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Slim Twig

MusicBlog

Location: Toronto

Website: http://www.slimtwig.com/

Bio: Slim Twig is a friend of abstraction. A chameleonic artist in the tradition of Bowie or Beck, Slim is a performer and songsculpter based out ... (more) of Toronto.

Twig has pursued his singular artistic vision since 2003, inspired by pillars of music and film avant garde like Scott Walker, Eno, Nick Cave, Thurston Moore, Godard, Lynch and Cronenberg. Naturally, following such guideposts, his sound has morphed several times over in the past few years from his early apocalyptic folk incarnation to a fuller art-pop sound and, most recently, the self-coined genre of Concrete Rockabilly with a gritty, sample-based aesthetic. This sense of unpredictability and appreciation for what can arise from exploring such mysterious ground is as much at the core of Slim's work as any instrumentation.

Surrounded by the world of film all his life and now dabbling onscreen himself, the medium has had a significant impact on Slim's songwriting. Twig's music concerns itself less with narrative and melody, and focuses instead on the combination of imagery and sound- the two key components of cinema. It's this unorthodox approach that lends Slim's music its peculiar appeal, and makes for particularly memorable live performances.

So far, Twig's musical imagination has brought us a handful of self-released EPs, secured a spot on EYE Weekly's list of artists to watch in 2008, and earned accolades like those for his earlier Derelict Dialect sessions, named "the best recording of '06" at the renowned Gas Station studio by producer Dale Morningstar.

Slim Twig can be seen on screen opposite Ellen Page in Bruce McDonald's The Tracey Fragments as Billy Zero, and has composed music for the award-winning short film Letters From R.

Slim is also 50% of the shambling shattering art-punk defunkts Tropics.




Slim Twig exudes the kind of cool we worshipped in Extra Width-era Jon Spencer's rockabilly punk chic and Genesis P. Orridge's extreme mixed-media weirdness, and that's hard to come by."
– Cam Lindsay, Exclaim!

"Renaissance-man-about-town Slim Twig deals in two kinds of love. Alongside drummer Simone TB, he exorcises his broke-down Birthday Party blues as scrappy garage-rock duo Tropics. But on his own, he indulges his Suicide-al tendencies in a secret laboratory of pawn-shop electronics."
– Stuart Berman, EYE Weekly

"Rising scene star Slim Twig and his Mercy Mercenaries darkly demented synth-rockabilly jams like the knife-slashing Brothl Hunting! and the hearse-driven Tormen have made their new Whiite Fantaseee EP into the grim grabber of the season." – Tim Perlich, NOW Magazine (less)