Kim Salmon and the Surrealists always salvaged their performances out of adversity – be it no money, no time, distance, and now the COVID Er

The band began in Perth 1987 deconstructing tunes like Blue Velvet, Je’taime Moi Non Plus and playing their own off kilter music with its bizarre time signatures and titles like ‘A Belly Full Of Slugs’, ‘Intense’ and ‘Bad Birth’. They managing to record 3 albums with little or no rehearsal in the 3 following years winding up in Melbourne where they now reside.
Continuing their MO to lesser or greater degrees this 3 piece toured Europe, USA, New Zealand and Australia supporting such luminaries as Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds, The Cramps, Jon Spencer Blues Explosion and even U2. In other words, they were a ‘band’s band’.
They recorded their most widely acclaimed album ‘Sin Factory’ in 1992 with genius producer Tony Cohen and their wildest tour de force of styles ‘Ya Gotta Let Me Do My Thing’ in 1996 with ‘blues’punk’ folk’ anarchist legend Jim Dickinson in Memphis.

Till now their most recent album has been 2007’s space, psych, jazz freeform freak out ‘Grand Unifying Theory’.

The band has something of a lineage but has settled at Kim, Phil Collings and Stu Thomas – the lineup on that last album.

Having always had more than a fair amount of improvisational content in their material, it was only ever a step away to take the plunge and make up a whole album out of nothing other than what the 3 of them could bring to a recording session.

The idea to have an improvised show before an audience with the purpose of recording it happened at the start of the year before any COVID lockdown.
The event was to be called Rantings From The Book Of Swamp.

Things quickly changed with Lockdown and the initial show at a venue cancelled.
Kim was approached by Semiconductor media and after a mooted event and by June the ante had been infinitely upped to the performance being livestreamed and made accessible worldwide.

For lyrical content Kim referred to his sketchbooks, all entitled various volumes of “The Book Of Swamp’ with the intention of fitting various sketched lyrics as vocals with whatever the band came up with musically – hence the title of the show.
This resultant material has coalesced into a brand new double album from Kim Salmon and the Surrealists for and of the COVID Era –
Rantings From The Book Of Swamp.