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
So here is an interesting story... Been planning a special edition of Metal Chaos Ensemble for a few months for when my old pal Space came for a visit last week to be called Space Metal Chaos Ensemble... Space and I used to make tape music in California in the 80s before I moved to the East Coast for Berklee... A week or so before he arrived, a Noise scene guy from the UK named Harsh Noise Movement reached out and asked if I would be interested in doing a split record and then releasing it on both our labels... Why not I thought? I do post on noise-oriented sites since some of the Evil Clown ensembles do contain a noise/electronic component to the sound... Maybe here is an opportunity to reach some people outside the improvisation scene... Most of our sets run 60 to 70 minutes and I didn't really want to have a session for half a CDs worth of music, so I decided to do three pieces each about 30 minutes and put out a full Space Metal Chaos Ensemble set on Evil Clown (Electropositivity) as well as the split album (Electronegativity) on both labels.... Space and I spent the weekend and the first couple of days of the week before the session recording new samples and building 30+ minute Ableton mixes to accompany the improvisations... I got the track yesterday from HNM and finished production of the split album today... (PEK 6/20/2017)
Photos by Raffi
Audio CD Evil Clown 9147
Space Metal Chaos Ensemble - Electropositivity
streaming, downloads and CD mail Order
1) Hold on to Your Pantaloons -25:10
2) The First THRUST - 36:26
PEK - tenor saxophone, dulzaina, tarota, contraalto clarinet, sheng,
tromboon,[d]ronin, guzheng, crank siren, orchestral chimes,
metal, ms-20, electric kazoo, samples/Ableton mix, voice
Bob Moores - space trumpet, guitar, hand chimes, daiko, metal
Space - guitar, bass, [d]ronin, hand chimes, electric kazoo, voice
Kevin Dacey - drums, metal, guzheng, whistles, amplified
metal/springs, particle smasher noise box
Joe Hartigan - drums, balafon, metal, amplified metal/springs,
particle smasher noise box
Yuri Zbitnov - fog horn, electric kazoo, voice, metal, wood, flailing
3) The First THRUST - Ableton Mix (download bonus track) 38:03
- The First THRUST Ableton Mix 37:40
Space Metal Chaos Ensemble - Electropositivity
Evil Clown Headquarters, Waltham MA
15 June 2017
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
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.