Excerpt from Nick Ostrum Review

“About ten minutes in, the musicians hit their groove, as the discrete rumblings well into a whirling psychedelic stew of depth, gravity, and ludicrousness befitting, well, the Luminiferous Ether it seeks to reflect…   Although Luminiferous Ether stands on its own, consider it one more contribution to the Evil Clown collective’s catalog, another unique brick in its wall, or maybe more appropriately, one long, colorful strip of fabric in its bizarrely calico circus tent. It glistens and rustles. It is weird. It draws one’s ears. And, it is one small but important contribution to the broader evolving, luminiferous whole.”

Nick Ostrum, Squid’s Ear

Squidco Blurb

Metal Chaos Ensemble, formed in 2015 as a working project to explore rhythms on metallic instruments guided by rule-based chaotic systems of a very large number of small components, presents a quintet studio recording using three dedicated drummers, reeds, electronics, and accompanying “tape” mixes, resulting in epic, inspired and wonderfully unpredictable improvisation.

Squidco Staff

Nick Ostrum Review

Metal Chaos Ensemble is Eric Zinman, Yuri Zbitnov, Steve Niemitz, Syd Smart, Joel Simches, and, PEK; in other words, it is the percussion section (with some modifications) of the wildly adventurous Leap of Faith Orchestra. Although this is a pared-down unit, Metal Chaos maintains the sonic immensity of the larger collective, in largepart through deploying a truly impressive array of tools. Some — various reeds, drum kits, melodica, synth, samples from the PEK catalog, and tabula — are familiar enough. Others — metal, wood, belatrons, Brontosaurus and tank bells, [d]Ronin, Dan-Mo, and various sirens — less so. The result is an hour-long jam session of thoroughly trippy improvisational cacophony. It begins with a recorded lecture on the solar physics disrupted by a chime and rolling montage of percussive clack and sci-fi sounds. About ten minutes in, the musicians hit their groove, as the discrete rumblings well into a whirling psychedelic stew of depth, gravity, and ludicrousness befitting, well, the Luminiferous Ether it seeks to reflect. From this point, the album oscillates between low electro-percussive simmers and spacey synth-driven cacophony. Even so, it never reaches the blow-out or meltdown one might expect with such an adventurous configuration. The focus is on restrained dynamics, tension, and strange, churning ambience rather than explosive crescendo and shock.

There is a potential downside to being as prolific as PEK and his Leap of Faith collective, as releases can sound like works-in-progress, as steps along the way to some, yet unrealized end. That said, Sun Ra — a clear inspiration for this project — could shine some light on this. As with Ra — a man who performed, recorded, and released relentlessly, even posthumously — the process itself was the actual end, each step a realization of just a small piece of an opus sealed not by a definitive work, but by the sheer number and variety of creative releases. That same applies to this album. Although Luminiferous Ether stands on its own, consider it one more contribution to the Evil Clown collective’s catalog, another unique brick in its wall, or maybe more appropriately, one long, colorful strip of fabric in its bizarrely calico circus tent. It glistens and rustles. It is weird. It draws one’s ears. And, it is one small but important contribution to the broader evolving, luminiferous whole.

Nick Ostrum, Squid’s Ear

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 Ambient Orchestra​. It was immediately obvious that Metal Chaos Ensemble had a sound to itself and over the last three years has been one of the most prolific Evil Clown ensembles. We have produced a bunch of 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. All Metal Chaos Ensemble sessions include at least myself and Yuri, along with a whole bunch of different guests.

For around 2 years now, I have been using the Ableton software to create electronic mixes which we use in several of the bands as an accompaniment track. In performance, I ride the fader from off to very present, but most of the time more to the background. Raw samples are taken from the Evil Clown Catalog and also specially recorded at Evil Clown Headquarters with instruments drawn from the Evil Clown arsenal. I then use Adobe Audition to process the samples and finally Ableton to assemble a timeline and create a mix. Most of the more recent MCE sessions use one of these mixes.

In the early days of MCE, most of our sets were with multiple percussion players. More of the recent MCE sets have a bigger variety of instruments with everyone doubling the percussion, more emphasis on electronic instruments and signal processing, and fewer dedicated percussionists… This particular set is a bit MCE old school, since 3 of the five musicians are great drummers. I had tried to schedule a session like this a few months ago with myself and these three drummers, but Yuri had car trouble and Syd’s wife uses their car on Thursdays, so Steve and I ended up doing a duet (Emergent Syntax).

This time It was looking like we were going to be Yuri, Steve, myself with Joel in the recording chair. I need to have Joel here for the mix when the ensemble gets more complicated and it seemed like a smaller unit, so I thought I would bring in Eric on synth, since I’ve been looking for a good set for that. Turns out Syd was able to ride with Eric and we ultimately had this full quintet!

I’m very happy with this performance which combines the old school percussion dominated MCE with some of the electronics of the new school MCE. Check it out!

PEK 1/12/2019