I first came in to contact with David Rooney’s work as a reader of Hot Press. For many of us this was an integral part of the vibe, or the Hot Press ‘look and feel’. His images were powerful in so many settings and left their mark on you long after the words had faded from memory.
As you’ll hear, David also had a parallel path as a musician, and this path led to his releasing a number of songs in the past few years in the company of some excellent musical collaborators.
His latest project, “Echotal” combines his two artistic paths. For David, the goal was to form a bridge between his own unique and dark scraperboard art and his music. This is also a collaboration with animators and filmmakers.
The four-track EP, is both instrumental and lyric driven and four music films or videos. He describes the musical style as “Indie Folk with a flavour of ambient/electronic/post rock”. The music was recorded, mixed and produced by Torsten Kinsella (God is an Astronaut, a band who’s recent album features one of David’s illustrations) with Jay Wilson (formerly with James Vincent McMorrow) as the principal music collaborator. Other tracks feature collaborations from Jo Quail and Snow Ghosts both based in the UK.
I found it to be a highly charged, deeply engrossing piece of multimedia art and I just had to chat with him to see how the strands of his own art and his collaborators came together.
The EP is available on bandcamp from Feb 25th., while the videos launched throughout March. Further details / links are available at David’s Facebook page and at davidrooney.com
(We had intended this interview as a quick chat but, like all good conversation, it flowed beautifully on to something longer. We ended up finishing after a good hour, not because we had run out of things to say, as much as we had run out of daylight!)
