Daphni - Butterfly *Pre-Order

At the start of this summer, following a three-year hiatus for Daphni (punctuated only by his first ever
collaborative Daphni track ‘Unidos’ alongside Sofia Kourtesis), he dropped ‘Sad Piano House’. The
track represented something of a continuation in the Daphni catalogue, its roots growing from
Cherry’s ‘Cloudy’ and its subsequent Kelbin remix, something in that song’s makeup having a
profound effect when played on dancefloors by Snaith and countless others. ‘Sad Piano House’
deployed more intangibly irresistible bendy piano to equally satisfying effect and continues to
achieve similarly rhapsodic dancefloor saturation.
Though a sizeable gap for Daphni releases, between Cherry and Butterfly however of course sits
Honey, the latest Caribou album and one that saw the more instantaneous and dancefloor leaning
traits of Daphni peaking through the cracks more than ever before. This blurring of the lines leads to
an intriguing collaboration in Butterfly’s lead single ‘Waiting So Long (feat. Caribou)’. An unlikely
duo - in that both artists are the same man, Dan Snaith - ‘Waiting So Long’ is not so much an identity
crisis, ego trip, or the result of a chemical spill in the Snaith laboratory. It’s simply a track that Snaith
felt for the first time belongs to both aliases, and might appeal to fans of both. He has never sung on

a Daphni track before, and did not set out with the intention to do so this time, and yet this strange
billing was born.
Daphni music has always been Snaith’s way of hitting directly to the core of the dancefloors he
spends so much of his time playing to, and those dancefloors have been steadily expanding as his
name grows, with the music following suit. This album however also draws from further back with a
definite kinship to the very first Daphni album, the invigorating bag of ideas that was Jiaolong.
Butterfly is a showcase of the wonderful variety and surprising twists and turns that made that album
such an exciting new prospect and that still to this day make Snaith such an intriguing DJ. There are
more heavy hitters here, tracks that fill those dancefloors better than anyone, like ‘Clap Your Hands’
which picks up the energy of ‘Sad Piano House’ and flips it, exposing the gritty and intoxicating
underbelly of Snaith’s hitmaking side, while retaining the playful urgency that runs through all of his
work of late. Meanwhile ‘Hang’’s comic-strip horns are unpinned by gleeful force, unrelenting and
thrillingly unshakeable. Elsewhere though comes a clutch of other tunes that might creep out
somewhere more off the beaten path, a path Snaith has never stopped seeking in amongst his larger
billings. ‘Lucky’ is squirmy and elusively intoxicating, ‘Invention’ skitters down meandering, inviting
corridors, ‘Talk To Me’ grumbles and broods in the murk, and ‘Miles Smiles’ could roll on endlessly,
so confident in its groove. There are no obvious peaks in these tracks or unifying moments, in fact
many of them really have no business being on the dancefloor at all, and yet in the right setting, they
could be the most fun to be had all night.
One such club is a good microcosm for the ethos of Butterfly as a whole. “Around the time I was
finishing up this album I played a long set in a club called Open Ground in Wuppertal, Germany.”
Snaith recalls, “It’s kind of, in one sense, the platonic ideal of the kind of club I’d want to play in.
Every single decision has been taken, at great expense, with the aim of making the perfect sounding
medium sized club room. But on top of it being the perfect acoustic environment it also is run by an
amazing collection of people in a way that gives it a sense of community that dance music at its best
provides. It is an absolute pleasure to play in that room to a crowd of people who come from all over.
Playing in there you feel like you can play anything, and I played works in progress of pretty much
every track on this album in my set there. Don’t get me wrong, I love playing a short set at a festival
or in a more raw warehouse kind of club where you bang it out and only really functional music
works but on record I guess the point of these Daphni records is to keep in mind a more expansive
idea of dance music where the parameters are broad and the church is broad. I think that actually,
putting really functional stuff next to weirder tracks (both on an album and in a dj set) might be the
thing that’s still most interesting to me.”
This is the feeling that’s most palpable on Butterfly, and in every single time you see Snaith DJ. Right
from the inception of the Daphni alias - and even before that – the thrill of trying stuff out, pushing at
the boundaries has always been there and on Butterfly is present in all its twists and turns. It leaps
all over the place and yet it hangs together, never feeling like a grab bag of dancefloor utilities but
rather a distillation of all the strings to Snaith’s bow, exhilaratingly human and unified by one
singular concept – simple and joyful exploration.

Vinyl Tracklist:
A1 Sad Piano House A2 Clap Your Hands A3 Hang A4 Lucky
B1 Waiting So Long B2 Napoleon’s Rock B3 Goodnight Baby B4 Talk To Me
C1 Two Maps C2 Josephine C3 Miles Smiles C4 Goldie
D1 Caterpillar D2 Shifty D3 Invention D4 Eleven