On Metal Chaos Ensemble: "... using unique strategies to yield densely active and eerily surreal music, an incredible excursion through experimental improvisation." - Squidco website staff
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
2
Liner Notes by PEK
Mekaniks is collaboration featuring Leap of Faith Core members Yuri Zbitnov, and PEK and invited guests from the Evil Clown Roster. While sharing the same the improvisatory ethos as Leap of Faith and the other groups in the EC roster, Mekaniks distinguishes itself by featuring cutting-edge looping, sampling and electronic processing as a centerpiece of their sound.
With a sound that hints at musique concrète, industrial, as well as the pioneering electronic experiments of Stockhausen, Xenakis, Henry, and Sun Ra, Mekaniks retains an identity all its own. Mekaniks is pushing the frontiers of electronic, psycho-sonic, transdimensional exploration.
This is a real milestone Evil Clown session... For the last several years we have been gradually introducing more and more electronic elements into our arsenal with several of the ensembles... This set features our special guest Joel Simches who runs the live to 2-track mix and performs lots of real time signal processing...
Evil Clown has been around since the 90s... so we were highly amused that Evil Clowns were so in the news in the fall of 2016 and occasionally continuing to the present... Yuri and I spent several months discussing a piece about the Klown Panik from Sparkles' point of view a created a work entitled The Great Klown Panik of 2016 along with several guests from the roster in December 2016...
A year later in January 2018 we recorded this follow up… Our special guests are Bob Moores on space trumpet & guitar, Greg Grinnell on samples, electronics & voice, and Joel Simches on signal processing and recording.
Here at Evil Clown we are generally interested in abstraction - what kind of sounds can we make / what kind of sonorities can we make and how do we transform/morph it... I think this is a first: An Evil Clown session that actually is about something!! I thank the Klown Panik for giving us a relevant subject matter for this series of improvisations...
PEK - tenor & bass saxophones, clarinet & contraalto clarinet, tarota,
sheng, MS-20, [d]Ronin, balafon, orhcestral chimes, wind & crank
sirens, daiko, log drums, wood, metal, daxophone, Ableton mix,
samples, voice, electronics, recitation
Bob Moores - space trumpet, guitar, whistles, electronics, voice
Greg Grinnell - samples, turntable, electronics, voice
Yuri Zbitnov - daiko, balafon, log drums, wood, metal, voice, recitation
Joel Simches - signal processing, live to 2 track mix
Raffi Photo tweaked by PEK
Photos by Raffi
"This is a phantasmagorical adventure through live sounds combined with electronic effects..."
- Peter K Rollings
Mekaniks: The Great Klown Panik of 2017 - Klownpocalypse
A collaboration of Leap of Faith members, percussionist Yuri Zbitnov, multi-reedist and wind player David Peck, with guests from the Evil Clown roster, adding electroacoustic elements including looping, sampling and electronic processing to their improvisation, here with Joel Simches on real-time signal processing, alongside sound artists Greg Grinnell & Bob Moores.
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.
Audio CD Evil Clown 9167
Mekaniks - The Great Klown Panik of 2017 - Klownpocalypse
streaming, downloads and CD mail Order
1. The KlownPocalypse is Real (this is not fake news) - 1:10:52
Evil Clown Headquarters, Waltham MA - 1/18/2018
Mekaniks
- The Great Klown Panik of 2017 - Klownpocalypse
Evil Clown Headquarters, Waltham MA
12 October 2017