Liner Notes by PEK

Every once in a while, a new Evil Clown Project emerges.  Mostly, the new ensembles are based on a small core group and a basic aesthetic problem which we solve in performance.  For example, Turbulence is the band with mostly horn players, but the ensemble makeup is different each performance.

Perturbations is the newest Evil Clown Ensemble.  The core unit is PEK and Joel Simches…  Joel is the Evil Clown house engineer who comes to sessions for various bands when the setup complexity is high and especially when there are both acoustic and electronic instruments and the ensemble is a bit larger.  Some of the bands (for example, Metal Chaos Ensemble and Simulacrum) feature Joel’s real time signal processing in addition to his role as the recording engineer.  As we continue to assemble the equipment (new board and effects) for the updated studio, Joel’s options have increased and improved.

Early this year (2022), I suggested to Joel that we form this new group where the signal processing takes on the role of an instrumentalist, significantly more complicated than the color and delay we use in the other ensembles.  For this band, Joel perturbs the sounds created by me on horns, percussion, and electronics, creating a compound musical statement with the blended source sounds and the perturbed sonority.  Shortly after that, in February, we recorded the first session for this project as a duet, producing Agitation.  As I expected, the result meets the requirement I have for a new Evil Clown project name which is to create a distinctive sound world from a particular section through Evil Clown’s broad palette…

As I considered a follow-up, I decided to bring in one additional player to thicken the sound spectrum and to help cover the instrument changes with other sound.  Initially, I booked Albey onBass for this set, but he is travelling back and forth between Boston and New York, and sometimes his plans are subject to change, and he had to withdraw…

I contacted Michael Caglianone for the set instead.  Michael plays saxophones and other woodwinds in several of the Evil Clown ensembles, and he and I have similar tone and phrasing vocabulary on saxophones.  He has performed on almost 20 Evil Clown releases including two trio format Turbulence sessions with Yuri Zbitnov…  So, we have played in larger and smaller settings and have fine-tuned interactions.

I asked Joel to increase the amount of Perturbations compared to the first outing and we launched into this new set, Deviations.  As I expected, the trio interaction in this new setting was great!  There is a steady bed of loops and electronic manipulation which evolved slowly over the course of the improvisation.  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 the instrumental expressions.

I like this new project and I bet you will too!!  Check it out…

PEK,  8/20/2022