Noel Molloy - Selected Audio Work 1983- 1999 CD

https://nyahhrecords.bandcamp.com/album/selected-audio-work-1983-1999

Since the late 70s, Roscommon multidisciplinary artist Noel Molloy has made strange, challenging works out of found objects and domestic detritus. Visit his website, www.noelmolloyart.com and you’ll find contorted scrap metal sculptures of soldiers, dancers, kings and bears. You’ll see an Irish flag, painted across three bottles of holy water. You’ll see a baby’s pram, crudely repurposed into a sort of military vehicle. A rusty mask will stare back at you with a grotesque metallic grin. Molloy’s semi-figurative creations occupy an uncanny space that is tied to the familiar, but is outlandish enough to trigger unique, unpredictable responses. His feverishly out-there performance pieces engage the mind in a similar, synapse-sizzling way; costumes, set designs, abstract actions, cut-up audio and musical extracts allude to themes such as religion, conflict, history and environmentalism, but what it “means” is left entirely to the audience. Selected Audio Work 1983 - 1999, released on Leitrim’s Nyahh Records, stitches together the extracted sounds from some of these performances, leaving the mind to create its own wild, visual accompaniment. This is a collection of growling, hypnotic oddness, full of distorted voices, faint musical interjections and clattering environmental audio. It pulls you into its strange, tactile world, where the sounds of saw on wood, an inter-county fallout warning, and a crumpled clip of a 1930s pop tune become haunting choruses to a concrète symphony. It’s a fascinating document for the archives of experimental Irish art.
- Eoin Murray