Milkweed (UK)

What do we know of Milkweed? On the face of it their musical concerns are transatlantic -
they follow the rich creative line that runs between British traditional music and the songs
and tunes of the eastern United States. In reality their scope is global, and rooted in deep
time, with influences from prehistory bleeding into a troubled and troubling anthropocene. As
a result their music doesn’t sit easily anywhere, but ricochets between bewitching
Appalachian folk music and disconcerting hauntological experimentation.
Their technique is comparable to plunderphonics, except Milkweed’s piracy is of a
multimedia, intertextual variety rather than a simply musical one. Antiquarian text bleeds into
song, grave dirt is sprinkled on recording equipment, tapes and melodies are chopped and
degraded, holes and silences appear unexpectedly. It is the kind of music that locates its
own natural faultlines and lays them bare.

What do we know of Milkweed? Enough, and nearly nothing. They are a duo. They use
voice, guitar and banjo. They describe their sound as slacker-trad, which is both true and
somehow insufficient. In 2022 they released Myths and Legends of Wales, which saw them
hit on a formula that has served them well ever since: a short album inspired by the
discovery, manipulation and interpretation of a specific folkloric text. In this case it was a
1984 title by Tony Roberts. The Mound People followed in 2023, this time inspired by a 1974
text on preserved bronze age human remains by Danish archaeologist Peter Glob. Most
recently, Folklore 1979 (2024) takes the text of an academic journal published by the
Folklore Society and turns it into a set of brief, beguiling songs. It blurs the lines between
what is found and what is created, and unspools like a single disjointed dream narrative,
taking in ritual, extinction, migration, esoteric cosmogony and Arthurian legend. Underneath
it all runs Milkweed’s trademark combination of loops and half-repetitions, degraded
equipment and fossilised percussion. It is a record that feels both pertinent and ancient.
Milkweed’s music recognises the planet as a palimpsest and requires us to look and listen
more deeply at our environments, the layers of natural and human history that peel away to
reveal grotesque, mysterious and beautiful deposits. It is a music of occlusion and discovery
which examines how a thing becomes an artefact, and whether an artefact can be psychic
as well as physical. The duo remain as inscrutable as ever, but their songs are uniquely
engaging, deliciously uncanny gateways to strange times and places.