Max Turnbull first saw the light of day in Toronto in 1988. After finishing art school and appearing in a handful of films as an actor, he forged the Slim Twig persona in the mid-2000s. What began as a lone outlet for his untamed sonic experiments led him to issue several self-released CD-Rs, the earliest being Livestock Burn in 2005. Those initial efforts mixed blues-tinged rockabilly, abrasive punk, hazy psychedelia, and crude sampling paired with makeshift rhythms drawn from bargain-bin records. Beyond his own recordings, he handled guitar duties for the ferocious punk group Tropics, scored the occasional film, and released solo material under the Archaic Women name. Paper Bag Records surfaced two EPs in 2008—Derelict Dialect and Vernacular Violence—before combining them into a single album the next year, while also delivering Contempt!, the project’s first full-length statement. Turnbull kept a brisk pace through the following years with limited-run cassettes and EPs issued independently and with Tropics, even as he launched a creative alliance with Meghan Remy of U.S. Girls. The pair issued several splits, toured together, founded a label, and wed in summer 2012. That year he produced both U.S. Girls’ GEM and his own Sof’ Sike. Long absorbed in the dense psychedelic concept album A Hound at the Hem, which he finished in 2010, he released it in tiny quantities in 2012 on the Calico Corp. imprint he ran with Remy in tandem with Pleasence Records. DFA reissued A Hound at the Hem in 2014. After a 7-inch that featured Slim Twig’s version of Serge Gainsbourg’s “Cannabis,” DFA brought out his fourth proper album, Thank You for Stickin’ with Twig, in 2015.
