Before forming outer limits jazz-rock outfit Badge ?poque Ensemble, Max Turnbull masterminded the oddball pop persona Slim Twig, wrote and performed with U.S. Girls, and moonlighted in varyingly experimental groups across his native Toronto. While this was going on, the devout cratedigger had his third eye trained on another project one that would span the breadth of his mercurial creativity. This "journal album," collages together the pearls of Turnbull's eight-year dive into his songwriting imagination. Sprawling across 90 audacious minutes, Scroll released simply as Badge Epoch, a tidy distinction from the collective ?poque Ensemble sounds unearthed from a lost musical Atlantis. Turnbull calls it "a cosmic hodge podge of funk, jazz, ambient techno, aggressive guitarmonized rawk, musique concr?te, and hip hop.", the record is peppered with musique concr?te interludes and has a dream-sequence feel, as if somebody else's memories had been scattered around your head. Turnbull began assembling the nuggets in 2017, when he enlisted the Toronto sound artist Andrew Zukerman, aka Fleshtone Aura, to collage his works-in-progress into sequences before adding undercurrents of Zoom-recorder-snatched sounds and Buchla synthesizer. "My instruction was to cut things up, open windows, slice, dice, what have you," says Turnbull. "Eventually this turned into 4 discrete cycles of music," each taking up one side of vinyl. Personnel: Produced, performed, compiled by Maximilian 'Twig' Turnbull & Andrew Zukerman. ?poque Ensemble: Jay Anderson, Alia O'Brien, Giosue Rosati, Ed Squires, Twig, In absentia: Chris Bezant, Karen Ng. Mastered by Sarah Register. Art by Andrew Zukerman & Meg Remy.
