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. A few years back, 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. This is good news for my back.

For the sixth 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 Cardstock signs of several different colors

• White Cards (window cards) –Frames identifying a group of performers and giving them a 30 second window for an entrance or an Event
  • Blue Cards – Very simple Frames of repeated whole note and attacked note patterns for the Blue Half of the band
  • Pink Cards – Very simple Frames of repeated whole note and attacked note patterns for the Red Half of the band
  • Yellow Cards – Frame Events for the entire ensemble, some cards with different Red and Blue Frames
  • Green Cards – Special Function Frames: Plus and Minus Signs, Individual Performer Names, Frames Composed Solo for the Opening
  • Lite Orange Cards – Compound Frames used in a more through planned opening of about 15 to 20 minutes

The big new idea this time is Lite Orange Cards so that I can plan more detailed events for the opening in advance.  This moves the conducted performances a bit closer to the old-school scored performances from before the pandemic.  It’s more flexible and less specific, but it is a move in that direction.  The other new device is 4 different conducting gestures for the 4 notational symbols used on the cards: 1) A chopping motion for a sharp attack, 2) A closed fist for a sustained note, 3) Wiggling extended horizontal fingers for a sustained trill, and 4) flailing arms for FRENZY.  I decided to add these gestures at the last second because I was worried that my Lite Orange Cards were a bit small for the content they contained, and I thought the players might have a hard time seeing the text. The gestures helped the ensemble follow the cards in the opening more planned sequence and were useful for the balance of the work when I moved into the other colored frames…

We are missing a chunk of the regulars, including Bonnie, who have done the last several TO&SU shows due to conflicts of another several festivals but John brought in 7 students from Brooklyn who were in town for the NU MU festival which runs through August in Brattleboro, who filled out the ensemble nicely. Despite their newbie status, the students did an excellent job! The Orchestra ensemble size ended up being 20 plus PEK at the Directors station.  Not the largest ensemble yet, but plenty of performers to create a very powerful rising sound during the FRENZY sections.

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

PEK – 8/16/2026