Milkweed

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.

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.

Presented by Broadside Hacks.

This is an 18+ event