C.PL: Complicated meters are an important part in your and Meshuggah’s music…
RM: Meshuggah is one of the bands that introduced polyrhythms to a broader audience. Their polyrhythms are actually very basic but are beautifully done and strongly swinging. They always use 4/4 beats and play odd time signatures over them. In nearly all their songs the drums play a slow 4/4 beat and the guitars play riffs that are faster and oddly timed, that’s what’s mostly responsible for Meshuggah’s special feeling. So on one hand you have this hip-hop kind of bounce, which is always stable and predictable and on the other you have this unpredictable guitar playing which is rhythmically odd. We basically do the same. But we build way more layers of polyrhythms and we don’t use 4/4 beats at all. We combine time signatures that are barely combinable and that creates an illusion of disorder in our music. That is what distinguishes our bands. Meshuggah is very clean and organized whereas we create a messy, chaotic feeling of being totally out of control.
C.PL: How did you get in touch with Meshuggah and how did you end up on tour with them?
RM: We first met them in Vienna in 2004 just after we released our first album. After Mushuggah’s show we had a chat with them and gave them our CD. A few months later our friend interviewed them and when he asked them about what they were listening to on the tour bus, they showed him three CDs and one of them was our album. They said that they really liked our CD and were listening to it all the time. After that there was a long period of silence, we ourselves had a hiatus as a band. We met Meshuggah again in 2011 at the OFF Festival in Poland, and together we gave an interview for Polish TV . Back then the Meshuggah members were already saying that they had been planning to invite us on a joint tour. So when we recorded our last album, Fredrik Thordendal was one of the first people to receive it from us. He got it even before it was released, and his reaction was very enthusiastic. After that we started to talk seriously about going on tour together. By then they were stars, so they were going on tours with bands they liked, not necessarily with bands suggested by their record label. After a while we got the invitation for the 25th anniversary tour, which was incredible.
C.PL: The now-defunct Polish band Kobong was a major influence to you. What’s so special about them?
RM: The interesting thing is that both Kobong and Meshuggah started to experiment with polyrhythms around the same time. Meshuggah survived and made it big, Kobong broke up shortly after releasing their best album, Chmury nie było. Kobong was experimenting with polyrhythms in a much more complicated manner than Meshuggah and that’s why I think they were a much bigger influence to us. There was a time when I was listening to Chmury nie było a lot, I didn’t know what was going on in that music at all, even though back then I was already playing guitar. Nevertheless, after a while, listening to that music became a total experience to me. I got so attached to Kobong’s music that from aged 17 to 19 I was listening to it all the time. After I realized what’s going on in the music, what it was that fascinated me so much, we started experimenting with similar musical structures in our band. That was one of the bases for the later development of our style.
C.PL: Which existing Polish alternative bands do you consider interesting?
RM: Apart from Kobong, my major influence, I always liked a Polish band called Kinsky, which might have been even more important to me. They recorded one album in 1995 and later recorded another that got lost for 16 years and never got mixed. That other album was somehow rescued and is being mixed right now and will soon be released. The band Kinsky is currently active again, they play rehearsals and will play live gigs. It’s just the impossible made possible. To me this is the most interesting band ever. Tony, their guitar player, is our friend, and we are planning to tour together.
C.PL: The members of Semantik Punk used to be active as Moja Adrenalina. Moja Adrenalina’s music was in the film Essential Killing with Vincent Gallo, how did that happen?
RM: Mr. Skolimowski (the director of Essential Killing), was searching for something extreme and contemporary, which he couldn’t find. Through some connections he heard about us. He consulted his idea of using our music with Paweł Mykietyn who was preparing the score for the movie and that’s how it started. Paweł Mykietyn thought our music very interesting; our musical experiments are sometimes similar to his musical experiments.
C.PL: What are Semantik Punk’s current plans?
RM: We are planning to write new music, which we haven’t done for almost two years. We were kind of tired and burnt out after recording our last album. So that’s the plan, but I don’t know if we’ll succeed. It’s hard to get us to work, we’re really lazy you know…
Interviewed by Marek Kępa, January 2015