Photography by Kourosh Keshiri

Location: Sal’s Tattoo & Barber

It’s Friday the 13th at Wrongbar, and Slim Twig is all dressed up with nowhere to rock: jet-black pompadour in full flight, a tight black suit that’s practically painted onto his slender frame… and an electric guitar that’s on the fritz. As the technical delay starts to eat up precious minutes of his set time at the Wavelength 450 festival, Slim tosses the six-string aside and tells the crowd, “I’m pretty shit at guitar anyway.”

It’s a moment that perfectly captures the curious and contradictory nature of Slim Twig, a man who believes in certain old-school rock ’n’ roll values like persona, showmanship and mystique, but has little interest in the music’s most commonly used instrument. For Slim, the guitar is not a tool of liberation, but confinement — one that physically restricts his performance and, more importantly, threatens to shackle him to 40 years of blues-rock cliché. It’s no coincidence that Slim’s Wrongbar performance only really comes alive once the guitar is cast aside, allowing him to slip into possessed-preacherman mode; his body convulsing along with his echo-drenched shrieks while his three-piece backing band — keyboardist Siena DeCampo, cellist Tilman Lewis and drummer/guitarist Jesse Laderoute — lay down the creepy funeral-parlour funk.

Though he’s been granted the coveted midnight headliner slot on this night, Slim Twig is really the odd man out. Compared to the other acts on the Wrongbar bill — excitable Cincinatti prog-punk crew Child Bite, electro-dancehall duo Bonjay and good-time soul-rockers Steamboat — Slim projects a far more antagonistic presence, with as many patrons sent scurrying to the back bar as those drawn into his sinister spell.

And this polarizing quality suits him just fine. After all, rock ’n’ roll is losing its provocateurs — we lost The Cramps’ Lux Interior and The Stooges’ Ron Asheton in the first two months of 2009, and Chicago’s Touch and Go Records were soon to follow — and Slim sometimes feels he’s the only one in town trying to hold onto the music’s transgressive spirit.

Sure, he’s met a few kindred souls in his brief career — caustic, confrontational avant-rock outfits like Brides, Huckleberry Friends, The Creeping Nobodies and Actual Water, to name a few. But unlike these comrades, Slim actually has designs on becoming a crossover artist, enlisting widely distributed Toronto indie label Paper Bag Records to assist him with his strategy of disseminating avant-garde ideas in pop-song packages. Equally dismayed by the cuddly, group-hug nature of popular Canadian indie-rock and the insular ethos of the art-noise underground, it’s no wonder that Slim’s upcoming debut full-length for Paper Bag is called Contempt!.

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Slim Twig doesn’t do breakfast at the Drake or Aunties and Uncles or some other popular west-end destination. He’d much rather have a grilled cheese and milkshake at the Detroit Eatery, a subway car–sized greasy spoon on the Danforth where the walls are covered in Detroit Red Wings paraphernalia and where Slim is on a first-name basis with the coffee-slingers.

The east-side location is fitting, given Slim’s anomalous standing in Toronto’s west end–centric indie scene. However, he admits his chosen neighbourhood is not so much a deliberate distancing tactic as it is a function of enjoying free rent from his landlords, who, shall we say, are old enough to be his parents.  

This revelation marks one of the few moments in our interview where I’m reminded that Slim is just 20 years old (the other is when he says he was only, “like, six” when Enter the Wu-Tang (36 Chambers) came out). It’s not an uncommonly young age for an aspiring musician, but where most artists of that vintage are still getting by on youthful vigour and leftover teen angst, it’s rare to meet a 20-year-old with such an informed, defined perspective on what he wants to accomplish with his music.

Naturally, Slim’s an art-school kid — he attended North York’s Claude Watson School for the Arts, first developing the Slim Twig persona at age 17 as a singer/songwriter antidote to his concurrent blues-punk band Tropics. But he credits his advanced sense of aesthetic on a source closer to home.

“I didn’t really learn anything in high school about wanting to be an artist,” Slim says between bites of his sandwich. “It’s a tall order for a high school to inspire that, while keeping you in line and making you do work that you don’t really care for.

“I already had the equivalent of what people might think art school provides because my parents are artists, so I’ve been fully immersed in the film world and going to art shows on a regular basis. And not unlike me, my parents were never part of any scene of any sort, and I’ve definitely felt that way.”

It’s usually pretty easy to spot the parents at a rock show — they’re the kindly, bemused-looking grey-haired folks standing near the back with their fingers in their ears. But when Slim’s parents were pointed out to me at the Wavelength 450 show, they could practically pass for Wrongbar regulars, with Slim’s equally skinny, side-burned dad standing near the front of the stage, documenting the performance on his camera-phone.

The parental influence on Slim was as much musical — complementing his childhood love of metal and top 40 hip-hop with early exposure to Roxy Music and Tom Waits — as ideological, showing him that there’s little glamour in the oft-romanticized bohemian-artist existence.

“I want to be a career artist,” Slim says. “And I want to reach a diverse audience. I do feel like an anomaly in Toronto — on the avant-garde side, there doesn’t seem to be any drive to break free [of the local scene]. I think, maybe, a lot of those people have already broken free of their suburban upbringing and are now making their statement [by turning to the avant-garde]. But my parents have been making films under the radar for 20 years — the goal was always to be seen and make enough money to work on your next project. Why wouldn’t that be the goal?”

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To date, Slim has been fortunate enough to bankroll one form of artistry with another: acting. It’s tempting to see Slim’s musical and filmic pursuits as products of the same persona-building process. In his most notable screen role to date — as Ellen Page’s punk-rock crush Billy Zero in Bruce McDonald’s The Tracey Fragments — he’s basically playing a glammed-up, gonzo version of his musical self, and stills from the film initially served as Slim’s music press photo. (That said, unlike his onscreen incarnation, the real-life Slim is far too gentlemanly to ever kick a girl to the curb after a car-seat shag.)

But for Slim, the acting gigs are really just gigs. Better-paying than his former video store–clerk post, sure, but not necessarily more exciting.

“The thing with filmmaking is it’s so stilted,” he says. “There’s no flow to it, at least from the actor’s side of things — I’ll go eat a granola bar, go sit in my trailer and read, and then it’s like, ‘Oh, it’s time to perform very, very briefly,’ and then stop. I have no illusions about the role of the actor; I think actors place too much importance on their role. As someone who’s a fan of auteurs in cinema, you’re not the auteur as the actor. With my music, I get to be the director, with each song being a scene.”



The restlessness Slim experiences on the movie set is answered by his formidably prolific musical output: two EPs (last year’s Derelict Dialect and Vernacular Violence) and the new full-length Contempt! in roughly a year. If Slim the musician fancies himself a director, his signature would be surrealist horror vignettes shot in single takes, producing songs “conceived in the moment of laying them down to tape.” And with each release, Slim has drifted further away from traditional song construction, clouding the question of whether he’s a rock star in the making or a hermetic shut-in who lives in his own mind.

Where the askew blues of Derelict Dialect was built from a relatively conventional (if wobbly) organ/piano/drums base, and Vernacular Violence leaned on Suicide-styled analog-synth drones, Contempt! effectively does away with rock-based instrumentation altogether, piecing songs together with layer upon layer of mutated (and thus unrecognizable) samples.

Slim aptly describes the album as “Elvis locked in the [Wu-Tang Clan’s] 36 Chambers,” a handy catchphrase that not only speaks to the album’s dichotomous inspirations, but also to the individual songs’ discrete relationship to one another. Unlike many rock albums, Contempt! doesn’t cohere into a conceptual framework, or build towards any kind of cathartic climax; rather, each song exists in its own separate space — one where the walls slowly start closing in, heightening the claustrophobic tension until you’re gasping for air.

The opening track, “Young Hussies,” effectively establishes Contempt!’s art of deception: the rolling floor-tom beat and Slim’s convincing Nick Cave croon initially suggest a straightforward stomper, but the song’s central, circular melody is repeated to the point of queasiness, and practically buried alive by a torrent of smashed-glass effects, spooky multi-tracked voices and ear-piercing oscillations. In that sense, the songs’ brief two/three-minute lengths come as both a relief as well as an ominous harbinger that a similarly suffocating process will soon begin again.   

“I never compose anything,” Slim says, “and that kind of set-up forces you to be really concise, as opposed to taking all this time to plan out bridges and choruses. Especially if the music is bordering on experimental, I like to hold people’s interest and [then] move on to the next thing.”

Sampling, therefore, provides Slim with the purest distillation of his populist/antagonist dialectic, given that it’s a method originally devised by avant-garde artists, but later embraced by pop hitmakers.

“I was interested in the connection between those two worlds,” he says. “The whole process of sampling is actually an idea that runs deep in the cutting edge of art for the last 40 or 50 years, and that’s something that’s largely gone unnoticed in hip-hop: the same principle that the RZA has based his practice on is one that — to be obvious — Andy Warhol used: recontextualization and reappropriation.

“I was really excited by the idea of creating music with sounds that weren’t originally yours — as if they’re puzzle pieces that don’t fit, and then [you] crush them into songs that fit your own ideas. A lot of hip-hop relies on hooks from past songs. But for me, I really like artists like the RZA and Madlib that have their own aesthetic fully formed using other people’s music. I can hear a Madlib beat and within the first 10 seconds know it’s him even though [all you hear is] an old horn sample. That concept blows my mind.”

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The most intriguing sample on Contempt! appears at the end of the third track, “Alley Spying.” For its first 90 seconds, the song sputters along inconsequentially in a torrent of deliberately jarring buzzer sounds. But like a movie whose best laughs are found in the outtake reel that rolls with the credits, in its dying moments, “Alley Spying” yields to a ripple of applause that grows louder before cutting out abruptly.

At first, the gesture seems like an in-joke, a knowing admission that such a beat-up, broken-down instrumental is hardly the stuff of opera-house ovations. But then the stream of applause reappears and cuts out and reappears in repeated cycles — forming both a rhythm track that echoes the preceding song’s slumberous gait, and an oblique commentary on the artificial, stagy nature of performer/audience interactions.

It’s something Slim Twig is aware of every time he plays a show, where the subtleties and intricacies of his recorded output are often compromised in the interest of putting on a proper rock performance. When Slim jettisoned his guitar onstage at that Wrongbar show, it wasn’t just a snap reaction to a technical difficulty, but a symbolic step toward developing a new mode of live performance.

“I really prefer not to play guitar. I want to be able to perform the songs more, because they’re coming from characters — people doing bad things and getting away with it morally. It’s a thrill to sing from that perspective.

“But it’s difficult to translate textural music live without becoming a noise band, and I don’t really have an interest in that. I’ve heard Beck say that each song has its own laws, like it’s its own country. Live, there’s no time for each song to develop its own world — you want the set to be dynamic, rather than worry about the intricacies of the song’s laws.”

Ironically, the artists Slim is most often compared to vocally — be it Nick Cave, Jon Spencer or Elvis — are better known for their sweat-soaked, pit-stained, tossed-panties performances than the nuances of their recorded output. But Slim’s ultimate role model is a figure who exists far outside the deep-voiced, ladies-man pantheon.

“I think my biggest hero is Brian Eno,” he says. “He makes totally conceptual pop music, where every song relies on an idea. My songs rely on ideas rather than melody or chorus — each song is a mini–art installation. If you look at Eno’s first four pop records, each song is an experiment, and I really think that’s lacking in music right now.”

At 20, Slim Twig knows he’s got a long way to go before amassing a discography as dense and diverse as Brian Eno’s. But for now, at least, he can lay claim to a growing body of work which evinces an adventurous, unfettered spirit similar to that of the young Eno.

That, and better hair, of course.

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