Excerpt from Bergstein Review

“… damn if this release doesn’t tear the roof off the sucka. Gonna splay it right up front: this stuff absolutely kills. It will blow your mind, alter your perceptions, derange your senses, and upset all your categorical applecarts…  Give yourself in totality to this quintet of quan as they unleash their protoplasmic artform in all its gutbucket, earthshaking, cerebellum-crushing magnificence.”

Bergstein, Downtown Music Gallery

Excerpt From Liner Notes by PEK

“… The basic idea of this band is to increase the amount of electronics, to keep the ancillary percussion and loose the drum set, along with PEK and Bob holding down the horn parts. Even without the drums, this set tilts more in the noise direction than typical of Metal Chaos Ensemble. I am interested to see where this project goes as we continue. I like this session and I think you may too…”  ​

Darren Bergstein Review

SIMULACRUM – Hyperreality (Evil Clown 9277; USA) Unsure if pandemic isolationism’s been creatively kinetic to Evil Clown honcho Dave PEK, or the ‘unshackling’ from it this year’s been explosively inspiring, but damn if this release doesn’t tear the roof off the sucka. Gonna splay it right up front: this stuff absolutely kills. It will blow your mind, alter your perceptions, derange your senses, and upset all your categorical applecarts. Which is another way of saying that the good Mr. PEK and his illustrious cohorts have done it again. In addition to PEK’s gigantic array of sound-designers and noise-facilitators, Simulacrum the group consists of Bob Moores on a whole host of electronic gadgetry, guitars, distorto-pedals, handheld objects, and aural demystifiers, Eric Woods banging gongs and twiddlin’ knobs, William Middlemiss Jr also striking guitars and synthees, and the Reverend Grant Beale separating glitch from (solid) state, warping circuitry, drones, and feedback with secular gusto. This hour-plus extravaganza comes roaring right out of the gate and across its illustrious timespan simply takes no prisoners. The collective invent, morph, and travel the spaceways in an expansive, intergalactic trawl through a myriad of folded dimensions that manage to channel the most outré moments hard-won from King Crimson, Gong, and Merzbow, to the likes of Acid Mothers Temple, Nurse With Wound, AMM, and some archaic, hauntological INA-GRM burn-out who took one lysergic lapdance too many. In any event, this slab’s a hive-mind of wild, vivid propulsion, where sounds intersect, congeal, and blossom with a vast, molten power that appears to regenerate by the minute. Guitars the blush of Frippian crimson conjure memories of the man’s “Fracture”-ed landscapes. Electronics, birthed by synth, modules, and various other mysterious paraphernalia, twit, twirl, and entwine themselves in the guzz and girth like malevolent insects hastily building labyrinthine nests. All throughout, PEK’s charging horns, bells, and various elegant machineries bleat and blurt like bubbling lava breaking through the surface. What is astonishing on all levels is the fact that none of this, despite near-constant variations in complexion, volume, hue, and cry ever degenerates into atonal cacophony but somehow maintains an awesome, fearless power throughout, never the same yet somehow thrillingly cohesive. Give yourself in totality to this quintet of quan as they unleash their protoplasmic artform in all its gutbucket, earthshaking, cerebellum-crushing magnificence.

Darren Bergstein, Downtown Music Gallery