Liner Notes by PEK
I formed Turbulence in 2015 as I started to assemble players for the Leap of Faith Orchestra. Turbulence, the extended horn section for the Orchestra (along with guests on other instruments), also records and performs as an independent unit. As if this writing in March of 2018, we have had about 20 albums on Evil Clown with greatly varied ensembles. The only musician on all of them is myself. The sessions range from an early duet with Steve Norton and Myself (Vortex Generation Mechanisms) to a 5 horn band with bass and two percussionists (Encryption Schemes) to four albums by the side project Turbulence Doom Choir which feature myself, multiple tubas, percussion, electronics and signal processing.
Bob Moores (trumpet +) and Dan O’Brien (saxophones, clarinets & flutes) each joined the Evil Clown roster a while back and have played with Leap of Faith, Leap of Faith Orchestra, and other projects. For Amorphous Solids, I asked Yuri Zbitnov from the core Leap of Faith trio to join with us in the percussion chair and I brought as much percussion as we can fit into the small performance area at Outpost 186. All four of us make many instrument changes which naturally results in steady flow of transformations through highly varied sonorities
Turbulence - Amorphous Solids
Outpost 186, Cambridge MA
18 March 2018
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 9172
Turbulence - Amorphous Solids
Streaming, downloads and CD Orders
Amorphous Solids - 1:10:26
PEK - clarinet & contraalto clarinet, sopranino,
alto & tenor saxophones, English horn,
contrabassoon, tarota, guanzi, alto flute, goat
horn, kazoo, aquasonic, accordian, sheng, hand
chimes, metal, wood
Dan O'Brien - flute, piccolo, clarinet & bass
clarinet, tenor & baritone saxophones, hand
chimes, metal, wood
Bob Moores - trumpet, hand chimes, metal, wood
Yuri Zbitnov - drums, percussion, hand chimes,
metal, wood
Photos by Raffi,
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
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