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 2025, we have recorded over 60 albums on Evil Clown with greatly varied ensembles.  All the smaller Evil Clown bands are really more about a general approach, rather than a specific set of musicians.  A session gets credited to Turbulence when it is mostly horn players and the only musician on all of them is me. The sessions range from an early duet with Steve Norton and me (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 and many other configurations, to the large orchestra project Turbulence Orchestra & Sub-Units.

For the last several years, Bonnie Kane (tenor sax, flute, electronics) and John Loggia (drums), who have a long running improvisation duet, have been participating in Evil Clown sessions with Turbulence and Leap of Faith.  Bonnie lives in Holyoake Ma and John lives in Brattleboro VT where he owns and operates a wonderful performance space at the 118 Elliot St Gallery.  Bonnie runs a performance series in Holyoake and John is a central figure in the Brattleboro scene.  John and I decided that we would do a Turbulence Orchestra performance at 118 Elliot where we would bring regulars from the Evil Clown Headquarters Turbulence sets in Waltham and add other musicians from the Western Mass and Vermont scenes.  I really like this dynamic of multiple groups of familiar players performing with each other so that both well-established combinations and new combinations of players are interacting in the improvisation.

Turbulence Orchestra Livestreams (https://evilclown.rocks/turb-orchestra/) from Evil Clown Headquarters typically have an ensemble size of 8 to 12.  For an ensemble of this size, I establish a rule that each performer should lay out for roughly a third of the total duration.  Combined with the players each performing on multiple instruments, the resulting broad palate and shrinking and growing of the number of simultaneous players, creates a sequence of sonorities which run through the duration and tell a story.  Generally, in improvisation, this transformation is necessary to establish form, which in more conventional music is determined by key, harmonic rhythm, rhythmic structure, modulations, tempo changes and other devices of traditional Western Music.

When the ensemble size grows much larger, I have used graphic scores to preplan these transformations without specifying specific pitches or rhythms.  Six of these scores were performed by the Leap of Faith Orchestra with ensemble size as large as 25 in the several years prior to the pandemic (https://evilclown.rocks/lofo-graphic-scores/) (https://evilclown.rocks/lofogsp-essay/).   I love this approach, but it is a tremendous amount of work – both to prepare the scores (which takes as much as 6 months) and to mount the performance (which requires a large Uhaul truck to move equipment).  I have shifted to Livestream performances from the YouTube studio at ECH as the principal presentation method for the enterprise and am mounting only a few live performances a year instead of the roughly 20 live shows typical pre-pandemic.

For the fifth TO&SU show at Elliot St Gallery, I have continued the use of dynamic Frame Notation presented to the ensemble on signs with downbeats.  At each successive show the number of and variety of the signs has increased.  I put Frames on Cardboard signs of several different colors

                White Cards – Frames identifying a group of performers and giving them a 30 second window for an entrance or an Event

                Orange Cards – Very simple Frames of repeated whole note and attacked note patterns for the Left Half of the band

                Pink Cards – Very simple Frames of repeated whole note and attacked note patterns for the Right Half of the band

Yellow Cards – Frame Events for the entire ensemble

Green Cards – Special Function Frames: Plus and Minus Signs, Individual Performer Names, Frames Composed Solo for the Opening

The new idea this time is the Orange and Pink Cards so that I can direct two different sets of events simultaneously with left and right hands. Another important step was to give my self more table space to arrange the cards – In previous shows, I sometimes had a hard time finding the one I wanted, and I made replacements on the fly, so having more table surface this time helped. Each time, when we do this, the common language of the performers and these means of guiding the improvisation becomes surer and the results demonstrate that. For In the Path of Typhoons I composed an 8- or 10-minute sequence of Frames for the opening of the work which we discussed in some detail in a band meeting before the concert. I’ve done this for the last three shows, and it leads to a strong opening from which the rest of the work organically unfolds.

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

PEK – 3/22/2026