Excerpt from Darren Bergstein Review

“…  Yeah, it’s improvisational experimental music at its finest, chock-a-block with so many dense layers of sound, performance, and production you’d be a lifetime getting into the depths of it all. But it sure as hell would be worth the effort.”  

Darren Bergstein, Downtown Music Gallery

Excerpt From Liner Notes by PEK

“… Perturbations is an extension of my solo work during the first year of the pandemic.  All that work used some form of electronic manipulation either during the performance or in the editing environment before or after.  With Joel at the controls of the signal processing, we essentially return to real-time decision making as a performance unit, and we get the full-time attention of a master engineer on the electronic perturbations of my instrumental expressions..…”   

Darren Bergstein Review

PERTURBATIONS – Agitations (Evil Clown 9296; USA) Well, Dave PEK’s done it again, his Evil Clown headquarters spewing forth another fearsome magnum opus from its Waltham, MA homebase. Disguised under the aegis of yet another PEK alias, this particular one-hour-plus beast recorded as the duo Perturbations (PEK plus soundboard maven Joel Simches, who is credited as utilizing the beforementioned perturbations in addition to spearheading the live to 2-track mix) tears your ears and soul apart in equal measure. PEK mounts his usual bandwidth of tradecraft, blowing his lungs out through a whole host of clarinets, saxophones, oboes, trombones, flutes, ocarinas, and what-have-you. All the while, strange, undulating electronics coarse through a deep reverb bed, augmented by thunderous gongs, thwacked springs and coils, strange beings cooing away in the distance, and other named and nameless instruments making many an abstruse sound/noise/cry across a decidedly Dali-esque wilderness. That PEK and Simches manage to corral this sordid tableau into one magnificently cohesive and epic statement is a true derangement of the senses, chocolate for the cochlea. The opening minutes vacillate between segments based on percussives and brass, with a good amount of silence sprinkled between ‘movements’ (or, better still, segues) to add further tension and anticipation. Roughly thirteen minutes in, intergalactic electronic paradoodles peek their bulbous heads out, surveying the airspace, speaking in tongues, rattling their cages with insistent whooshes, PEK and Simches coating their comely sprites in thick-as-thieves log drum messthetics and atmospheric shakers. By the time the listener has moved past this recording’s halfway mark, they’re microdotted with a symphony of alien morse codes, ever-spiraling tendrils of cyclonic synth and a more malevolent confluence of events, big ’n’ bad reams of electronics painting pictures of silver machines hovering amid quark, strangeness, and charm. Yeah, it’s improvisational experimental music at its finest, chock-a-block with so many dense layers of sound, performance, and production you’d be a lifetime getting into the depths of it all. But it sure as hell would be worth the effort. 

Darren Bergstein, Downtown Music Gallery