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 100) 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.

When a particular lineup for a Leap of Faith set works particularly well, we repeat that lineup.  One such lineup that has had 4 performances to date is a core trio of PEK, Glynis Lomon and Eric Woods on Modular Analog Synthesis.  The four prior releases are:  Undulations in the Spatial Field (1/15/22), Loops of Gravitational Force (w/ Reverend Grant Beale) (9/25/21), Lattice (w/ Steve Niemitz) (6/27/21), and The Observed Present (2/15/20).

In the archival Leap of Faith period, both Glynis and I were mainly interested in improvisation in acoustic ensembles.  Occasionally, there would be some signal processing on acoustic instruments from someone in the ensemble, but mostly we played with strings, horns, percussion, piano, etc.   After the hiatus, when I restarted Evil Clown, I was interested in using a far broader pallet and more electronic instruments and signal processing gradually made their way into the process.  I had been looking for an analog synthesist when I ran into Eric at a show I was on with Greg Grinnell’s project, Mission Creep.  Eric knows the deep history of the origins of electronic music in the classical scene of the 50s and 60s in Europe.  Composers like Pierre Henry, Stockhausen and others revealed a whole new sound world which has been under development for over half a century.

Anyway, since that time Eric has been a core member of Metal Chaos Ensemble and has participated in many sessions by the other bands.  The first trio (The Observed Present) showed the potential of combining the Leap of Faith improvisation concept with a strong electronic presence, and the trio and quartet sets that followed confirmed it.

This session is a new extension of this trio with the string and horn sections expanded to make a sextet.  Relative newcomer to Evil Clown Vance Provey joins on trumpet while Evil Clown regular Michael Caglianone joins on saxophones.  The venerable Albey onBass joins on the upright electric bass.  Albey is now on over 20 of Evil Clown releases and I get him on as many sessions as I can…  Albey and Glynis together form a fabulous string section!!

This may be the best set yet by this variation of Leap of Faith…  I really like it, and I bet you will too…

PEK 4/10/2022