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  ---REVIEW BY DARREN BERGSTEIN, DOWNTOWN MUSIC GALLERY
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  PEK SOLO / A QUARTET OF PEKS - Strange Beauty Out of Chaos (Evil Clown 9269; USA) Taking a glimpse into anything that emerges from Dave PEK’s abstract wonderland requires a suspension of personal, literal, and metaphorical time. One has to submit in PEKwerk fully, to experience it without interruption, in one sitting, for it to engage you in full psychic lockstep. Recorded in early April 2021, the isolationist milieu underscoring our lives hasn’t dimmed PEK’s force for creation one iota. There is surely much in the way of an awry, strange beauty to this glimpse from the incorporeal beyond. PEK reincarnates all manner of free jazz, improv, and rugged experimentalists of epochs both past and present—Sun Ra’s untethered Arkestras, the skronk and instant abandon of the Spontaneous Music Ensemble and John Zorn’s more eclectic shout-outs, the rhythmic vortices and total alien entities imagined by upstarts like Musica Elettronica Viva and The Hub—but his characteristic overdubbed canvases remain immediately recognizable as his own. Piledriver sax bleats carve widening sinkholes that crumble into electronic voids that shudder with a pronounced malevolence. Galvanized tintinnabulations and synth baubles the color of pitch course through the music’s veins like sentient dark matter. Great struck gongs do their thunderstormic rumble in the distance. Call-and-response horns send distress calls out into the ether like ancient morse code, only to have their notes bounce back in mutated tonics of digital delay and electrostatic bitstream. Mad, bad, and dangerous to know—partake in this exuberantly bonkers slice of PEK’s evolutionary narrative and it’s guaranteed neither your ears nor your cerebellum will ever be the same. - Darren Bergstein, DMG
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  ---LINER NOTES BY PEK
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  Every once in a while, there is a break in the crazy schedule here at Evil Clown and I have some time to do a solo album. Our grand olde pal, the Corona Virus has provided such a break in spades…. At the beginning of the 2020, it appeared that the year would be our busiest yet… We did a bunch of albums in January, February and the first weeks of March, and then I was forced to cancel a bunch of wonderful performances scheduled for the months that followed. So, I caught up all my old business: web site, social media, distribution, and the other non-musical activity required to drive the enterprise. Then I took a month off… my biggest rest since I started up in 2015 after my long hiatus. In mid-May I started up again, conceiving some new means of producing some of the enormous output normally achieved by Evil Clown. In the Fall I did a huge series of solo works along with a few Metal Chaos Ensemble sets with Yuri and Mike Gruen.
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  Now entering the second calendar year to be effected by the Stupid Virus, I really miss playing with others… For obvious reasons, I have been producing a lot more PEK Solo albums than I do typically. I conceived a structural schema for producing solo works while we wait for the virus to be over. As with larger ensemble Evil Clown sessions, the planning involves selecting sound resources from the massive Evil Clown Arsenal and setting up the studio with these instruments to allow rapid changes in instrumentation and therefore in sonority. This system provides a framework to create solo works that are sufficiently different from each other that I can continue to produce new work at something close to my usual rate even while I can’t perform with others.
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  The PEK Solo albums fall into four categories:
  1) One continuous track (no overdubbing) of PEK playing one or many instruments with or without signal processing.
  2) One continuous track of PEK playing one or many instruments with a prerecorded mix of samples drawn from the Evil Clown Catalog or specially recorded at Evil Clown Headquarters. Solo albums from before 2020 fall into the categories 1 & 2.
  3) A Quartet of PEKs – Four continuous tracks of one PEK each playing many instruments on each pass. Some of these use broad pallets and some use very focused pallets.
  4) An Orchestra of PEKs – Many tracks of PEKs performing on a broad section of the Arsenal.
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  The current work, Strange Beauty Out of Chaos, is category 3. I’d like to thank Nick Ostrum for the title. Nick used this phrase in a recent Squid’s Ear review of Metal Chaos Ensemble – The Riddle of Steel and so I stole it for this work.
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  I recently became aware of the unique and distinctive instruments made by Tim Kaiser. I would classify these instruments as electro-acoustic rather than electronic since they amplify quiet acoustic sounds made on guitar strings, springs, rods and other metal materials. He also makes some homemade synths which are electronic. I bought 6 of these instruments (telstar, 2 electric chimes, hedgehog chime box, large spring box, cymbalum, cyclops harp) to add to the daxophone, [d]ronin and Ozzam Bells mpa-019 which I have had for some time. Tracks 1 and 2 use the new and older instruments from this category along with percussion and a couple of synthesizers. Tracks 3 and 4 have the horn solos and more percussion and electro-acoustic instruments.
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  The [d]ronin and the daxophone have been important instruments in the Arsenal, adding to the broad palate alien sounds that help us avoid sounding like other more conventional music. This new recording shows the power of extending this collections of sounds to a much bigger set. I will end up using these instruments a lot for this reason, and I will buy some more over time including a few of the homemade synths.
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  While I have enjoyed the process of creating Quartet of PEKs and Orchestra of PEKs recordings during our collective CV incarceration, I am looking forward to resuming performance with other musicians in the very near future. My housemate, Raffi, and I have both received first vaccine shots. I’ll be able to open Evil Clown Headquarters to sessions probably by mid-May to players in the roster who have also been fully vaccinated. That date is about 5 or 6 weeks from the date of this writing. My current plan is to do several category 1-3 sessions during that time, but perhaps I will squeeze in one more Orchestra of PEKs set before I can start doing sets with other players.
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  I expect that I will be able to resume the rapid schedule interrupted a year ago. I have been in periodic communication with members of the various units, and we are all chompin’ at the bit!! Stay tuned for a flood of new works by Leap of Faith, Metal Chaos Ensemble, Turbulence and other Evil Clown Ensembles starting up in May…
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  As usual, the chaos of the universe throws out problems which require our attention. Expression must be expressed. Music must be made. The chaos of the universe demands it.
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  PEK – 4/4/21 ... more
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• Killer PEK Solo, A Quartet of PEKs session featuring newly acquired elector-acoustic instruments made by Tim Kaiser

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