Milkweed: International Showcase Fund (SXSW 2025)
Biog: 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.