Liner Notes by PEK

Metal Chaos Ensemble was formed in early 2015 by PEK and Yuri Zbitnov as a working project to explore chaotic rhythms on metallic instruments. I had started to amass the Evil Clown Arsenal of percussion, electronic and wind instruments and we needed a workshop to develop this universe of sounds for the Leap of Faith Orchestra. It was immediately obvious that Metal Chaos Ensemble had a sound to itself and over the last ten years has been one of the most prolific Evil Clown ensembles. We have produced over 60 albums covering a wide range of sonority sets, but always with the presence of gongs, chimes, glockenspiel, Tibetan bowls and many other metallic sounds and the horns of PEK.

More recently, MCE has been a recurring sextet unit with most of the sessions having exactly the same six performers. With drums and electric bass and electronics, this unit contains the most rock elements of any of the Evil Clown ensembles. Since Yuri retired from Evil Clown, drummer Steve Niemitz has been holding down the drum chair. He drives into Boston from Western Mass, so we don’t do quite as many sets as we did back in the day, but it tends to make them a bit special.

For this set we welcome Evil Clown newbie Gabe Boyarin on guitar and laptop. Gabe is studying at the New England Conservatory and has been around in the scene for a few years playing with others well known to us at Evil Clown. He reached out on Facebook a few months back and I scheduled him for two back-to-back sets with Neurodivergent (last Saturday) and this Metal Chaos Ensemble set.

So, originally, Barsoom was scheduled to be a Septet with the regular sextet lineup plus Gabe. Unfortunately, early in the morning, Steve emailed me that he was sick and could not make it. Drat! I have lots of good drummers in the Evil Clown roster though, and I can often get a sub even with very short notice, so I sent out the feelers, but this time I had no luck. A few hours later, I heard from Eric that his young kids had brought back something from school, and he was also sick and would not make it.

One thing about pure improvisation as compared to other styles of music is that is much more tolerant of changes in personnel. An improvisation is a solution to an aesthetic problem posed by the performers and the resources available, so a change in these inputs changes the problem, but that only means a different solution is achieved. The only question here is do these changes take us far enough away from the aesthetic intent of Metal Chaos Ensemble that a change of the ensemble name is appropriate for this performance.

Metal Chaos Ensemble has undergone a long history of transformation over the last 10 years. The current sextet lineup features spoken word narration with a heavy emphasis on spacey/electronics sounds. It is true that we are missing the signature voice of Eric Wood’s analog synthesis, and that we don’t have drum set which was a central voice in the origin of the Metal Chaos Ensemble aesthetic, but we do have plenty of electronics and plenty of percussion and we do have spoken word narration. It’s less of a rock vibe and more of a chamber vibe, but despite the change in lineup, I feel we easily meet the goals of a Metal Chaos Ensemble performance, and I’m happy to add this fairly different show to the MCE catalog.

I’m super happy with this album and I bet you like it too…

PEK – 9/24/2024