Start Listening To: Milkweed
In conversation with Milkweed about myth, memory, and making music that listens as much as it speaks.
Milkweed are a UK-based duo making experimental folk music steeped in myth, memory and the weight of inherited stories. Their latest record, Remscéla, is a haunting and expansive work rooted in the prelude tales of the Táin Bó Cúailnge, an epic of Irish mythology, filtered through the language of Thomas Kinsella’s 1969 translation. This is folk music not defined by genre but by method: fragmentary, reverent and radically interpretive. We spoke with the band about the challenges of becoming a vessel for ancient stories, the joy of live reinvention and how to honour tradition without becoming trapped by it.
For those unfamiliar with your music, can you tell us who you are, where you’re from and about the music you make?
We’re Milkweed, we live in the UK and make experimental folk music.
Your work often begins with existing texts, folklore, myth, history but Remscéla seems like a particularly monumental undertaking. What drew you to the Táin Bó Cúailnge and Kinsella’s translation in particular?
There were things that we had in mind when we began. The previous album had come from a slim journal with a range of authors and topics which made it seem important that we do a more concentrated work. Additionally, we wanted to do something that could be performed as a coherent story, as text accurate as possible, from beginning to end. This led to several weeks of taking up sources and then dropping them. In the end, a friend made the choice for us by telling us the story of the Taín on a walk home. We were intrigued enough to decide that this should be the work we pursued and when we actually read this translation the language caught us immediately as well as Kinsella’s intentions when writing it, which are worth quoting, “It is not intended as a scholarly work (for which I had neither motive nor equipment) but as a living version of the story, leaving as few obstacles as possible between the original and the reader“.
You only made it through 20 of the 400 pages you originally set out to process. Was there a moment you realised that the Remscéla the “pre-stories” deserved to be their own project?
Because the point had been to have a coherent work that followed the progression of the text from page to page without radically altering the language it became clear after a while that to do it any justice would take longer than a year and produce hours of material. It seemed better to just make a beginning and come to one definite conclusion.
There’s a beautiful tension in the record between reverence and reconfiguration. How do you approach honouring the source while still making something distinctly yours?
This is a really big part of why not having a relationship to the work prior to beginning is important. If we already knew it we would have too many preconceived notions about it and those ideas would put a slant on everything. Instead we develop an appreciation of the source text slowly as we work through it. The reverence comes from doing it, reading the work over and over and trying to transmit it, faithfully as it is. Of course it comes out completely altered anyway, but the intention is there.
‘The Pangs of Ulster’ is such a visceral idea. How did you go about translating that mythic, almost metaphorical pain into sound?
The Pangs of Ulster is a story we rework over and over again in our live set because there are these very potent, totemic elements to explore - the fair, the chariot, the scream. How you get across the expansive meaning of those things is a rewarding challenge, the recording is one version of many.
The record plays like a living document, part oral tradition, part hauntology, part future-folk. Do you see yourselves as archivists, interpreters, or something in between?
In a way the albums are very much like a game of telephone. We attempt to be faithful interpreters, but it comes out all garbled. Still, there is value in everyone digging into the great mass of things accumulated by generations and taking that as their inheritance and making use of it as they will.
A lot of what you’re doing seems to push against the idea of folk music as fixed or purely acoustic. How do you see technology shaping this lineage of storytelling?
People might stop thinking about tradition as a fixed way of doing things and instead a way of thinking about things and find new, more fluid means of expression.
Your live shows range from duo setups to full 10-piece ensembles. How does the music change in those different contexts, and do you write with either version in mind?
We always write the albums knowing that they will be an entirely different thing from the live shows and only have to function as recorded music. With this album in particular though I always had my eye on what the live show would be like and am constantly adjusting it to try and translate the words more clearly. Adding additional players is such a joy because they have their own capabilities and maybe something they do can better embody some aspect of the material then what we can.
You’ve talked about “sacrificing your inner life” to become a vessel for these stories. That’s quite a statement. What did that sacrifice look like while making Remscéla?
It is kind of an overly grand thing to say, but there’s truth to it. I’d been thinking about the idea of the human body as a storehouse, like if there isn’t any other way to preserve something, all you have is yourself and the responsibility of that and the madness of that. We’re all a store of information, but we don’t worry about forgetting it because we trust that that information is stored somewhere, its written down or recorded or filmed or at the very least the same information is being held by other people. But that’s not always the case. Actually this idea plays out in the very first page of the Táin, wherein the poets of Ireland gather together to see if any of them can remember the whole of the Táin Bó Cuailnge, but none of them can. Obviously there wasn’t any dire need for us to become storehouses for the Táin, but it was a good thing while we made Remscéla to act as if there was.
What was your process like in the studio? So much of the album feels fluid and collage-like. How much is composed vs. discovered in the moment?
The words and melodies are largely written beforehand, but we leave a lot of space when laying out the structure for experimentation and accidents to occur. There are things that happen by accident that can express some aspect of the story much better than we could through long effort and trying.
The visual language around the album feels important too, from the artwork to the video for ‘The Pangs of Ulster’. How closely do you work with visual collaborators, and what role do visuals play in your storytelling?
The visual language is important, ideally it should all work as one complete piece that amplifies the whole. When we work with collaborators we like to tell them enough information about the text so they have a feel for what it is, but if you’re working with someone you should already trust them and let them make something they feel good about. In our experience, interfering more often than not proved to be a misstep.
What do you love right now?
I was told yesterday about a performance piece in which there was an old man who sat in a chair on stage watching the other performers and not moving at all until he got up to bow at the end. The image of this in my mind fills me with ecstatic joy.
What do you hate right now?
We are trying not to hate anything.
Name an album you’re still listening to from when you were younger and why it’s still important to you?
John Wesley Harding and Thembi, no explanation needed.
Looking ahead, after this deep immersion into myth, do you imagine the next Milkweed record returning to something more personal or contemporary, or are you staying in the archives?
The contemporary would be something to explore more, we’ve toyed with making material out of contemporary sources and have scraps of that kind of project on tape, but if it became a project dealing purely with the personal it would be like us walking into an empty, windowless room and closing the door behind us.
