Part I:  History of Evil Clown (Early PEK History)

I started playing the clarinet in the 3^rd grade, then switched to piano lessons for a few years, alto sax in Junior High and finally tenor sax and flute in High School where I was also the drum major of the marching band as a senior.  For about 5 years starting in Junior High, I studied classical and jazz saxophone with a guy named Kurt Heisig in San Jose California.

I then went to the University of California at Davis where I played in marching band for a year while majoring in Mathematics.  I quickly got tired of the Marching Band and for a year or so I did not play music.  I started taking Philosophy classes at Davis (including a course in Aesthetics which had a profound influence on my early thinking about art) and then switched to the University of California at Santa Cruz as a Philosophy major, with my good pal Jeff Mockus who was from Santa Cruz. 

Once in Santa Cruz at age 20, I encountered a band of older musicians (in their mid to late 20s) in a rock band called Thieves, Villains and Scoundrels Union, Local 12; the name refers to a Rocky and Bullwinkle cartoon where Boris is on strike for the Union holding a sign proclaiming, “Unfair to Local Villains.”  Disenchanted with College, although I still liked both Mathematics and Philosophy, I left school and started to play with Local 12, taking a day job at a local backpacking and camping equipment store called Western Mountaineering.

Local 12 was a transformative experience for me.  The other players were far more seasoned than I, and the material was eclectic and bent in a prog rock direction.  I formed bonds with Jim Smith the vocalist, keyboardist and songwriter and Dave Murray the bass player.  I learned a lot, but the environment was chaotic and after a few years the band dissolved.  Determined to increase my skills, I went back to Kurt Heisig for more lessons, this time taking them very seriously and spending the next 5 years in the woodshed in Santa Cruz. 

History of Evil Clown (Archival Period)

In 1989, at the age of 25, I relocated from California to Boston MA to attend the Berklee School of Music.  I had learned a lot from Kurt Heisig about how to control the tone, sound, and phrasing of saxophones, but I was still in need of formal education in music theory, ear training, composition and other topics covered at a real music college.  While there, I studied tenor sax performance with tenor sax jazz titan George Garzone.  I was one of George’s most Avant-garde students at that time and George and I had a great relationship, including performing together both at the school and in the Boston scene.

I decided that I would earn Berklee’s 2-year certificate rather than a bachelor’s degree, which I basically did in three terms, but stayed for five terms.  I was able to take only courses which interested me for those last two terms without worrying about satisfying the full degree requirements.  I doubled up on lessons with George and for the last two terms we ignored the standard prep for proficiency exams and instead played improvised duets on two tenor saxes.  From this I learned about improvisation phrasing and interaction with a master jazz musician.  To my knowledge no other Berklee student has ever used their lesson time like this.  I had no trouble with the exams since I had used Berklee scale study books in my Heisig lessons for 5 years, and so the tests were easy, and I could prepare in just the week prior with no difficulty.  I also took some advanced composition courses including one with Ken Pullig on using ideas of serialism in jazz composing.  I composed a giant work called Nucleus for this class that was never performed.

While still at Berklee and playing in the Boston Improvisation Scene, I decided that I wanted to change the instruments I was using to broaden my palette.  I had bought soprano, alto, 2 tenors and baritone vintage Selmer saxophones, clarinet, and flute from Heisig in California.  I traded away the higher saxes and one of the tenors for a bass clarinet, a contrabass clarinet, and a bassoon.  The three clarinets, two lower saxes and bassoon were my instruments from this time until 2001.

Masashi organized a performance of Cecil Taylor’s composition Burning Poles performed at New England Conservatory.  The performance featured a large orchestra of many gifted improvisors from the Boston area including two Cecil Alumni:  Trumpeter Raphe Malik and tenor saxist Glenn Spearman.  They were able to give a great deal of insight into how to interpret Cecil’s composition, having played a lot in his larger units.  Cecil attended the performance, and I was able to meet him at a party held in Masashi’s loft apartment right next to Fenway Park.

When I left Berklee, I got a job at the Tower Records in Harvard Square where I worked for six years running the receiving department like I had done in California for Western Mountaineering.  In many ways, this was a crappy job, but it had a key benefit:  I was able to open and listen to essentially any recording I wanted to hear in the back room where we processed the store’s inventory.  I added another few thousand CDs to my collection and listened to every kind of music you can imagine.  I specialized in free jazz and free improvisation, modern classical music (after 1900), and world music (especially from Asia and Africa).  My work pal, Thom Jones aka Pointy Toes, introduced me to industrial music, noise music and other weird musics more from the popular culture.  I acquired a profound knowledge of music history across cultures and time.  Especially important to me was classical music after 1950 by composers John Cage, Iannis Xenakis, Krzysztof Penderecki, György Ligeti, Harry Partch (among many others) and performers Arditti String Quartet (among many others) from solo to Orchestral Works. 

In 1991 and 1992, I spent over a year preparing my first Frame Notation score for improvising orchestra entitled Expansions (performed 3 times at the amazing loft performance space, Mobius).  The score organized Events on a timeline including composed lines and other notational devices like what I learned from helping to prepare and interpret Masashi’s scores and what I learned from Mark McGrain at Berklee.  At the time, I thought this would lead to more similar works, but partially due to the huge amount of effort involved, I focused for a long time on purely improvised works for smaller ensembles.

Another important band for me during the 90s was the jazz orchestra of Raqib Hassan.  This large band had several formulations but typically included Glynis, me and multiple drummers / percussionists including Sydney Smart and Yuri Zbitnov.  We played Raqib’s compositions and sometimes covered jazz standards or Sun Ra compositions.  There were several big concerts including one dedicated to Coltrane and one dedicated to Sun Ra.  Raqib’s compositions used sophisticated jazz ideas and are more “free jazz” than typical in my Evil Clown ensembles which are more “free improvisation” or “pure improvisation.”

In 1998, I predicted the decline of Tower Records, and sick of the low pay and rotten treatment of their employees, decided to return to college at the University of Massachusetts to study Computer Science.  I had been writing mathematics to make Fractals in a computer program called Fractint with a Berklee pal, Martha Ritchie, for album artwork and for computer generated video at shows.  I knew that I enjoyed that this mathematical programming and that I could complete the computer science degree and radically improve the quality of my day gig.  Martha is a gifted pianist, we hung out a lot for several years and did record a few albums together (with animated fractals on the video versions) released with the band names Free Trance Ensemble and Fractal Trance Ensemble.

Of course, this became the title of the album and then I needed artwork for the cover.  My housemate, Raffi, is a trained painter and together we conceived of a digital painting for the cover which Raffi then executed:  A giant clown (Godzilla sized) stampeding through a circus, squishing people, while juggling an elephant, a circus wagon, and several other large circus objects.  This is the origin story for the name of the label, Evil Clown.  The clown’s name is Sparkles, the Giant Evil Clown, and while he is perceived as evil by bystanders, he is not really evil, merely indifferent to the fate of the tiny insignificant bug-sized people he tramples.  Sparkles symbolizes Chaos – Chaos Theory is a key component of the theoretical foundation of our music which will be discussed in much greater detail later in this article.  A latter painting (from 2015) by Raffi introduces Sunshine, a giant evil Bunny with huge sharp teeth, hanging out with Sparkles.  Sparkles and Sunshine show up together a few years later in a third painting, and Raffi is currently (2021) working on a fourth painting with Sparkles and his pal Lurky, who is lurking behind the Eiffel Tower in Paris.

Anyway, I worked my ass off for the year prior to the MIT concert with the Fringe, not only preparing the band, but going to school at night and working at the demanding technical day job.  After the concert I was exhausted, and without really planning to in advance, I stopped scheduling new sessions and it gradually became clear that I was taking a break.  I realized that the SGH job was an amazing opportunity to develop a career that would allow normal adult activities like buying a house that do not come easily or at all from a performance career in Avant Garde music.  I often say that my approach to music is cerebral rather than emotional or visceral, and for a long time the technical demands of the job satisfied my need to exercise my brain and I did not miss music making.

• Leaping Water Trio (trio with Glynis and Sam Lobel)

• Wind (duet with Sam Lobel) even

• Boston Improvisors’ Collective (Lead by Flutist Matt Samolis)

• Sky Saw (A rock project with Yuri and Core Redonnett on electric zither from the Blue Man Group)

• Various Raqib Hassan bands

• Mental Notes (an overnight radio program at the Tufts radio station with Craig Schildhauer and many others)

• Free Trance Ensemble and Fractal Trance Ensemble (with Martha Ritchey)

• Composers Orchestra (with Eric Zinman, Raphe Malik and others)

• Equilibrium (with Charlie Kolhase, Matt Langer, Tatsuya Nakatani and James Coleman)

• Bottom Feeder (with Craig Schildhauer)

I had used Fractals, created with Martha Ritchey, for Album Covers and Posters during the Archival period.  In the intervening time, computers had become far more powerful and there was a new Fractal Program called UltraFractal which is much better than Fractint.  I got the new program and created a generation of fresh Fractal images, writing a lot of Fractal generating math in the process.  My SGH gig had given me strong skills with Adobe Photoshop, so I made artsy digital alterations to the raw Fractal images for the new artwork.  While the images are different from each other in many ways, they also have some strong similarities which made them excellent for a marketing brand (together with Sparkles) to give all the products of the various ensembles a visual theme tying them together.  Occasionally, I spend a few days or a week adding to a huge library of Fractal Art images.  Whenever I put out a new album, I just need to pick source images from the library, and I can design packaging.  Fractals are Mathematical images of Chaos Theory with the property of self-similarity across scales:  To me they symbolize mathematical chaos and abstraction just like Sparkles does and tie-in to the music Theory discussed in detail below.

In early 2014, while in NYC on SGH business, I visited Downtown Music Gallery and had a long conversation with proprietor Bruce Lee Gallanter.  DMG specializes in the wacky music I listen to and I had been for years a weekly customer of the DMG list published at the end of each week.  Bruce knew me well as a customer, but not at all as a player.  After we discussed my music at length, I sent him a batch of the CDs from the Archival period.  He wrote great reviews of every disc I sent and was able to sell nearly all of it, persuading me that there would be interest in newly performed music.  Recently, for the 30-year anniversary of Downtown Music Gallery, an excerpt of the Leap of Faith Orchestra – The Photon Epoch was included in an hour-long YouTube program called DMG 30th Anniversary – Episode 01.  It is quite an honor for me to be included in this program with many well-known and less well-known accomplished improvisors. 

To prepare the musicians to improvise in an orchestra of 20 to 25 players, I decided to form several smaller ensembles that would record and perform together.  These bands were String Theory (Glynis, me and string players), Turbulence (me and other horn players) and Metal Chaos Ensemble (originally me and Yuri with other percussion players).  The ideas which guide the Frame Notation Scores are discussed in detail below in the second part of this essay.

I started having concerts at the LilyPad in Cambridge, which is a nice small venue, but expensive.  Eventually, I switched over to Outpost 186, around the corner:  Less nice and with no bar, but very cheap by comparison.  At Outpost 186, I had the third Saturday of the month from 2016 to the onset of the pandemic in 2020, and these bands and a few others alternated as the performer at those shows.  For the first year, we did small ensemble sets from these bands and 6 shows to prepare the Leap of Faith Orchestra at Clarendon Church in Somerville where we could do larger ensembles.  The last of the Clarendon Church shows was the first Frame Notation Score performed by The Leap of Faith Orchestra entitled The Expanding Universe.

So, during the Contemporary Period, many different Evil Clown projects run at once, each with a different planned general focus and Sonority.  I gradually set up a sophisticated studio called Evil Clown Headquarters at my house in Waltham.  Over time many more instruments have been added to the Arsenal, the recording equipment has greatly improved, and I have set up a LIVESTREAMING to YouTube rig with 8 cameras, real-time video mixing and high-quality sound. 

• Leap of Faith Orchestra (35 releases):  Following the warmup work at the Sommerville Church leading up to the first contemporary period Frame Notation Score, The Expanding Universe, I found a nice larger venue called Third Life Studios in a different area of Sommerville where I scheduled 5 shows a year (two months apart excluding the one show in the middle of winter when hauling a lot of equipment is too difficult).  We performed 13 times at this venue between 2017 and 2019 when Susan had to give up the space due to the radical increase in the rent required to renew her lease.  At the conclusion of this run, I offered a 25 CD box set of the complete performances which you can find on bandcamp:  The Complete Leap of Faith Orchestra and Sub-Units Performances at Third Life Studios 2017 to 2019.  These performances do not use scores but did provide practice at unplanned improvisations with the ensemble size from about 7 to 15.  Each show (except one) started with an hours’ worth of short 15- or 20-minute sets by small Sub-Units of the orchestra (usually trios or quartets).  Each time I filled my van to the roof with equipment from the Arsenal so the musicians could play these auxiliary instruments as doubles to their ordinary instrument(s) and improvise with each other in both small units and in the largest pure improvisation settings with no score.  The auxiliary instruments are assigned as doubles in the Frame Notation Scores and the players got to experiment with them in these performances which were preparation for the scored performances of which there have been 6 to date.  I need a venue with a big stage for these shows which is expensive and difficult to arrange.  I bring a significant portion of the Arsenal for these shows requiring a large U-Haul truck:

1. The Expanding Universe (6/4/2016 – Nave Series, Clarendon Hill Presbyterian Church)

• Supernovae (11/19/2016 – Somerville Armory)

• Possible Universes (5/28/2017 – Somerville Armory)

• SuperClusters (12/1/2017 – Pickman Hall, Longy School of Music)

• Cosmological Horizons (7/14/2018 – Killian Hall, MIT)

• The Photon Epoch (4/27/2019 – Pickman Hall, Longy School of Music)

There is further detailed discussion of the theory and practice of the LOFO scored performances at the end of this essay.

• String Theory (13 releases):  During the Archival period Leap of Faith recorded Linear Combinations and Transformations at Killian Hall, MIT.  The middle of three movements of this CD length work was a septet comprised of me and Mark McGrain on horns, a String Quartet (Glynis – vc, Craig Schildhauer – b, Rob Bethel – vc, and Forest Larsen – vla), and Lawrence Cook at the drum set.  In preparation for the septet movement, we did several sessions with just me and the strings.  String Theory is the contemporary period implementation of this idea.  I love playing with free improvisation string players, but they are hard to come by.  Orchestral string players are highly in demand and most of them are classically trained and not particularly interested in playing weird music.  Even so, we have had some great string players come and go and whenever the Evil Clown Roster has active string players, I scheduled sets for String Theory.  This band name will likely not produce more recordings since Yuri has left Leap of Faith – new performances in this category will be Leap of Faith sets.  A great String Theory set from 2016 featuring me, Glynis, violinist Mimi Rabson and cellist Jane Wang was released as Condensed Phases of Matter.

• Turbulence (29 releases): Turbulence is the band that is mostly horn players, although there are relatively few releases that are horns alone.  The horn players often double multiple horns, percussion and/or electronics and sometimes we have a drummer.  There are 4 relatively early sets with the sub-group name Turbulence Doom Choir with me and Yuri with two tubas (Dave Harris and John Baylies) and electronics (one is Lava Flow).  There is a great performance (Upheaval) from 2019 with horn only quintet (PEK, Bob Moores, Michael Caglianone, Jim Warshauer and Ellwood Epps).  The most recent album, Friction Coefficients (2020), from just before the pandemic, features tenor saxophonist and flutist Bonnie Kane and her drummer John Loggia from Western Mass along with several Evil Clown regulars on horns. 

History of Evil Clown (Pandemic Period)

Both me and my housemate Raffi are diabetic and therefore at elevated risk from Covid and we have been extraordinarily careful.  Apart from the few small ensemble MCE sets mentioned above and one Leap of Faith trio set, True Representations of Reality, with me, Glynis and Eric Zinman (piano, piano interior, synth, percussion) performed at Eric’s Studio 234, I kept Evil Clown Headquarters locked down and focused on producing solo work during the Pandemic. 

Every once in a while, there is a break in the crazy schedule, and I have some time to do a solo album. Our Grande Olde pal, the Corona Virus, has provided such a break in spades…. At the beginning of 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 2020 I started up again, conceiving new means of producing some of the enormous output normally achieved by Evil Clown.

Now in the second calendar year to be affected 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.  Solo performance constrains the Sonority Set to resources that I alone use and to me alone as the performer.  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.  I conceived of a formal system which provides a framework for creating 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.

20 of the 32 total PEK Solo releases were recorded and released so far during the pandemic (January 2020 to May 2021) including two four-hour Category 4 (Orchestra of PEKs) compositions each in three 80-minute movements on 3 CD sets (Some Truths Are Known, Semantic Notions), a category 1 (PEK Solo) Requiem for my Father (Requiem for Raymond) performed within hours of learning of his passing in California last fall, and three category 3 (Quartet of PEKs) focused palette sets (Schematic Abstractions for the Clarinet Family, Fixed Intentions for the Saxophone Family, and Completeness for Flutes and Double Reeds).  Ironically, while my output slowed down a bit from usual, I spent more time playing than in a typical year due to the amount of overdubbing and studio construction.

As with all artists, my work naturally falls into periods as my story unfolds.  When a chapter concludes, there is an opportunity to collect that chapter’s work together in a big package.  Doing so helps to make clear the reasons for the grouping and to give the Evil Clown journey definition.  After the venue, Third Life Studios, in Cambridge was forced to close in 2020, the Leap of Faith Orchestra and Sub-Units project which occurred there concluded and I put together a 25 CD Box Set of the 13 performances:  The Complete Leap of Faith Orchestra & Sub-Units performances at Third Life Studios (2017 – 2019).  When the virus fired up, I similarly created a 26 CD box set of selected performances by Metal Chaos Ensemble:  Best of MCE 2015 to 2019.  Like these earlier Box Sets, the new 25 CD PEK Solo Box Set, Fundamental Units – Complete Solo Works from Jan 2020 to May 2021, collects performances by one ensemble belonging to a particular period:  PEK Solo projects during the Stupid Corona Virus.  Downloads and CDs of these giant box sets are half price compared to individual CD orders on my bandcamp sites.

History of Evil Clown (Looking Forward from April 2021)

As I am writing this essay in April of 2021, having received my first vaccination shot and having the second one scheduled for next week with full vaccination to be achieved in mid-May, the CDC says that fully vaccinated adults can be together indoors with no masks.  Nearly all the players involved in the cancelled sets of April through June 2020 are still around and interested in resuming their involvement with Evil Clown.

I have emailed the Roster indicating that Evil Clown Headquarters (ECH) will be open to musicians who are fully vaccinated for LIVESTREAMING to YouTube performances starting after May 15.  As of today (4/24/21), I have 5 sessions in May and June on the book for Leap of Faith, Metal Chaos Ensemble, Turbulence, and the newly formed Expanse (with Michael Knoblach).  Yuri has decided to withdraw from Evil Clown altogether, and Steve Niemitz, a great drummer from western Mass, is going to commute into Boston for MCE sets to replace Yuri.  I’m planning a new ensemble called Simulacrum to feature mostly electronics.

I expect that the schedule will get full and stay full very quickly and we will probably average about 3 new releases per month in line with pre-pandemic times.  I also expect that the new work will come out strong right from the beginning since all of us are desperate to perform music with others and a key element in all great shows is the passion of the players for the moment of performance!!

The final activity of the Pandemic Period was to release the new 25 CD PEK Solo Box Set, Fundamental Units – Complete Solo Works from Jan 2020 to May 2021, collecting performances by PEK Solo projects during the Stupid Corona Virus.  I quite enjoyed doing these albums which departed from my usual practice of simultaneous real time performance of all the musical elements with an ensemble to constructing solo works in the studio with overdubbing more in line with methods used to make most conventionally made studio albums. However, after producing over 25 hours worth of solo material prepared in this fashion I was more than ready to return my focus to ensemble work.

For about 5 years, prior to the Pandemic, I had the third Saturday of each month at a small venue called Outpost 186 in Cambridge. We also performed at Third Life Studios and other Venues, so a significant portion of each year’s output came from Live Performance to audiences in Venues. I always video taped everything, so the YouTube of these shows is from the videos published after-the-fact. The first LIVESTREAM performances from Evil Clown Headquarters were presented in November of 2018, and thereafter all of the session at ECH became both recording sessions and simultaneously LIVESTREAM performances to YouTube. As of this writing (12/26/2024) there are 150 LIVESTREAMS in the Live Section of the Evil Clown YouTube Site (https://www.youtube.com/@GiantEvilClown/streams). So for a brief period, we were doing both Live Shows and LIVESTREAM broadcasts until the Pandemic Shut us down. Emerging from the pandemic, the Live Performance Scene was drastically altered including the disappearance of both Outpost 186 and Third Life Studios, our primary Venues. We made a transition from a primarily Live Performance focus with some Studio/LIVESTREAM performances to a Primarily LIVESTREAM focus with a few Live Performances.

Sometime during the pandemic, Raffi and I started discussing exchanging the studio space and the theater room in the house to address these issues. In September 2021, I purchased a 48 channel Soundcraft Mixing console and Joel and I set it up in the old studio space to learn this Board while planning the new studio space. I spent the next year planning the new studio, making drawings of how I wished to use the space and acquiring the additional studio equipment that would be needed.

Construction began in October 2022 and was essentially completed in mid-January 2023. The studio upgrade represented a major modification to the house and a huge upgrade to the studio. The old studio had the board in the same room as the musicians which is obviously not ideal, especially not for a live-to-2-track mix.

I had my electrician add a new panel so I could put in a bunch of new circuits. The electrical for the lighting needs to be kept separate from the audio electrical, and I also wanted dedicated circuits for the board and its associated equipment, the video mixing station and its associated equipment, and several distinct circuits in the main studio room so there would not be too much electrical load from amps on any one circuit. I installed a silent spilt air conditioning unit so that we could cool the room without adding any appreciable noise load in the studio space. I moved the existing noisy AC into the mixing room.

I removed the wall between the two middle floor rooms used previously as music storage rooms, and then cut a new interior door between this combined space for mixing and the new main studio room. I cut a new exterior door from the mixing room to the side of the house for the musicians to load in through and closed up the door that went in at that location to the studio room. I cut a new exterior sliding glass door in the kitchen to provide egress to the deck and the parking behind the house and so I could stop using the exterior door at the back of the main studio room. I covered the large bay window that overlooks the backyard in the studio room with a temporary wall so that we can control the light in the space and I could use the new wall to mount instruments.

The reconfigured space is setup for permanent installation of instruments to the walls around the perimeter of the room. I used the slat system to hang my keyboards, electronic instruments, and a nice Mackie mixer from the wall between the mix room and the main room. I bought a Nord Stage 3 synth/digital piano for this wall so we have a good piano instrument previously lacking from the set up. We use the mixer to mix those electronic instruments to stereo and send the stereo to the main mix in the Mix Room. In the corner where the disabled exterior door was, the slat system hangs a row of large Almglocken bells and a balafon over a custom table for a xylophone with storage below. The custom table wraps around the corner and has room for some orchestral Anvils, wood blocks and Tibetan Bowls. More recently a trap table extends into the room which holds the Noise Tower and electronics for the daxophone and gravichord.

The next area is open for musicians but has one of the racks mounted into the wall and the 40 inch gong hanging high on the wall behind where the players go. On the left end there are pegs and mounted baskets for headphones, headphone cable management, XLR cables and TRS cables. In the Far corner is the third rack with another Mackie mixing board that gathers 6 mics of the wall mounted percussion instruments into stereo which is sent to the main mixer in the mixing room.

The back wall which covers the old bay window is covered with percussion instruments. On the right, there are two octaves of crotales above a glockenspiel, next there is a 25 inch gong above a large extremely resonant plate gong, next there is a heavy gong stand which holds the brontosuarus bell (a 40 inch long cow bell) and two heavy bells made from large tanks. Many other small percussion instruments are mounted to this rack including wood & temple blocks, cowbells, chimes, small cymbals, and others. Next is a 25 inch Chinese gong above another 25 inch gong. Finally, a Danmo (a Vietnamese wood block instrument) is above the Englephone (a rack with about 30 resonant cowbell like instruments made by a guy named Engle.)

There were a number of shifts in the Roster that occurred over the pandemic, most notably the withdrawal of our primary drummer Yuri Zbitnov. However, the Roster is large and the Pandemic created a lot of change in people’s lives – some moved, others changed their musical practices, and some just became unavailable for other reasons; of course, new people are always joining the Roster also. The net impact of the transformation of the Roster is the retirement of some of the ensembles and the spawning of some new ensembles.

Yuri’s withdrawal meant the core unit for Leap of Faith changed again from trio to the duet of PEK and Glynis Lomon. Generally a performance is credited to Leap of Faith when both PEK and Glynis are on the set. Performances were credited to String Theory through 2019 when the ensemble was PEK, Glynis and other string players without drums – this configuration would now be credited to Leap of Faith, so the String Theory ensemble name is retired. Mekaniks and Chixculub were two other projects involving Yuri that concluded in 2017 and 2018 – These two ensembles were early ventures into more electronic improvisation territory.

Just before the halt for the pandemic, regular trumpeter, Eric Dahlman, brought in percussionist Michael Knoblach who plays found objects and unusual instruments. After the pandemic, I formed a new ensemble called Expanse with several variations, to feature work with Michael. 2021 also saw formation of Simulacrum, a spinoff from Metal Chaos Ensemble with the horns and electronics but without the strong presence of drum set. Axioms, a Jazz-Poetry Project with Albey onBass and Jane SpokenWord had one set in 2018 and seven more between 2021 and 2023 before Albey and Jane moved back to NYC. 2024 saw the formation of Neurodivergent (AKA the Wacky Banter Ensemble) featuring Count Robot, DNA Girl, and Tim Mungenast who go way back as a unit and bring a more pop-culture aesthetic as well as a very interesting aesthetic of improvised words to an Evil Clown setting.

I immediately instituted a grand plan to build the Evil Clown Roster with enough players to perform Improvisation Orchestra performances of Graphic Scores following up on my 1994 Composition Expansions. I also determined to massively broaden the available resources now that I had more resources available. I started buying lots more horns, tons of percussion instruments, electronic instruments and all manner of miscellaneous sound makers.

In parallel with Leap of Faith, Yuri and I also formed Metal Chaos Ensemble to explore the new worlds of sound brought about by all the metal percussion I was accumulating. Starting with the duet Null Theory, we did more duets and also larger groups where we invited other percussion players and some more rock/pop culture oriented players.

I started renting the Lilypad Jazz club in Cambridge for live shows where we would perform a two CD length performance with smaller sub-units for the first hour and everyone together for the second hour as the Leap of Faith Orchestra. Some of the LOFO sets included up to 10 musicians. Leap of Faith also played several shows in NYC with the core quartet.

By the end of 2015 I had started Turbulence for wind instruments, and String Theory for me and Glynis with other String players. The plan was to combine Leap of Faith with Metal Chaos Ensemble, Turbulence, and String Theory into the Leap of Faith Orchestra which would perform large ensemble improvisations and work towards graphic score performances, the first one of which, The Expanding Universe, was performed in 2016.

PEK – 8 January 2024

Below is repeated the Narrative section of the

Performance Summary for 2017

Performances 2017

2017 was a huge year for Evil Clown. The pace increased and by the end of the year we recorded 38 albums. There were 2 Leap of Faith Orchestra Graphic Score performances, Possible Universes and SuperClusters.

The LOFO preparation performances moved to a new venue, Third Life Studios in Somerville. The venue was large enough for 15 or so musicians in the ensemble and the load-in was straight forward. For each show I brought a full van of gear and the musicians were encouraged to play these auxiliary instruments along with their primary axes. These shows were billed as Leap of Faith Orchestra and Sub-Units: The first hour was short pieces by smaller groups and the second hour was everyone together. For several years we did a 5 shows a year (one every other month taking off Jan/Feb).

Yuri and I formed the short lived space-rock trio Chixculub, bringing in electric bassist Jason Adams who played with Yuri in a rock band called Axemunkee. Our first set was Creation Event. The music was interesting and successful, but Jason was very busy and hard to schedule, so this unit ended up only performing 3 sets.

My friend Mike Grialou (AKA Space), who I played with for 5 years in the 80s before moving to Boston to attend Berklee, visited for a week and we did 2 albums by a special Metal Chaos Ensemble which we called Space Metal Chaos Ensemble (Electropositivity, ElectroNegativity).

There were more sessions by the active ensembles of that year at Evil Clown Headquarters and Outpost 186: PEK Solo, Turbulence, Turbulence Doom Choir, String Theory, Metal Chaos Ensemble.

PEK – 1/9/2024

Below is repeated the Narrative section of the

Performance Summary for 2019

Performances 2019

2019 was a huge year for Evil Clown. There was a single performance of a graphic score by the Leap of Faith Orchestra, The Photon Epoch, at the best room we have ever had, Pickman Hall at the Longy School of Music. This is a state of the art venue with an amazing room sound and a large stage. Pianist Peter Cassino who played with Glynis quite a bit and was the pianist on the first Score The Expanding Universe, was a faculty chair and was able to give us one of his yearly performances in the space.

The final 3 performances of Leap of Faith Orchestra & Sub-Units took place at Third Life. Susan’s lease was up and due to the gentrification in Union Square her rent was going to increase so much she couldn’t keep the room. At the end of the run I compiled all of the performances into a massive 25 CD box set called The Complete Leap of Faith Orchestra & Sub-Units Performances at Third Life Studios (2017-2019).

Yuri and I were invited to a rock show at a nice venue in Delaware. We decided to bring a Power Trio Edition of Metal Chaos Ensemble which we thought would appeal the the Grateful Dead oriented rock audience that would be there (Basilisk). Albey was going to be the bass player, but he and Jane moved to New Orleans and we replaced him with Mike Gruen who played electric bass with a much more rock leaning style.

Below is repeated the Narrative section of the

Performance Summary for 2020

Performances 2020

2020 was a very eventful year for Evil Clown. After two shows in the beginning of the year, Outpost 186 got into a beef with the City of Cambridge and the shows stopped. We thought for a minute that it would get resolved but the pandemic hit right after and the room is still not back 4 years later.

I was really bummed about the interruption since we had tremendous momentum and were pumping out a huge amount of high quality music. We did about 10 great sessions in the first few months of the year including Principles of an Open Future, which we recorded for Kevin Reilly’s label Relative Pitch.

Yuri decided that he was not going to continue playing with Leap of Faith, but I convinced him to go on with Metal Chaos Ensemble. His last set with the sextet edition of MCE was The Riddle of Steel took place right before the pandemic got bad. I cancelled 5 or 6 really exciting sessions that were in the calendar and took a few weeks off. Then I spent a minute compiling the second huge Evil Clown Box set (25 CDs) Best of MCE 2015 to 2020. Yuri came back for one more MCE session, Don Quixote, where we used overdubbing to make a thick mix with just the two of us performing. Then he decided to withdraw from Evil Clown altogether.

Most of 2020 and a chunk of 2021 was spent on solo projects and comprise the bulk of the work by the PEK Solo ensemble. The solo albums fall into a few categories with a bunch of them being either PEK Solo – A Quartet of PEKs or PEK Solo – An Orchestra of PEKs. These albums were constructed with overdubbing and studio techniques. Notable in this group is a massive 3 CD major work entitled PEK Solo – An Orchestra of PEKs – Some Truths Are Known.

Oddly enough, I think I spent more time actually playing my instruments to create the 25 albums from 2020 than I do in a year where there are ensemble albums and we usually record around 35 albums.

Metal Chaos Ensemble resumed in the fixed rock-leaning sextet edition with Steve Niemitz taking over the drum chair from the retired Yuri. The first new set was called Tinier Even than Science. Steve lives in western Mass about an hour and a half drive away, so MCE sets are less frequent due to the difficulty of scheduling them and Steve’s travel.

I formed a new MCE Spin-off ensemble called Simulacrum around the trio of me, Eric Woods and Bob Moores. The intent of this unit is to increase the electronics and loose the drum set from the MCE configuration. The first set was called Hyperreality.

Over the years since 2015 I had accumulated so much equipment that setting up for a session was a major exercise every time since the studio room was between my housemate Raffi’s space and the kitchen and theater room in the back of the house which meant that much of the gear needed to be stored away after every set. We started planning a major renovation of the house which would improve the situation for both me and Raffi. This project would take place in Fall 2022 and the first bit of 2023.

PEK – 1/9/2024

Also new for the year was the growth in size of Turbulence, the band formed around horn players. Once an ensemble reaches 8 players, I tack “Orchestra” on to the end of the band name. I’ve got lots of horn players in the roster and the Turbulence sets for 2022 were mostly credited to Turbulence Orchestra. This band has a drummer and a bass player and is the most Free-Jazz oriented of any of the active ensembles which are more on the Free Improvisation end of the spectrum.

Almost all the performances of the year were YouTube Livestreams from Evil Clown Headquarters, but there was one excellent Leap of Faith performance at the Lilypad in Cambridge (Spectral Sequences) and one excellent Leap of Faith performance (The Symbolic Method) at Bonnie Kane’s Friday Experiment in Holyoake MA.

Active ensembles for the year are Leap of Faith, Axioms, Perturbations, Simulacrum, Metal Chaos Ensemble, Expanse, Expanse Meets the JMDE Quartet, and the Leap of Faith Chinese Orchestra featuring Jimmy Zhao and other Chinese musician guests.

PEK – 1/9/2024

Below is repeated the Narrative section of the

Performance Summary for 2024

Performances 2024

2024 was the most productive year to date for Evil Clown. Lot’s of things long in the works have converged.

The Evil Clown History falls into two periods – The Archival Period (1993 – 2001) and the Contemporary Period (2015 to the Present). I quit being musically active for a long time to focus on my day job which was very demanding of my time. Eventually, the job mellowed out and in 2015 I started back up again with a vengeance, broadening the scope of my palette with many new horns, percussion, electronics and other instruments – A significant expansion of the 6 horns I used during the Archival Period.

The end of 2024 marks the completion of a full decade of the Contemporary Period which started with a few PEK Solo recordings and Leap of Faith – Regenerations in early January of 2015. The Contemporary Period is actually now longer than the Archival Period and has far more recorded output (355 albums vs. 95 albums). The Archival Period was actually very busy, but not as well documented, with about half the output Leap of Faith (47 albums) and half the output other Projects (48) which include a bunch of Projects where I was more of a side-man or collaborator than the leader.

The Evil Clown Headquarters studio renovations were complete enough to start Livestreaming sessions in January 2023. All the ECH sessions from 2023 were broadcast from the new performance space. Over the course of 2023 we worked out final issues like the lighting and cameras and really learned to leverage the new broadcasting and recording environment.

Evil Clown Ensembles have always worked in a really long format. We have generally performed a single performance length piece for every show (live in person or Livestreamed) of an hour or more in length. This long format has a lot of advantages for me including simplifying production issues, the number of titles needed, and letting the improvisations breathe and organically develop. However, the music industry is not well set up for long works and the web/phone obsessed culture we live in seems to have very short attention spans…

In 2023, CD Baby, the company I use for broad digital distribution, changed their policy so that a single track CD (even if it was 70 minutes long) could only be distributed as a Single which would sell for at most $2. So, I started recording a “5-Minute Shorty” at the end of the soundcheck before we roll the LIVESTREAM so that each new album contains 2 tracks and we can still play the 70-minute duration that otherwise meets my aesthetic criteria.

I started to release Compilation Albums of the Evil Clown Shorties from each session across all the different projects. Volume 1 was completed in 2023, Volume 2 started in 2023 and completed in early 2024, and Volumes 3 and 4 completed in 2024. As of this writing, Volume 5 is about half complete and will be ready in a few months in 2025. Another advantage of the Shorties is that they make it on to Spotify who also has weird rules about the length of pieces that they will accept.

The other Live Performance was at an Avant Garde Festival in Rochester NY called the Avant Garde A Clue Festival. This was a long 7-hour drive for a short 20-minute performance, but we played to a nice crowd of people who were mostly familiar with modern noise-oriented improvisation and who likely had not seen anything like what the Leap of Faith quartet edition performed there with acoustic instruments only.

Before the Pandemic we played maybe 20 shows per year and the balance of the sets were at Evil Clown Headquarters. I am happy with the new model of a few live performances to audiences and most of the performances being LIVESTREAMs. We are presenting a broad palate improvisation concept that needs a lot of equipment to realize. The ECH studios are permanently set up for this and no mass hauling of equipment is needed to present these ideas. The LIVESTREAMs are attended by viewers in real time and watched from the YouTube channel afterwards in both the full length and Shorty versions. This model of performance gains us more viewers and listeners than we were ever regularly achieved through live performance in venues.

The Live Performances are all special for some reason and since the Broad Palate Idea is so well represented by the ECH LIVESTREAMs, I travel much lighter to these shows than I did in the past.

The Evil Clown Saga marches on stronger than ever. I can’t wait to see what exciting developments the future brings!!!

PEK – 12/24/2024