“…Rooney empathises and charms us into feeling the subjectivity of his protagonists. Who else but him could achieve such deep pathos with such down-to-earth subjects, methods and materials?” The Guardian.
“…sound art at its least routine, imagination performing a ventriloquist’s act, speaking out of the haunted past in a borrowed voice.” The Wire magazine.
NEWS
Autumn 2026 – Paul Rooney work showing in This 26 exhibition, Royal Scottish Academy, Edinburgh.
Autumn 2026 – Axing For It and Other Stories, a new vinyl album by Paul Rooney on Owd Scrat Records.
Summer 2026 – Different Types of Road Signs – 2026 Extended Edition, a CD album of remastered tracks by Rooney on Owd Scrat Records.
2026 – Words and Silence presented at WordsWordsWords, a Radiophonicx listening event, with Leona Jones. Cobalt Studios, Newcastle.
2025-2026 – Broken Token shown at: Offbeat Folk Film Festival, London; Screener Short Film, London; New Jersey Film Festival/United States Super 8 and Digital Video Festival; International Film Festival The Hague, Netherlands; Living With Buildings IX Film Festival, Coventry; GIFT001 club event, Sawan Bunker Room, Plymouth; Aegean Film Festival, Patmos; Popup Shorts from the Aegean Film Festival, Andreas Kalatzis Gallery, Patmos.
2024-2025 – Broken Token sound work and film, an Imperial War Museums 14-18 NOW Legacy Fund commission in partnership with, and exhibited at The Box, Plymouth.
A single female voice sings of waiting in her garden for her ‘dark-eyed sailor’ to return from war, bearing the other half of their token, a gimmel ring. Three veterans pass on the road as she waits, and she asks them: “When you were fighting in distant lands, did you think of the home you left?” In reply the veterans relate their recollections. The garden images in the accompanying film represent ‘home’, but also stand for a more general possibility of redemption, of the potential of the past to return at any time, disguised and changed, to renew the present: “Each moment of time is a garden gate,” the song goes, “Through it my love may walk.”