SWIMMING INTERVIEW

By Ben Edgell

Swimming are all about BIG.

There’s the big press coverage. (Swimming’s column inches have attained some serious girth in recent weeks, with all from NME to Artrocker gibbering manically about the Nottingham five-piece, and bestowing all kinds of 5-star, top of charts, single-of-the-week-style praise upon them).

There’s the big ‘concepts’. (Latest single Panthalassa takes its name from the vast global ocean that surrounded the Paleozoic supercontinent Pangaea. Phew…)

And there’s the big music. (Not for Swimming the pared-down charm of recent indie offerings - their scale starts at ‘soundscape’ and ends somewhere on a far off, slightly ethereal horizon. Think Arcade Fire meets The Polyphonic Spree, smudged together with the thumb of British Sea Power.)

Yep, Swimming are all about big, and new album The Fireflow Trade is no exception – firing briskly through a series of sweeping, hook-laden tracks with an impressive range and depth. Yet, amazingly, all thrown together for just north of 800 quid. So, when Liberation caught up with the band mid-way through their (typically expansive) tour of the UK, we just had to get them to spill the beans on their impressive low-cost production.

“We're all sound-junkies and we had no money to get anyone else involved,” says lead singer John Sampson “It was recorded on begged and borrowed time in different spaces, and mixed on a laptop in my spare room. I think that had the biggest effect on the sound.”

Some effect, maybe, but the cut-price production hasn’t limited the scope of the album. Freewheeling, vibrant, and imaginative, The Fireflow Trade seems anything but a low-fi homebrew. And, although Swimming met at school and "weren't really thinking about it as a full band" until their Primary EP, the amateur-hour stops there. The band are four-fifths from a sound engineering background, so they have ability in spades.

Lucky for them, in fact, as neither they, nor their then-label, had any cash. But times have changed since then, so what about next time? “We really want to go into the studio with someone else for the next one, to try something different and bring in some fresh ears.”

Fresh ears, and maybe a whole new sound if their recent experiments are anything to go by. As well as binaural Christmas tunes, the band have been working on a ‘headphones only’ series with “sonic artist” Dallas Simpson. So far, so quirky. But having recently fallen in love with her track I Feel Love, their next collaboration could be even more leftfield: the one and only Queen of Disco, Donna Summer. “We’ve become obsessed with it – we could duet on an ethereal disco number”. (See swimmingband.com for an exclusive preview…)

True, of many bands, these eclectic side projects could feel like filler – exciting fluff to tell the press but of no real value to the music. But for Swimming, they’re essential ballast to help plot a course through the synth-obsessed tide: the range and experimentation are central to the theme. Tracks like Crescents, moving seamlessly from an almost tribal drum to a Mars Volta-esque wail, nestle comfortably alongside Panthalassa, on indie homeground with synth hooks and pop twirls, and Tigershark, which could easily have hailed from the likes of Passion Pit or Temper Trap. So have they got an agenda to stop post-punk in its tracks? Not really. “Its exciting to have a whole range of acts getting attention. When there's no template or formula there's more scope to move forward”. But agenda or no, they’ve staked out a different direction from their indie peers. So what’s the story?

“We've never felt part of a specific scene or sound. We all have different influences in the band as well - we don't all listen to the same stuff so that helps keep it off a set track. We don't go about writing or recording the same way every time, it changes with every song. Whether it be a sample we've found, working with someone like Dallas Simpson on the headphone only stuff, or an interesting space to record in, that all comes through in the music.”

On The Fireflow Trade, they pull this all together with aplomb. An impressive full-length debut, not least considering its humble origins, you’d expect Swimming to be crowing about their progeny’s huge success. But unpredictable as ever, we actually find them humbly hopeful and wanting merely that the album “falls on the ears of people who connect with what we're trying to do: with these songs, and the sounds we're making. And that they will keep finding things that speak to them in it.

“Oh, and that it get its 50m badge...”

The Fireflow Trade is out now on Colourschool records.