Slodown

Brian Lim was a student in my third year communication design class at SVA before—or perhaps while—he became the cult Singaporean R&B icon Slodown. Even back then he had chops, and for our semester long conceptual branding project he developed a full world around a notional high-low porn site called Bodies. So, it’s not surprising that as a performer his work barely even pauses at songwriting and recording. If you look carefully at the liner notes of his releases or the end credits of his videos, aside from a few one-off collaborations with people like Tzekin from Eternal Dragonz, Brian, credited as Slodown, conceives and produces almost all of the visual material that give three and fourth dimensional depth to his project. Like our mutual friends in the Eternal Dragonz crew, Slodown is interested in piecing together the fragmented memories of the cultural heritage he internalized growing up in Singapore with the global pop culture that held his attention throughout his youth. The resulting kaleidoscope of sounds, textures, images and ephemera weaves itself through the samples, video textures, typographic choices and even the character’s personal style—a mix of cues that brings together 90’s New York street fashion, quintessential Asian diaspora archetypes and pieces of his Singapore roots. Here we talk about his songwriting process, which also not surprisingly mostly consists of collaging together bits of highly personal diaristic writing in his iPhone’s Notes app, how the proper lens through which to view his practice might be as a total artwork rather than simply a music side project and how his training and day job as a designer and art director gives him the tools he needs to bring this all together. The first in our special pandemic “Through the Wire” series in which we have figured out how to record remotely. Sound quality could be better but at least its not that Shyne rapping from prison shit.