Excerpt from Darren Bergstein Review

“… By the time the piece winds down and you can manage the odd breath, PEK and Co. have once again demonstrated that their performative genius remains epic— why remain tethered to stylistic boundaries when you can summarily invent your own? Breathtaking.” 

Darren Bergstein, Downtown Music Gallery

Excerpt From Liner Notes by PEK

“… This set was originally scheduled to be the core trio with Albey as the guest and Joel Simches at the mixer.  The morning of the performance, I heard from Eric Woods that he had a nasty cold and would not be able to make the set.  Since the ensembles are modular and somewhat difficult to schedule, I rarely ever cancel anything due to a scheduling issue of this kind.  Instead of a quartet with Joel recording, I asked Joel to bring some of his tasty extra signal processing gadgets and perform his Perturbations role for this set…”

Bruce Lee Gallanter Review

SIMULACRUM Semblance (Evil Clown 9297; US) Amongst the many outfits that Evil Clown impresario Dave PEK has hatched through his own singular dominion, the collective he dubs Simulacrum can really turn your ears inside out, and for this lot, that’s really saying something. Yes, every project PEK and his motley crew dabble in has overtones relatable to the other (some more horn-based, others more on the spacey tip) but for this latest Simulacrum, PEK, and his fellow multi-instrumentalists—Bob Moores, Albey OnBass, and Joel SImches—pull out all the stops, set the controls for the heart of the sun, and blast off to parts unknown that only a hybrid merger of Sun Ra, Hawkwind, Pink Floyd, Spontaneous Music Ensemble, and Musica Elettronica Viva could devise. If those folks tweak your lobes a thing or two, then Semblance is surely your cuppa ummagumma. As is the standard M.O. for a typical Evil Clown joint, the quartet of red inaugurate a single improvised headstate across its 74-plus minute latitude. The piece churns ’n’ burns right out of the starting gate, with various fizzing, digital spasmodix, glorious lo-frequency static distortion, and synths a-plenty eventually giving way to PEK and Moores’s strangulated horn cries. Things burble, bubble, and come to a hot boil roughly forty minutes in, as PEK’s horns attempt to eviscerate the darkness, only they’re nearly buried in a quicksand of decommissioned tones and Simches’s expert signal processing, a textbook example of studio mind (tricks) over matter. At the fifty to fifty-four minute duration, a whole slew of percussive rain thunderbursts overhead and the quartet let loose a barrage of brash, magisterial synth and sequencer that would do any 70s hirsute krautrocker proud, augmented by a battalion of high trumpet that feels like the galactic empire’s entire fleet is gearing up for an interstellar assault bent massive. By the time the piece winds down and you can manage the odd breath, PEK and Co. have once again demonstrated that their performative genius remains epic— why remain tethered to stylistic boundaries when you can summarily invent your own? Breathtaking.

Bruce Lee Gallanter, Downtown Music Gallery