Paul Rooney of Owd Scrat Records shares a playlist compiled by label artists Alain Chamois, EF Bausor and The Creeping Things, exploring the magic of the space where musical sounds and spoken word meet. Broadcast in the Freak Zone Playlist series on BBC 6Music on 29/7/2018, and Including records by Laurie Anderson, Current 93, Coil and extracts from the work of surreal comedian Chris Morris.

Difficult Listening Hour, Live – Laurie Anderson (United States Live, Warners)

We have not yet learnt the new songs – Object Collection (Cheap&Easy OCTOBER, Object Collection/BMI)

Sea Hole L’Estaque. July 2002 – Luc Ferrari (Les Anecdotiques, Sub Rosa)

Indeterminacy Part 3 (excerpt) – John Cage and David Tudor (Indeterminacy, Doxy)

Child Soldier – Oneohtrix Point Never (Replica, Software)

Bottom of the Garden monologue – Les Dawson (Thirty Years of the Good Old Days, BBC TV show)

I’m Transmitting Tonight – Tim Hecker (Radio Amor, Mille Plateaux)

Blue Jam (excerpt) – Chris Morris (feat. Olive) (Radio 1FM show, series1, episode 2)

Minus Something – Swans (Soundtrack for the Blind, Young God)

Hollywood Ambient (excerpt) – AG Cook (feat. Charli XCX) (Liminal mix tape) 

B4 – Chuck Person (Eccojams, The Curatorial Club cassette).

I Looked to the South Side of the Door – Current 93 (Birth Canal Blues, Coptic Cat). 

Blue Jam (excerpt) – Chris Morris (Radio 1FM show, series 3, episode 6)

Down 3 – Stars of the Lid (The Tired Sounds of Stars of the Lid, Kranky)

Gorbals 1930 – Ivor Cutler (A Flat Man, Estate of Ivor Cutler)

Broccoli – Coil (Musick to Play in the Dark Vol. 1, Chalice).

The Backyard (excerpt) – Robert Ashley (Private Parts, Lovely Music)

BBC 6 Music Freak Zone Playlist - Owd Scrat Records

Rooney’s second solo album is a move away from the eclectic DIY post-punk of 2017’s ‘Futile Exorcise’ towards voice, piano and electronics led skewed ambient pop. As it’s title suggests, this new album’s tracks are themed around service industry jobs (it is the first of two albums on this theme), particularly the transient vocal interactions of everyday call centre work, as well as the humanity and humour that endures through it all. The lyrics of the pieces often use interviews or texts from the workers themselves, made during the early to mid 2000’s.

Stay Polite is a deeply emotive male voiced hymn to the abuse filled day of a female taxi company phone operator, featuring a beautifully fragile lead vocal by acclaimed folk singer Jackie Oates. On the album’s longform spoken word piece, Words and Silence, softly insistent modular synth tones accompany an Indian call centre worker leaving a message – of invented personas and time-as-commodity – on an answer service, creating an extended moment of mysterious confabulation for the eventual listener (us). As well as phone interactions there are two pieces about the text based interplay of email conversations and chat-rooms. The latter, Don’t Throw Up On Window Sills, being a kind of chamber opera about a gardening chat group celebrating the return of a missing cat, imbued with the melancholy of obsolescence (the chat-room fad itself is all but extinct). The album is a poignant, reflective encounter with everyday failures, everyday battles, and everyday resistances, pertinent to our precarious times.

“Yet again, there is another stunning album that’s been released by Paul Rooney.” Zaph Mann (KFFP Radio, Portland and podcast). 13/08/2021.

“A track from local artist Paul Rooney’s second album, a real treasure trove of glorious computer composed hyper-pop.” George Maund, PMS (BBC Radio Merseyside). 20/8/2021.

“This new album Surface Industries, his second solo album, tracks themed around service industry jobs… it really is fascinating.” Stuart Maconie, Stuart Maconie’s Freak Zone (BBC 6 Music). 23/8/2021.

“These eight tracks have been created over a period of two decades, mostly using texts derived from call centre operatives. They occupy a space where folk music might have developed, up to that juncture when meaningful tradition and continuities of locality dissolved into the glacial wastes of cyberspace, global capitalism and the unsolicited sales pitch.” Julian Cowley (The Wire magazine). Oct. 2021.

"Service Industries I makes strip-lit minimalist psalmodies from call centre conversations of invisible workforces... It’s a profound, political, and holy work, worth a thousand Panoramas." Stewart Lee. (The Idler magazine). Jan-Feb. 2022.

Surface Industries I

Hold the Line for a Moment

Paul Rooney - Hold the Line for a Moment

This track was conceived as an alternative, disruptive soundtrack to the now deleted YouTube video ‘Still at Large – Holy Island’, an essay film about Lindisfarne, UK, presented by architecture writer Nicholas Still. The Creeping Things (aka Lola de Witte-Still of Berwick-upon-Tweed and Berlin) made her own (unsolicited) version of the video, with her disturbing soundtrack imposed on top of it. When we came across this relentless and compelling piece of music and wordage we persuaded Lola to allow us to release it as The Creeping Things’ first UK single release. We are also chuffed to be exclusively hosting the new video on Owd Scrat Records’ Vimeo channel.

The female monologue on the track (which de Witte-Still claims is not her own recording but was sent to her via an anonymous WeTransfer link in 2015) remorselessly intones about a male figure on the run from an unspoken crime. This figure is up to his neck in the sea, in the manner of St. Cuthbert, who liked inducing trances by the chill of the water. Over de Witte-Still’s relentless motorik beat and haunted analogue synths (not unlike Neu!-mode Stereolab backing a robotic David Tibet) the voice chants of the fugitive’s many ‘hyperthermal’ apocalyptic reveries, until the monologue seemingly drowns in its own twisted poetic vitriol. The voice, and the figure it describes, both seem to be hunting for something or someone. Are they aiming their threatening intent towards Still himself? Interestingly, Nicholas Still has not made any public appearances since the new version of his video was posted.

Thanks to Berwick Visual Arts, Paul Rooney, Richard Stephenson Winter and Melanie Dagg.

New Theme to Still at Large

The Creeping Things – New Theme to Still at Large

An 18-minute single-track homage to a snowy field near Hebden Bridge by composer and former music writer Alain Chamois. The track includes sound recordings from the field itself and from Heptonstall graveyard, along with a swirling snowstorm of ambient drones and chopped and screwed 80s pop loops, creating a kind of Vaporwave audio tour that meanders into places not dissimilar to Tim Hecker and Ben Frost's more numbed arctic realms. The spoken word monologue, which touches on Leon Trotsky, Ted Hughes, Sylvia Plath, Ian Curtis, comic Russ Abbot, fellow Owd Scrat artist Paul Rooney’s 1990s band Rooney, and above all the landscape of West Yorkshire, is structured around the moment in 1979 when photographer Charlie Meecham takes a photograph of the snowy field in question. The photograph was later chosen by Joy Division and Peter Saville to adorn the cover of the 12″ single Atmosphere. This is Owd Scrat's Christmas single, out in July (of course). With thanks to Steve Fortune.

L E T  M E  T A K E  Y O U  T H E R E

Alain Chamois – L E T  M E  T A K E  Y O U  T H E R E

A Victorian child shoplifter on trial sings her daydreams amidst a musical collision of shimmering pop synths and rowdy courtroom shouting. Her spirit is summoned out of stolen fragments (a court report, a Jean Genet novel, memories of childhood, a Victorian hymn), and she seems all too aware of her transformation from a voiceless youth into a new entity: a sparkling self-mythologizing bad-girl teen-pop diva construct, shaped out of these ‘lying words’. Lola de Witte-Still remixes what was originally a Paul Rooney sound installation (this is his first single since Lucy Over Lancashire) to create a shiny kick-driven experimental-pop single cum mini-opera, with nods to AG Cook, Men’s Choir Shouters of Finland and Oneohtrix Point Never.

Stolen Things (The Creeping Things Remix)

Paul Rooney – Stolen Things (The Creeping Things Remix)

Late 1990's lo-fi Liverpudlian John Peel favourites Rooney (not the US band who ripped their name off later) went along to Maida Vale in 1999, their first and only visit to a professional recording studio, to record their first and only John Peel session. After BBC6 Music repeated the session recently we were reminded of its unique charms and moved enough to make the session finally available on disc for the twentieth anniversary of its first broadcast. In the session, the electro-lo-fi of Rooney's three albums is translated into an understatedly strident post-punk power pop, the only evidence of how the live band (Colin Cromer, Ian Jackson and Paul Rooney) sounded. All of the tracks showcase the particular Rooney lyric approach, focussing on hyper-mundane modern life, such as paintwork jamming windows shut, curtains letting in sunlight and standing at a distance from bus stops. This release is to herald the fact that Owd Scrat will also be putting out some more unreleased Rooney material during the coming year or two.

This Job's Forever - The Peel Session

A Friend Who Forgot/Birdsong

Rooney - A Friend Who Forgot/Birdsong

Used to It

Rooney - Used To It

Records, CDs, cassettes and downloads from a dark corner of the land.
Founded 2014, northern England.

Email: owdscratrecords [at] gmail [dot] com