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  REVIEW BY Darren Bernstein, Downtown Music Gallery
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  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.
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  - Darren Bergstein, DMG
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  LINER NOTES BY PEK
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  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.
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  Pertubations 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 assemble the equipment (new board and effects) for the updated studio, Joel’s options have increased and improved.
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  A few months back, as I was working out the schedule for the January to April sessions, 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.
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  Pertubations is an extension of my solo work during the first year of the pandemic. All that work used some form of electronic manipulation either during the performance or in the editing environment before or after. 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 pertubations of my instrumental expressions.
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  I like this new project and I bet you will too!! Check it out…
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  PEK, 2/13/2022 ... more
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• Debut performance from the newest Evil Clown ensemble, Pertubations... Tearing it up livestreaming to YouTube from Evil Clown Headquarters

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