Space Jam: Toil & Trouble

WORDS & PHOTOS: REISHA HANCO

I wander into the corner of Elmwood that is home to Matt Kathler, drummer for newly-formed Winnipeg psychedelic prog rock duo Toil & Trouble. I knock on the door, and I’m greeted by Matt and Jeremy Simpson, the band’s triple-threat bassist, guitarist, and vocalist, in full costume of the Toil & Trouble characters—two goblin aliens from Gelson Prime, shunned by the musically-ignorant people of their home planet and forced to travel the galaxy learning the musical ways of other lifeforms. Matt and Jeremy lead the way to the basement, home to the Toil & Trouble jam space and Matt’s Butcher Shop Studio. We step through a curtained doorway and into the multipurpose space. On one side, the walls are lined with amps, instruments and various equipment. The other side of the basement is a raised platform containing a cozy productionlab-meets-lounge, complete with a sound-mixing station and multiple gaming systems. I asked the duo what made them decide on this space as a home base for the Toil & Trouble project. “Well, I definitely got this house because of the basement. It was a really good layout just for being able to fit all the instruments we need to fit. We have a whole wall of amps, a PA and normally drums, but we still have a whole bunch of space to be able to move around,” answers Matt. Referring to the upper platform he says, “This side is the back end, where we sit down, talk things out, do any video editing or listen to tracks or anything on the computer, so it’s almost like separated a little bit.” “Eventually, we’ll record here too,” adds Jeremy. The bandmates also share that this was the shooting location of the video for their first single, “Zooplankton Zion,” which is out now on YouTube. “It truly is in the middle of a shifting stage of jamming, to music videos, to recording,” says Matt. The bandmates reminisce on some of the other Winnipeg bands that have used the space to jam and practice; Grand Master, Attilan, Moon Tan and The Uglies, just to name a few. Matt and Jeremy show off the Butcher Shop Studio sign hanging above the couch in the lounge space, and Matt shares the origin of the studio’s name. “It’s based on the first band I was in, Grand Master, because the first hit we had was “The Butcher.” So I always thought Butcher Shop Studio sounded pretty cool and I always thought to get like a wood sign made up with a meat cleaver and then having Butcher Shop on it, so it actually looked like, you know, an old school sign that would be hanging on the boardwalk in New York sort of thing. So I went to a friend who did some woodworking, he made up that sign and I was like, ‘yeah, it just works,’ so it’s just kind of been the name of the basement ever since that first single came out for Grand Master.”

I asked the band about the benefits of having a jam space in-home. “It’s amazing,” Jeremy says. “I lived here for almost a year a while back, and it was the most convenient thing ever because when I wasn’t working, I would just stay home, and then Matt would come home from work, and we would just come down and jam any day we wanted to.”

Matt talks about this further, saying, “Just being a two-piece…the ability to be able to move around and be able to do all the things. Like the music video again, if we were in a bigger band, it would have been so much tighter and so much more difficult to be able to move around and be able to do something in this type of space, but for two people, it’s everything that we need and then some. It’s really good for everything that we want to do. It’s kind of like our mothership.”

Check out the alien duo’s debut, The Pond Album and keep your eyes peeled for Toil & Trouble’s next live Earth appearance!