Liner Notes by PEK

Leap of Faith is the core duet of the Leap of Faith Orchestra (LOFO) comprised of PEK on clarinets, saxophones, clarinets & flutes, and Glynis Lomon on cello, aquasonic & voice.  The ensemble is based in Boston and dates back to the early 90s.  We utilize a huge arsenal of additional Evil Clown instruments to improvise long works featuring transformations across highly varied sonorities.   At times, the core unit has been a trio or even a quartet.  The longest running core unit was comprised of PEK, Glynis and drummer Yuri Zbitnov, who played for the last couple of years of the Archival Period and the first 5 years of the reboot starting in 2015. The ensemble has always been highly modular, and our many recordings (well over 150) feature the core unit in dozens of configurations with a huge list of guests and occasionally as only the core unit with no guests.  Currently, the core unit is the duet of PEK and Lomon and we are regularly presenting LIVESTREAMs to YouTube from Evil Clown Headquarters with other guest performers.

A common configuration for Leap of Faith in the last few years has been 3 horns, Glynis, bass and drums.  Spatial and Temporal Aspects is a variation of this lineup, 3 horns and Glynis with violin and percussion.  Jonathan LaMaster is the violinist, and this is his first appearance with Leap of Faith except for a single time with the Leap of Faith Orchestra performing a PEK frame Notation Score at the Somerville Armory before the pandemic. In the last few years, he has appeared on half a dozen Expanse and Simulacrum sets with percussionist Michael Knoblach and synth wizard Robin Amos.  These projects focus more on electronics and frequently frequent synth specialists…  Leap of Faith does use those sounds and those same players sometimes but has a stronger focus on the interaction of the acoustic instruments.

Anyway, Glynis and Jonathan had played in other settings back in the day, and I have been trying to get them together on a LIVESTREAM performance for a while now.  Jonathan has played violin in rock and post/rock settings (including 10 years in the Boston seminal post/rock band Cul De Sac with Robin), so his approach is different than many of the more classically oriented string players that we have played with over the years. He also uses signal processing on the violin, which Glynis does not do with the cello. So I was interested in blending these different approaches to string improvisation together.

As I expected, the string section played extraordinarily well together, and also with the all-star 3-horn front line of PEK, John Fugarino, and Michael Caglianone.  Michael Knoblach held down the percussion role with several crates of unusual percussion and found object noise makers. We recently revamped the electro-acoustic instrument section of the studio with some new Tim Kaiser instruments and rewired and rebalanced the sub-mixer which handles that portion of the mix, so there is an especially rich contribution from this area of the broad palette on this performance.

Anyway, I really like this set, and I bet you will too…

PEK 11/22/2025