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They Made Me Do It -
Talking Influences with Kim Salmon
Talking Influences with Kim Salmon
With over 35 years of music to his name, post-punk veteran Kim Salmon has returned with his eighth studio album under the Surrealists moniker - thrilling and subversive, Rantings From The Book Of Swamp encompasses a sprawling career of reinvention told through an improvised collection of 13 tracks. We had Kim talk us through his musical influences surrounding Rantings From The Book Of Swamp and the wider magic behind his work.
Unbound by design and concept, Rantings From The Book Of Swamp is an auteurs guide to genre integration, finding balance between jazz-fusion, blues, post-punk and rock. Born out of a worldwide live-streamed performance, the album channels the urgency of deconstruction and salvage - each track playing on the considered sounds of past Surrealists work while exploring unpredictable genre shifts. Mapped out across 13 tracks, Rantings From The Book Of Swamp finds cohesion and sharp focus through Kim’s lyrical sketches. Each taken from notebooks entitled Various Volumes of the Book of Swamp, lyrics howl with an equal balance of wit and foreboding tension.
Despite moving between tempos and genre sporadically, the album does hold a shortlist of ground rules addressed in Kim’s warm introduction; “we can’t read each other’s minds and be prepared to deconstruct our ideas.” But with an unparalleled musical chemistry, the Surrealists marry their strengths of post-punk groove, fusion drumming and searing guitar lines - each playing off each other seamlessly in striking moments of improvised gold.
As the album progresses, it’s hard to deny the long-standing growth these musicians have felt together, now decades into their friendships and musical careers. However, it’s more than just a celebration of the group’s forever-evolving musical dynamic - Rantings From The Book Of Swamp is a realisation of life’s uncertainty and beauty.
To dig a bit deeper into the chaos, we had Kim fill us in on what inspired the Surrealists to take on such a wild project.
My previous band Scientists (mark2)
Despite moving between tempos and genre sporadically, the album does hold a shortlist of ground rules addressed in Kim’s warm introduction; “we can’t read each other’s minds and be prepared to deconstruct our ideas.” But with an unparalleled musical chemistry, the Surrealists marry their strengths of post-punk groove, fusion drumming and searing guitar lines - each playing off each other seamlessly in striking moments of improvised gold.
As the album progresses, it’s hard to deny the long-standing growth these musicians have felt together, now decades into their friendships and musical careers. However, it’s more than just a celebration of the group’s forever-evolving musical dynamic - Rantings From The Book Of Swamp is a realisation of life’s uncertainty and beauty.
To dig a bit deeper into the chaos, we had Kim fill us in on what inspired the Surrealists to take on such a wild project.
My previous band Scientists (mark2)
This band, aside from being the one that brought the ‘Swamp’ motif to my oeuvre, had a golden period in the mid 1980s where we were really just making it up on the spot with little rehearsal a lot of the time. ‘Rev Head’, ‘Nitro’, ‘Demolition Derby’, ‘the Spin’, ‘Hell Beach’ and ‘Human Jukebox’ are all the examples of a basic idea tossed into the vortex for the band to salvage what it could from it.
At the inevitable implosion of this band in ‘86 in London I vowed to myself to take that way of doing things to my next band ...which was of course, the Surrealists!
Free jazz
At the inevitable implosion of this band in ‘86 in London I vowed to myself to take that way of doing things to my next band ...which was of course, the Surrealists!
Free jazz
When you’re makin it up i.e. improvising, people project all kinds of stuff onto you that you have no idea of. Sometimes you ignore it, sometimes you affect a “yeah man , we’re down with Miles” (or whoever) and sometimes you actually investigate. By the time of KS&TS I’d looked into a lot of the stuff - Miles Davis, Ornette Coleman, Coltraine - John AND Alice, James Blood Ulmer.... Sun Ra..
We were never jazz but this stuff made its impression and has been in the background over the decades with the Surrealists.
Our drummer, Phil Collings comes from the jazz scene and while he views us as his chance to ROCK we have absorbed more of the Free Jazz vibe by osmosis.
Da funk
We were never jazz but this stuff made its impression and has been in the background over the decades with the Surrealists.
Our drummer, Phil Collings comes from the jazz scene and while he views us as his chance to ROCK we have absorbed more of the Free Jazz vibe by osmosis.
Da funk
Show me some post punk guys from the mid eighties that weren’t aspiring to be masters of ‘the funk’ and I’ll show you some guys that weren’t post punk guys from the mid eighties - well maybe not the Scientists who mistakenly thought they were above it ha!
Brian Hooper and Tony Pola were a product of the time and their funk was filtered through stuff like PIL, Rip Rig and Panic, A Certain Ratio and Killing Joke. Stu Thomas and Greg Bainbridge had to be able to do what their predecessors did and more - they brought their funk infused with Miles Davis’s On The Corner and James Brown and this was a way for me to bring in my teenage soul influence like The Isaac Hayes and Barry White that I absorbed through endless hours of Casey Kasem’s American Top 40 back in ‘71
Telephone
The kid’s game where one kid whispers something to another and that kid whispers that same thing to another and after it's gone through the chain the last person is saying something entirely different.
You say something to anyone and their interpretation of what you say will always be different. You give an idea to someone as individual as Stu Thomas and get him to give it back and it will be something you hadn’t ever thought of. Phil Collings comes from an entirely different scene to us two so his reference points are other worldly!
I’ve never fought this. It’s a big part of Surrealism.
The holy trinity of Alex Chilton/Jim Dickinson/Tav Falco
Brian Hooper and Tony Pola were a product of the time and their funk was filtered through stuff like PIL, Rip Rig and Panic, A Certain Ratio and Killing Joke. Stu Thomas and Greg Bainbridge had to be able to do what their predecessors did and more - they brought their funk infused with Miles Davis’s On The Corner and James Brown and this was a way for me to bring in my teenage soul influence like The Isaac Hayes and Barry White that I absorbed through endless hours of Casey Kasem’s American Top 40 back in ‘71
Telephone
The kid’s game where one kid whispers something to another and that kid whispers that same thing to another and after it's gone through the chain the last person is saying something entirely different.
You say something to anyone and their interpretation of what you say will always be different. You give an idea to someone as individual as Stu Thomas and get him to give it back and it will be something you hadn’t ever thought of. Phil Collings comes from an entirely different scene to us two so his reference points are other worldly!
I’ve never fought this. It’s a big part of Surrealism.
The holy trinity of Alex Chilton/Jim Dickinson/Tav Falco
The devastation and deconstruction of the Dickinson produced Alex Chilton albums Sister Lovers and Like Flies on Sherbet and the trainwreck that was Tav Falco’s Panther Burns were HUGE for the Scientists.
Music being deconstructed and all kinds of mayhem being salvaged from that!
The Scientists work in the area was not finished and I’ve used the Surrealists to take it to the next level.
Music being deconstructed and all kinds of mayhem being salvaged from that!
The Scientists work in the area was not finished and I’ve used the Surrealists to take it to the next level.
Rantings From The Book Of Swamp is out now - head to Bandcamp to grab the album on limited vinyl.
