Experimental Stuff
Before forming outer limits jazz-rock outfit Badge Époque 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 crate digger had his third eye trained on another project—one that would span the breadth of his mercurial creativity. This “journal album,” as he puts it, is titled Scroll, and it 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 Époque Ensemble—sounds unearthed from a lost musical Atlantis. Turnbull calls it “a cosmic
hodge podge of funk, jazz, ambient techno, aggressive guitarmonized rawk, musique concrète, and hip hop.