A ghost is born
They don’t call him Slim Twig for nothing, but his frenetic, rockabilly-inspired performances aren’t what you’d call fragile

It’s not just a clever name. Slim Twig is also a comically accurate description of this emerging rocker’s appearance — tall and gaunt, with a jet black pompadour, pencil-thin moustache, starched-white button-down shirt and tight black pants, the avant-crooner carries himself like Tim Burton’s idea of a Nashville star. On stage, gnashing at a semi-hollow-body guitar and howling in reverb-drenched tones about snake-oil salesmen and sweaty gunmetal, Slim Twig’s persona is made flesh. Even his film debut last year alongside Ellen Page in Bruce McDonald’s visually compelling psychodrama The Tracey Fragments bore the charcoal shading of his stage presence. Although he admits over drinks at Manic Coffee that his acting style is almost “non-acting,” he says, “Maybe my Slim Twig persona may have overlapped a bit with [The Tracey Fragments’] Billy Zero one, but it wasn’t really intentional.”

Over the course of two EPs released this year on Paper Bag — the linguistically themed Vernacular Violence and Derelict Dialect, now collected on a single vinyl LP — Twig has basically created his own self-labelled genre: “concrete rockabilly.” Sounding like Carl Perkins filtered through the trashy ambience of Suicide and shrouded in Nick Cave’s cigarette smoke, Slim Twig’s experimental solo ventures sit in opposition to the Black Flag blues of his other gig, Tropics.

In fact, the solo Slim Twig is a direct result of his long-standing duo, or rather, its suspension. Slim had been playing with Tropics drummer Simone TB since the end of junior high, but when she moved to Montreal for university he spent a couple years writing new material without anyone to perform it with. The genesis of the live Slim Twig experience came when he purchased a drum machine and enlisted the help of Huckleberry Friends keyboardist Sienna De Campo. The band, which now includes drummer Jesse James Laderoute and occasional cellist Tilman Lewis, provided the spark that set Slim Twig ablaze.

Even though I’m never entirely certain whether I’m talking to Slim Twig or the man behind the mask, it’s obvious that he has a clear vision for who he wants to be.

But a persona can be problematic, both for the performer and for those interested in him. When I sit down with Twig at a table in the coffee shop’s back corner, he not only asks that we don’t print his real name, he insists, “I don’t want people to really know me personally. I think I am very different [from Slim Twig].” He’s quick to explain that his assumed identity has a lot to do with rockabilly’s OG: Elvis Presley. “I love Elvis. I have a huge man-crush on him,” he confesses with a coy sort of reverence. “I just think he was like a force of nature in the mid-’50s to the early ’60s. He had his own persona, which the world really hadn’t seen until then.”

Similarly Slim Twig sees his own persona as something that’s unique to Toronto. “Particularly in the experimental community where that’s completely a non-issue,” he says. “People have non-personas, and that’s completely the point … Everyone can be faceless.

“What I’m trying to do is straddle the line between having an approach [almost] like a noise band — I’m really interested in new techniques and textures in music rather than melody — but within the skin of a songwriter,” he says. “To kind of have a disturbing aesthetic both sonically and lyrically but through the eyes of a form that’s traditionally associated with, like, Neil Young or Bob Dylan. 

“Those guys don’t really put a lot of work into creating a new sound. It’s like they use the same chords for their entire career, which to me is great, but not what I’m interested in.”

Lately, Slim isn’t even all that interested in playing guitar. “I really hate it,” he admits. “I don’t think I’m very good at it and I find it really difficult to try and create original music using guitar. I have an album coming out next year which has virtually no guitar on it — it’s all very sample-based.”

By borrowing from other media, Slim Twig is making his singular brand of rockabilly Sam Phillips’ weirdest nightmare.

“It’s really hard to have that same process with guitar,” he says. “Because everything, even the more far-out aspects, have been discovered and well-documented. A band like Sonic Youth makes it very difficult to try [anything new]. But if it’s more sound-oriented and sample-based or something more conceptual, it’s kind of a shortcut to a new language of pop songwriting, which is what I’m after.”

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