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
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. We have had over 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.
For the last several years we have been introducing more and more electronic elements into Evil Clown ensemble performances. An early version of the electronic sounds in a Turbulence session cam about in the Turbulence Doom Choir albums all of which featured John Baylies on tuba and electronics. John left for Grad school in New York a while back and since then most of the Turbulence sets have been with just the horns or with horns and percussion.
This set was originally planned as an Outpost 186 show, but I made a calendar error and had the wrong day in my book for the show. Since I hate to cancel anything once planned, and since Bob and I have never done a full length duet before, we kept the date and moved it to Evil Clown Headquarters. Bob has been a frequent participant in Evil Clown sessions since I rebooted the enterprise in 2015, appearing on 21 Leap of Faith/Leap of Faith Orchestra albums, 12 Turbulence albums, 10 Metal Chaos Ensemble albums, and 6 Mekaniks albums. Bob uses a variety of instruments in addition to trumpet and guitar and has been utilizing them on our sessions. We have both been using more synth kind of sounds in the Metal Chaos Ensemble sessions. So, we decided to use the full scope of our instrumental options with the whole ECH studio space available for instruments for just the duet.
PEK – 12/16/2018
Audio CD Evil Clown 9204
Turbulence - Chaotic Flow is not all Turbulent
bandcamp: Streaming, downloads and CD Orders
Chaotic Flow is not all Turbulent - 1:10:35
PEK - clarinet & contralto clarinet, alto, tenor & bass saxophones, tarota, bass tromboon, akai ewi5000, moog subsequent, arp odyssey, korg ms-20, daxophone, [d]ronin, orchestral chimes, crotales, cymbells, gongs, brontosaurus & tank bells, Ableton mix*
Bob Moores - Laptop using Mainstage softsynths, iPad using Moog Model D emulator, Korg Monotron Duo, Kracklebox, Guitar with effects, space trumpet
Turbulence - Chaotic Flow Is Not All Turbulent
Evil Clown Headquarters, Waltham MA
15 December 2018
Photos by Raffi,
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.