photo by Kourosh Keshiri

Toronto’s Slim Twig makes rockabilly dangerous again. His album Contempt! is not merely a deconstruction, but a distillation — no a fermentation — of all the menace that made rockabilly so exciting from the get-go. Slim bends and warps old school rock ’n’ roll with disarming electronic sounds and noise, but watch out, he’s looking to take things even further. Helen Buyniski met up with Slim before his Market Hotel show last week to talk about what it means to be a sample-hoarding, instrument-hopping musical “magpie,” why rock musicians don’t give out free mixtapes (but should), and how cool it is to be compared to Wu-Tang.

JM.com: Where did the name Slim Twig come from?

Slim: I thought it was a funny name, partially because it describes my frame, I guess, and I think Slim is a good rock ’n’ roll name. When I started this project a while ago, I was just looking for a cool name, and that was the one that stuck.

JM.com: Musically, were you doing anything before Slim Twig?

Slim: Yeah, I’ve been in a band called Tropics for about 7 years, I was guitar in that, and I was in a metal band when I was in middle school, but I’ve been doing music for about ten years.

JM.com: What instruments do you play? I know you’re the only one in the band but I was listening to some of your tracks, and it seems like there’s a lot of instruments in there.

Slim: I do a lot of sampling, so sampler is a big instrument, I play a lot of organ, guitar obviously, a variety of things. I like making mysterious sounds, phone sampling and that kind of thing, where the origin is kind of unclear.
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