Liner Notes by PEK

Here at Evil Clown, we specialize in long (concert length) works with very broad palettes.  As the musicians change between many instruments over the length of a work, the sonority undergoes development, transforming across many different small movements and creating the form of the work as an emergent property of the improvised interactions.  The pieces are approximately 1 hour and 10 minutes in length (tracked with a sports clock) which neatly fits on a CD and simplifies a lot of things required to produce music.  The music breathes and transforms organically.  I like this format, and the musicians in the Evil Clown Roster are all comfortable with it as well.

While this approach works well for me from an artistic/aesthetic perspective, the music industry is not well set up for long works especially in a streaming context.  In early 2023, CD Baby, the company that I use to get our music to Download and Streaming vendors, changed their policy so that any disc with a single track (even at 70 minutes) can only be marketed in their system as a Single which sells for much less than a Full-Length release.  The Evil Clown Enterprise costs me a great deal of money to execute and I need the small number of sales that I do make to be at a fair price, so this presented a problem to my methodology.  Joel is always recording as we warm up and soundcheck at each session, so when this happened in Spring 2023, I was able to find a useful short track (less than 10 minutes) for each album in the Spring 2023 releases so that those recordings could be marketed with two tracks as Full-Length Recordings.

Since then, in advance of each YouTube LIVESTREAM performance, which is how these improvisations are nearly always created, we have recorded a short piece (approximately 5 minutes) which still fits with the long work within the 80-minute maximum length of a CD.  I’ve been calling these pieces “Shorties”, and they tend to be a bit different in character than the longer works from the same performances.  Technically, they are the end of the soundcheck, but we are so dialed in at ECH that the mix is good to go. 

This release, Evil Clown Shorties Volume 4 (2024), collects 14 of these short improvisations from 14 albums performed by 7 different ensembles comprised of 31 musicians plus Joel at the mix.  Evil Clown Ensembles are highly modular, the Ensemble name does not indicate a band that always has the same players, but instead a general sonic concept and perhaps a core unit.  For Example, a performance is assigned to Leap of Faith if Glynis Lomon and I are both on it regardless of which guests from the Roster also participate.  In the 4-month period covered by these 14 pieces, 5 are Leap of Faith albums and none of the ensembles are exactly the same.

As I write these notes, I compiled the tracks in an iTunes play list in the order of their performance dates last night and listened to it.  I really enjoyed listening to these very different pieces flow into each other.  In the future, I will continue this practice and release several albums of Shorties each year.  I have created a new bandcamp page to offer these recordings since they contain all the various ensembles and don’t really belong on the page for each band.  They are a sort of sampler for the period of Evil Clown production that they cover, and I expect that some listeners will find they wish to hear the long work associated with the short track from this release.

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

PEK out 10/5/2024