Moonlighting As A Handyman

Oscar Key Sung (Oscar Slorach-Thorn on his birth certificate) settles at a corner table in Warner Music’s Melbourne offices. At present, he has cropped platinum locks that peep out from beneath a black beanie. Slorach-Thorn sports a ripped white t-shirt with black cursive writing scrawled all over it, but it’s difficult to drag your focus away from those captivating, feline green eyes. Always fashion forward, Slorach-Thorn wears an awesome bomber jacket, with Union Jack emblazoned across the back, in the photograph that features on his latest Altruism EP’s cover. We need to know where he sourced it from. “That jacket was my uncle’s favourite jacket and he was a really, really big part of my life until late last year when he passed away,” Slorach-Thorn shares. “And, you know, a lot of the energy in some of the songs is kind of directed at him and stuff like that. So the jacket was me doing a little ode to him.”

"I was so wrecked when we were filming. I just wanted it to be really stark and almost like, you know, a realism film"

Slorach-Thorn confirms the clip for EP track Skip was filmed “just around here, like, on Johnston Street and just around Collingwood”. The shoot took place “around three or 4am” and Slorach-Thorn recalls, “I was doing a lot of kind of handyman work around that time, for my grandma, and so I was so wrecked when we were filming [laughs]. I just wanted it to be really stark and almost like, you know, a realism film or something like that where I’m genuinely tired just riding around in my neighbourhood.” There are shots where the camera moves alongside Slorach-Thorn as he cycles. “[Ryan Alexander Lloyd]’s sitting in the back of my friend’s Pajero – Andy Wilson who does Andras Fox,” he enlightens.

Since his days studying sound art at RMIT, Slorach-Thorn believes he’s learned to consider a composition’s context. “Now I imagine, ‘Will this song be good on a dancefloor? Will it be good to cry to? Will it be good to contemplate to?’ and I try to have a more tangible reason for a song to exist rather than for it to just be an exploration.”

He raps his fingers on the table sporadically throughout our chat and when asked how many musical guises he’s currently exploring, Slorach-Thorn clarifies, “Well I guess my solo project is the main thing and then, within that, I do work with, you know, someone like Andy where I sing on house music stuff [Andras & Oscar]. There’s also a number of other producers that I’ll sing with, stuff that’s coming out over this year, and some remixes I’ll be doing with people, and producing for people… I want to do a number of aspects of the industry, so by having a solo moniker I can then put on a lot of different hats. But it’ll all come under that OKS banner.”