anything else, that they seem to appreciate most.

Butter Sessions feels like a confident rebuttal to the idea that longevity, relevance and success might require some level of compromise. If anything, Corey and Maryos’ journey with the label, and as Sleep D, suggests quite the opposite. What began as a blog to bridge a perceived distance has grown into a global network of friends, collaborators and artists, all orbiting a shared instinct rather than any fixed sound.

And yet, there’s no sign or sense that they’ve arrived anywhere final. To them, that appears to be precisely the point.

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Final tickets to Butter Session's series of 15th birthday celebrations are still available.

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Jack Colquhoun is Mixmag ANZ's Managing Editor. Find him on Instagram.