Audio CD Evil Clown 9287
Axioms - Discourse
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1) Discourse - 1:09:43
Evil Clown Headquarters, Waltham MA
21 October 2021
Jane SpokenWord - poetry, spoken word
PEK - clarinet, contralto & contrabass clarinets, alto & tenor saxophones, bass flute, Christmas flute, mussette, sheng, prophet, novation peak, moog subsequent, Linnstrument controllers, syntrix, [d]ronin, electric chimes, chime rod boxes, telstar, spring boxes, gongs, thunder sheet, Tibetan bowls & bells, glockenspiel, crotales, orchestral chimes, xylophone, balafon, almglocken, seed pod rattle, castanets, wind siren
Glynis Lomon - cello, aquasonic, voice
Albey onBass - freless bass, spoken word
Steve Niemitz - drums, gongs, Englephone, glockenspiel, crotales, orchestral chimes, xylophone, balafon, almglocken
Joel Simches - live to 2 track recording
Axioms - Discourse
LIVESTREAMED to YouTube
Evil Clown Headquarters, Waltham MA - 21 October 2021
PEK Liner Notes
Albey OnBass and Jane SpokenWord were associated with Cecil Taylor's final period. Following Cecil's passing they were in Boston for about a year in 1998 and the beginning of 1999 and Albey performed a dozen or so times with Leap of Faith, Metal Chaos Ensemble and Turbulence. In November 1998, Albey and I had been discussing doing a duet, but we decided to include Jane’s poetry as a trio. This new Evil Clown Ensemble we called Axioms, which to me is an apt name for a band which features words - something that most Evil Clown sessions do not.
There are two definitions:
1) a statement or proposition that is regarded as being established, accepted, or self-evidently true
2) a statement or proposition on which an abstractly defined structure is based (mathematics)
These two meanings bridge the distance between poetic discussion of truths and abstract musical structures.
A few months later, about a year before the virus, Albey and Jane moved to New Orleans, so the original session, Manifestations, had been our only recording to date.
Back in July, soon after I reopened Evil Clown Headquarters for YouTube streaming performances / recordings, Albey reached out saying that he and Jane would be in the Boston area for a few weeks, and we recorded Hypotheses a few days later. For Hypotheses, I brought in Glynis and Steve Niemitz, making Leap of Faith the backup band for Jane’s poetry. This was an excellent set, and I was happy to hear that they had moved from NOLA to New York, since we would be able to play more often.
This new set, Discourse, has the same quintet, with Joel Simches driving the newly arrived and substantially upgraded mixing console. This time Albey brought his fretless instead of the electric upright from the last two recordings. Sounds like Albey and Jane are planning to move back to the area again fairly soon. Hopefully, that will happen and we will be able to regularly do Axioms sets, and have Albey come for performances of the other Evil Clown ensembles.
I like this performance and I think you will too...
PEK – 23 October 2021
On Metal Chaos Ensemble: "... using unique strategies to yield densely active and eerily surreal music, an incredible excursion through experimental improvisation." - Squidco website staff
2
Evil Clown
On Leap of Faith: "Alien yet familiar, bizarre yet completely fascinating. Expanding, contracting, erupting, settling down, always as one force..." - Bruce Lee Gallanter, DMG
Composer and multi-instrumentalist, PEK, set his sights on something bigger with the Leap of Faith Orchestra's Supernovae. The previous incarnation of the LOFO expands from the fifteen musicians on The Expanding Universe (Evil Clown, 2016) to twenty-one players on this new outing. Another noteworthy element of this project is PEK's use of Frame Notation where the score is seen in written descriptions and straight-forward symbols within Duration Bars. The system provides the musicians with immediate understanding of their own parts and the higher-level arrangement of the music.
Supernovae consists of a single track composition running just under eighty minutes. The digital download includes a bonus track. Though the extended piece is not broken out by formal movements, there are clear delineations within the score. PEK's ensemble—not surprisingly—includes enough non-traditional and weird instruments to compete with a Dr. Seuss orchestra. Though they are not playing in a vacuum, that group of instruments dominates the first ten minutes before strings and reeds make themselves more clearly heard. Forty-five minutes in, we have the first case of prolonged melody, darker and more subdued than the overall tone of the first half.
Supernovae gives way to free improvisation overlaying the melody. Eventually the piece introduces a brilliant percussion passage before it reintroduces the non-traditional music elements, but here in a more refined manner. As with all of PEK's compositions, there is—behind the scenes—a painstaking amount of organization that is not always evident in the listening. That is part of the beauty of this album; the non-traditional approach to instrumentation and the lack of adherence to Western structure continue to make the various iterations of Leap of Faith consistently interesting. And interesting look at the written score can be viewed at http://www.evilclown.rocks/lofo-supernovae-score.html.
Excerpt from PEK Liner Notes:
“This new set, Discourse, has the same quintet, with Joel Simches driving the newly arrived and substantially upgraded mixing console. This time Albey brought his fretless instead of the electric upright from the last two recordings. Sounds like Albey and Jane are planning to move back to the area again fairly soon. Hopefully, that will happen and we will be able to regularly do Axioms sets, and have Albey come for performances of the other Evil Clown ensembles.”
Squidco Blurb:
Featuring the poetry and words of Cecil Taylor-associated poets Albey OnBass and Jane SpokenWord, the Boston collective improvising band Axiom of David Peck on reeds, winds and percussion, Steve Niemtiz on drums & percussion and Glynis Lomon on cello & aquasonic + OnBass & SpokenWord, focus on "Discourse", wakefullness and freedom in an age of social unrest.