Milkweed

Milkweed is a UK folk duo who write and record aboard a narrowboat, moored wherever the water takes them, and who have spent the better part of a decade turning found texts into music. Rather than compose from scratch, they take a single old book or journal - a study of Welsh mythology, an archaeologist's catalogue of Bronze Age grave goods, a 1979 issue of a folklore quarterly, Thomas Kinsella's translation of the Irish epic Táin Bó Cúailnge - and strip it for lyrics, turning found language into lo-fi tape collage built from banjo, warped loops, and cut-up field recordings. They call the result "slacker trad," a phrase that undersells the strangeness of what they do. The pair perform under initials alone, their faces once hidden behind cartoon masks in press photos, and have carried that same reticence into a sold-out show at Cafe Oto and a session for BBC Radio 3's Late Junction. Four albums in, each one built from a different archive, they have become a fixture of the current British folk revival's stranger corners, championed by outlets from The Quietus to The Guardian.