Liner Notes by PEK

Every once in a while, a new ensemble gets started at Evil Clown.  Sometimes the new unit has a particular aesthetic problem, and an appropriate band name assigned defined in advance.  For example, Metal Chaos Ensemble started as a duet between me and Yuri Zbitnov as soon as we started to work with newly acquired metal instruments in 2015, and Turbulence was formed to feature groups of horn players – sometime as only horn players and sometimes with bass and drums.  Sometimes the new unit is spun off from an existing ensemble with some variation or different set of resources.  Simulacrum was spun off from Metal Chaos Ensemble to include even more electronic instrumentation and signal processing and to not require a drummer.

Sometimes the new unit comes about because new players join the roster and contribute to a session by an existing ensemble, and it is clear their contribution adds a distinctive voice to the Evil Clown palette which deserves a new band name.  Such is the case with Neurodivergent.  Count Robot, DNA Girl and Tim Mungenast played on two Expanse records in 2023 (Swathe in March and Gamut in July).  They bring an odd sensibility that involves improvised spoken word banter between the three of them and a more pop-culture oriented use of guitar, mandolin and electronics than is typical in the other Evil Clown ensembles.  For the third set featuring these three relative newbies, I rolled out the new band name, Neurodivergent, to explore combinations of their aesthetic as a group of players with a long history with various combinations of players from the Evil Clown Roster. 

While most of the Evil Clown ensembles perform strictly instrumental music that does not contain words, a few of the bands do use words and I like how the text provides an entry point for the audience to access the music.  Metal Chaos Ensemble uses text from literature and movies and Axioms uses the Poetry of the amazing poet Jane SpokenWord who recites her words in small ensembles which also feature the amazing bass playing of her husband Albey onBass.  In these settings, the words come from fixed text, but the delivery and the choice of which words and when to place them are improvised.  In Neurodivergent, the improvisation of the words is on another level… None of the text is fully fixed in advance; most the words are improvised in reaction to the Wacky Banter of the others.  This music contains a great deal of playfulness and humor which is often lacking in the world of pure improvisation.  I have long valued humor in music as a method of engaging people and I think this band is the best example so far of an Evil Clown ensemble which centers humor as a critical element.

Starting with the last set, On the Evilness of Clowns, I have spent much more effort planning the narrative arch for these performances. Having a plan means there is more focused storytelling, but the flow and the actual words are still mostly improvised in the moment.  Here I started with the title, Alien Sluts Need Snacks Too, which represented a target in the story arc that was more generally about Aliens. I came up with a sequence of topics which gradually approach the title topic which appears in the fourth act… Future Neurodivergent sets will share a similar Narrative plan where there will be four acts with different but related subjects including some text that may or may not be used to trigger the improvised wacky banter between PEK (that’s me) and the other Wacky Banterers.

For Alien Sluts Need Snacks Too, the subject of the First Act is the Drake Equation created by Frank Drake (for the first SETI meeting which occurred in 1961) to estimate the number of Alien Civilizations that might be possible to detect with radio telescope inspections of the Milky Way. This theme is elaborated and contrasted in the second act which is about Alien Conspiracy Theories, and the third act which is about hotties in movies about Aliens. The fourth act introduces discussion of Alien Sluts in movies who eat people for snacks and how we can modify the Drake Equation to estimate the number of Alien Sluts who eat people for snacks. The fifth act and the balance of the piece will always be fully improvised.

Anyway, we had a terrific Livestream performance.  I really dig this set and I bet you do too…

PEK 5/2/2026