Axing For It and Other Stories
33⅓ RPM 12” black vinyl/digital, album, 44 mins, 2026.
Tracks:
Side 1:
Letters Begin (1.18)
Write Here Write Now (8.07) video
Letters In (1.08)
Axing For It (10.56)
Tape’s Pool (1.21)
Side 2:
To Havana Have Not (5.40) video
Letters Pray (1.20)
Hardcore Born (5.44) video
Axe Me Again (1.07)
Pool the Other One (8.27) video
Paul Rooney’s fourth solo album, Axing For It and Other Stories, is a collection of longer pieces – interspersed with shorter interlude tracks – that contain first person spoken-word narratives, in the manner of previous works such as Lucy Over Lancashire, Lost High Street, and Words & Silence. The pieces foreground the complex phonetic and rhythmical qualities of ordinary spoken (not versified) prose; speech as music. They explore how that speech – and the voices that speak it – interplay sonically and expressively with the accompanying music and sounds in complex ways. This is not a simple transmission of information but a different expressive understanding of language. The pieces also play with the inexorable and unreliable nature of storytelling itself, which has its own relentless rhythms and patterns beyond the semantic.
Propelled by frantically arpeggiated pulses, the protagonist of Write Here Write Now hurtles along the M6 with a relentless narrative momentum, thanks to an invisible (possibly AI) author who is writing the protagonist’s life as a medical spy thriller. Amongst the electronic drones and cellos of Axing For It is the voice of a cheerfully self-hating tree describing visits by a postman called Franz who has also insinuated himself into her dreams. In Hardcore Born, field recordings and electronic bleeps accompany the observations of a reanimated zombie poet (based on fake Melbourne poet Ern Malley) walking the streets of Melbourne, Australia, who has been created out of fragments of other Melbourne poets’ writings. Pool the Other One submerges us in church organ, hymn singing and involuntary memory, and centres around the remembrance of a ridiculous, failed attempt to remedy the sicknesses around us.
Buy via Owd Scrat Records.
“A cauldron of wild imaginings bubbles away incessantly just below the surface of Rooney’s attentive registrations of daily life.” Julian Cowley (The Wire magazine). October 2026.
“…Axing For It and Other Stories… on that great label from Liverpool: Owd Scrat.” Michael Fenton (Fenny), On the Wire (Slack City Radio). 6/9/2026.
“I keep fearing the day when Paul Rooney’s work begins to dip below the almost impossibly high standard he’s set but it’s still never shown any sign of arriving.” Mark Whitby (Rabid Underdog blog). 8th September 2026.
Axing For It track broadcast as part of Radiophrenia 2026 FM radio project. September 2026.
“That’s Paul Rooney’s excellent new album Axing For It…” Mark Whitby (FSK Radio). 7/8/2026.
“…another stunning album.” Zaph Mann (The Beat Goes On podcast). 14/8/2026
“…this album is at least the equal of his staggeringly great 2017 release Futile Exorcise”. Gavin Hellyer (Bandcamp website). August 2026.