Excerpt From Liner Notes by PEK

“… When considering the line up for the third set, I wanted to bring in Albey, but I thought that I would have both Albey and Michael.  This is the largest the ensemble should ever be for this band since there is enough space for Joel to make a dramatic musical contribution.  So, moving forward this band will be a quartet or smaller…”

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 last 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…

The second set, in the fall, was scheduled to be a trio with Joel, Albey and me, but Albey ended up having a conflict and I invited Michael to sub.  The set was very different than it would have been, but also excellent.  When considering the line up for the third set, I wanted to bring in Albey, but I thought that I would have both Albey and Michael.  This is the largest the ensemble should ever be for this band since there is enough space for Joel to make a dramatic musical contribution.  So moving forward this band will be a quartet or smaller.  I really liked this combination of players, so it is likely that we will do the same quartet again in the future…

The other notable thing about this set is the sophistication of the video product.  In addition to Raffi’s real-time multi-camera mix.  We have now added Paul Brennan, an old pal of Raffi’s, to hand-hold a video camera for mobile shots and close-ups.  This required some new gear, a wireless video transmitter and new batteries for the camera to give Paul mobility free from cable attachments.  Paul has come for the last 4 or 5 performances and it makes a great difference to the video presentation since Raffi can pick from 7 static cameras and one mobile camera during the mix.  For this set, our new trumpet player, Keiichi Hashimoto, came and ran a second mobile camera…  Wow!  This set had as many support crew as musicians.  An Evil Clown first!

With Joel at the controls of the signal processing, we essentially have 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 really like this performance and I bet you will too!!  Check it out…

PEK,  4/19/2023