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 50 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 Turbulence Orchestra and Sub-Units with as many as 25 performers and four albums by the side project Turbulence Doom Choir which feature myself, multiple tubas, percussion, electronics, and signal processing and many other configurations.  

Objections to Realism is the third Evil Clown session in a row to be credited to Turbulence.  The previous session from a week ago, Golden Ratio, was originally going to be Leap of Faith which is the original Evil Clown band featuring cellist Glynis Lomon and myself.  It was right before Christmas, and Glynis thought she was going to have a family conflict and a couple of weeks prior told me she would not make it, so I repurposed the show to a four horn Turbulence sextet with bass and drums.  At the last second Glynis rejoined the session, but I decided not to credit the show to Leap of Faith and just leave it as Turbulence.  The week before that we recorded Nested Phenomena, a three-horn quintet with bass and a different drummer which is a common Turbulence configuration.

Objections to Realism was also originally intended to be a Leap of Faith session.  It would have been a chamber set – a session without a drummer – with Glynis and myself and John on brass and Scott on bass.  In the long history of Leap of Faith, about half the total time the core unit has not included a drummer, although we had guests.  The first iteration in the early 90s was Glynis, me and trombonist Mark McGrain, followed by the second iteration, Glynis, me and bassist Craig Schildhauer.  The end of the Archival Period and the first 5 years of the Contemporary period, it was Glynis, me and drummer Yuri Zbitnov, and since 2020 it is just Glynis and me.  Chamber sets vary significantly in character from sets with drummers in a number of ways, but mostly in dynamic range and action density.  Drummers tend to raise the energy level and the average volume, and chamber sets tend to have more quieter and delicate sections.  Both varieties of ensemble ideally should cover the range of dynamic from very quiet to loud and the range of action density from sparse to busy, but the average levels tend to be different.

Evil Clown currently has wonderful and sensitive drummers/percussionists in the Roster and most of the ensembles include a drummer or percussionist for most of their performances, however, I do periodically schedule chamber sets to explore those possibilities.  Tom is a wonderful violinist and Glynis and I have done several smaller format chamber sets with Tom including a couple of trios, so Objections to Reality was a follow up to those sets with a slightly larger format including John on brass and Scott on bass.  Glynis was sick for the date of the show, so, as I always do, I repurposed the show, crediting it to Turbulence and we did the show as a chamber quartet.  I call an ensemble with an equal number of players in different instrumental groups “balanced” when it contains an equal number of players in each instrumental group, so Objections to Reality is a Chamber Improvisation with an Ensemble Balanced on Winds and Strings.

Tom has appeared on 8 Leap of Faith recordings, so all his Evil Clown sessions to date have included Glynis.  I love strong string sections, so this pattern is deliberate, but Glynis’ absence for this set created a different string section dynamic than all of Tom’s previous Evil Clown outings.  Scott’s bass playing functions more like the bass in Jazz than is typical for most of the Evil Clown bass players, whereas Glynis’ playing is in no way jazz oriented.  I found that I was interacting with Tom alone differently than I interacted with Tom/Glynis in our previous sessions.

It is interesting to compare the improvisations of three different Turbulence Units recorded in a three week period.  Of course, there are many common elements, but the differences in the ensembles combined with the broad palette available at Evil Clown Headquarters produced three distinctive Turbulence albums each with their own character.

An advantage of improvisation over more conventional music is that it does not rely on fixed instrumentation or material which needs to be learned in advance.  Accomplished improvisors, like the group assembled here, can make interesting music regardless of any last second changes to the lineup, so the last second change to a different unit was in no way a distraction for this performance.  The aesthetic problem addressed to the ensemble is to make interesting music with the players and the resources at hand, a change in ensemble changes the problem without in any way preventing an interesting solution.

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

PEK – 1/5/2025