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 – sometimes 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. Most of the time you wouldn’t necessarily notice, but I was profoundly influenced by Frank Zappa as a young man who used humor to draw regular-old people into complex music they might otherwise not have enjoyed.

For the last two sets, On the Evilness of Clowns, and Alien Sluts Need Snacks Too spent a lot of effort planning the narrative arch – not quite a script, but a detailed outline for 5 “acts” of wacky banter. I 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. Both Topics suggested a detailed story and moving forward, this will be one of the structures we use for Neurodivergent performances when the subject matter warrants. I did not have such an idea this time, but I came up with I Like Yummy Things and the related topics for the following acts. I published the ideas in advance to the banterers in the ensemble so they could think about what they might say. I did plan the base subject matter for each of the 5 acts in advance and had a brief banterers’ meeting right before the performance to have some discussion. We’ve done this enough times now that a little structure goes a long way! The amount of planning needed for this presentation was less, but the banter was still great! We will utilize different models for the narrative arch moving forward depending on the subject matter.

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

PEK 7/19/2026