performances 2025 - Evil Clown

Evil Clown Performances

2025

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Year in Review | Production Summary | 2025 Performances

2025 in Review

2025 was an extremely productive year for Evil Clown. Lot’s of things long in the works have converged.

The Evil Clown Headquarters studio renovations were complete in the beginning of 2023, so we have now completed 3 full years in the updated studio space and we’ve got it down to a science.

Evil Clown House recording engineer Joel Simches was on the road with Nektar in the Spring for a few weeks and I took those same few weeks to visit my family in California. In the Fall and early Winter we took another break to work on Raffi’s movie (more below). All told, we had about 2 months worth of interruption to the Evil Clown schedule – so, all year I was aggressive with the performance calendar to achieve my target yearly production in 10 months instead of 12. The goal is to record an average of 3 albums per month and we exceeded that goal in 2025 with 37 albums plus 3 Evil Clown Shorties Compilation records. In 2024, we completed 41 albums without so many distractions, and in 2016 we completed 41 when several concerts were released as two separate discs, where I now release a two hour concert as a double CD. All other production years from the contemporary period were a bit less productive. So a lot was achieved on a compressed schedule.

All year, I spent any open spot in the schedule working through two ongoing large projects that will continue probably at least for a few more years before completion.

I now break each 70 minute LIVESTREAM performance video into roughly 5 minute video shorty chunks to post them to Instagram, YouTube and Facebook. I’ve been working my way through the catalog and I’m back to January of 2021 (the middle of the solo works I did during the pandemic in by PEK Solo; PEK Solo, a Quartet of PEKs; and PEK Solo, an Orchestra of PEKs). I recorded video for everything in the Contemporary Period back to 2015 and selected concerts from the Archival Period (1993-2001) – so there still is a lot to go through and post in the short form. I created a new YouTube page just for the Shorties in March of 2024 – a year and nine months prior to writing this. The short format has drawn a lot of hits on the site – 24,512 hits on 2,384 video shorty excerpts in 21 months – pretty good for such weird music…

In the beginning of the year, I started a relationship with an organization called That Pitch which allows me to offer Evil Clown’s music to Licensing Libraries. It was a lot more complicated to get running than I expected. It turns out that like in almost every other area of the Music Business, these services do not accommodate artists who work in long forms. I have to split my long works into pieces that are 7 minutes or less in length and get them registered with ASCAP. Registering them was not easy since I have 11 or 12 tracks with very similar titles except a Shorty Number at the end to indicate which excerpt the track is of the full work and ASCAPs system has a great deal of trouble with that. Anyway, I eventually found a vendor that has a script to bulk load into ASCAP that got around this issue, but it took a couple of months to work it all out. It’s going to take a long time to work my way through the catalog and get it all listed, but I already have about 2000 tracks in these Libraries – No sales yet, but I am optimistic that someone with a weird movie or some other non-conventional need for music support will find our work in this venue.

Almost all of our performance now occurs as LIVESTREAMING at Evil Clown Headquarters which is the studio at my house. This is a special place configured to solve the aesthetic problem of larger ensemble broad palette improvisation. We have two rooms for performers: the main studio space which has permanently set up areas for my horns and percussion, string, electronic, and electro-acoustic instruments for everyone to use; and the kitchen (which gets covered with black duvateen fabric during performance) where we put drums and bass when the ensemble size is bigger that 5 or 6 players. A third room contains the audio and video mix consoles and the lighting system computer. Joel monitors the performance space on a large monitor fed with the cameras used by Raffi to make the LIVESTREAM feed.

We have been getting much better YouTube Live viewership as time goes on. Although our music is very strange and the audience is always going to be small, we now have dedicated listeners who watch essentially every performance in real time. Since we do not have to move the equipment, and since we have professional broadcasting and recording equipment permanently in place, and since we get a regular streaming audience I have decided to save my back and focus on this performance model.

We do a few public live performances each year, however, including Bonnie Kane‘s Masters of Sonic Liberation Series in Western Mass and Turbulence Orchestra & Sub-Units performances at John Loggia‘s excellent gallery space at 118 Elliott St in Brattleboro VT where we can have a much larger ensemble than I can fit in Evil Clown Headquarters.

So, we had 40 releases for the year and this is how they break out:

Leap of Faith (6), Leap of Faith Orchestra (2)
Metal Chaos Ensemble (3)
Expanse (3), Expanse Percussion Edition (2)
Turbulence (6), Turbulence Orchestra (3), Turbulence Orchestra & Sub Units (2)
Axioms (1)
Perturbations (2)
Simulacrum (2)
Neurodivergent Orchestra (5)
Evil Clown Shorties (3)

If you look at the Production Summary in the next section of this page, you can see trends in production across the bands. Leap of Faith was a bit less busy than usual this year due to complications in Glynis Lomon‘s schedule, but we did reach the 190 total album mark – we will likely reach 200 albums in 2026. Metal Chaos Ensemble has remained steady at about 3 per year since Yuri Zbitnov left, but shows no signs of ending even while the makeup of the unit is in flux… Expanse, which are projects featuring Michael Knoblach‘s unusual hand percussion and found objects, has a new variation called Expanse Percussion Edition which includes more dedicated percussionists on a set than the other projects. We managed an Axioms set even though Albey onBass and Jane SpokenWord now are based solely in NYC and do not have the convenient local crash opportunities they had for a while a few years back, although we did see Albey as the bass player on some of the other sessions… We did small format streaming sets by Turbulence (the ensemble of mostly horns), larger streaming sets by Turbulence Orchestra, and 2 public performances by the Turbulence Orchestra & Sub-Units in Brattleboro with large Orchestras of about 25 players (the second one had performers travelling from 6 different North Eastern states).

Including the Western Mass/Brattleboro/NYC performers who were at the Brattleboro shows, we had over 50 improvisors participate in 2025 with John Fugarino appearing over 30 times and some others more on the order of 10 to 20 times. Most of our Roster participate in 3 to 6 Evil Clown performances in a typical year. A few very busy members have been on the Roster for years, but are only able to come infrequently. We have some great brand new regulars like Kelsey Gallagher on Clarinet and Cliff White on saxophones who made their first appearances this year and immediately became strong regular contributors. Synth wiz Robin Amos and violinist Jonathan LaMaster have been around a few years now and the Simulacrum Project is really reaching new heights with their contributions. Likewise Neurodivergent (featuring the wacky banter of Count Robot, DNA Girl, and Tim Mungenast) has grown significantly in 2025.

My housemate Raffi is an artist, not a musician. He made the original digital painting of Sparkles the Giant Evil Clown in 2000 and all of the variations since. Nowadays, he runs the 8 camera video mix of the LIVESTREAMs and directs (with a wireless head set) his old pal Paul Brennan who hand holds one of the cameras. Years ago, he wrote a short movie which has been laying about since. He decided that he was ready to make the film and we temporarily decommissioned the main Evil Clown Headquarters studio room to make a set and to shoot the movie in for a bit over a month in the fall. We shot all the footage with my cameras and studio equipment and two actors: Raffi and DNA Girl. As of this writing, he is finalizing the initial mix of the film and over XMAS I will be composing the score from samples that Joel and I recorded over the last few months of me, Jonathan LaMaster and Robin Amos. People have told me over the years that our music sounds like movie music – I always agreed with that statement and have wanted to compose music for film for a long time. I am looking forward to completing this new film score composition in the near future.

Making the movie has been really fun, but it has also had the added benefit of forcing us to become much more informed about the manual settings in the cameras and the lighting system in the studio in order to achieve Raffi’s aesthetic vision for the lighting in the movie. Already, this increased knowledge is apparent in improved control of the video production of Evil Clown’s LIVESTREAM performances.

Evil Clown don’t fuck around…

We are barreling along at full speed, making a ton of challenging purely improvised music every year. The Broad Palette Aesthetic Concept is designed to make this music very different from piece to piece and very different throughout the duration of each individual work by transforming across widely diverse sonorities. In 2025, we have shown again that this strategy is successful at achieving its artistic goals.

Every year I feel like I have made some of the best music of my life. So stay tuned and we will see what happens in 2026.

PEK – 12/19/2025

Year in Review | Production Summary | 2025 Performances

2025 Production Summary

Year in Review | Production Summary | 2025 Performances

2025 Performances

(In Reverse Chronological Order)

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PEK, Michael Caglianone, Hilary Noble, Kelsey Gallagher, Cliff White, John Fugarino, Bob Moores, Eric Dahlman, Duane Reed, Glynis Lomon, Jonathan LaMaster, DNA Girl, Tim Mungenast, Eric Woods, Robin Amos, Count Robot, Cyrus Shauoul, Scott Samenfeld, Michael Knoblach, Jared Seabrook, Joel Simches

Evil Clown Performances

2025

2025 in Review

2025 Production Summary

2025 Performances

(In Reverse Chronological Order)

Sub-Unit Video Shorties

Orchestra Video Shorties