Liverpool based multimedia artist Paul Rooney – the subject of The Wire's latest Invisible Jukebox interview featured in issue 476 – describes his third full length album Surface Industries II as “the final part of a long-term, poignant and reflective project – a sonic encounter with everyday failures, everyday battles, and everyday resistances, pertinent to our precarious times.”

The lyrics of Surface Industries II focus on roles in retail, banking and hospitality, often using interviews with the workers themselves. “The songs describe transient everyday customer interactions and repetitive drudgery,” says Rooney over email, “but also reveal creative moments of playfulness, mischief and vengeance.” Although the album is centred around these voices, the narrations are matched with synthesized melodies and beats that mirror that dichotomy of imagination and the mundane.

“The track “In My Head” is the only song on the album that takes the perspective of the 'customer' rather than the front of house service provider,” Rooney says, “in this case they are the words of fine art student Jenny Mountain, describing her hesitancy in getting her paintings started in spaces absent of peers. Her isolation is not so different from the hotel maids that are the subjects of other tracks on the album. The video for the track, made in 2001, shows her vacant fine art studio spaces at The University of Sunderland, and has a sense of eerie emptiness that echoes her halting, lonely pursuit: “I need to use my time better now. It is all up to me.””

Read Richard Thomas's Invisible Jukebox interview with Paul Rooney in The Wire 476. Wire subscribers can also read the magazine online via the digital library.

Surface Industries II is released by Owd Scrat.