Bio: PEK (Long)
Early PEK | Archival Period | Contemporary Period
On PEK Solo – Complex and Real Dimensions
“… Another far-ranging pictorial of mystic spiritualism imbibed with free-thinking experimentalism from the man with a thousand fingers.”
– Darren Bergstein, Downtown Music Gallery
PEK – Detailed Bio
Early PEK – in California..
PEK (born 1964), began playing music in elementary school on clarinet and then piano. In junior high school he switched to alto saxophone and then tenor saxophone at the start of high school. As a senior he was the Drum Major of the marching band, lead tenor sax in the jazz band and played flute in the concert band. From grades 7 to 10 he studied classical and jazz saxophone with Kurt Heisig.
He went to the University of California at Davis to study mathematics and philosophy, changing schools to the University of Santa Cruz a few years later, and then leaving school to focus on music exclusively. He resumed studying with Kurt Heisig from 1984 to 1989, spending these 5 years on heavy woodshedding and playing in Heisig’s Sax Quartet. During this time he also played with several rock bands including Thieves, Villains and Scoundrels Union, Local 12; Ring of Fire, Kings of Hilarity and No Such Thing, among others. He made experimental tape music with Mike Grialou, Jim Smith and Dave Murray. He wrote and recorded several compositions including Fission, The Safety Device and Descent Into Madness.
His day job was at a camping and climbing equipment retailer where he knew rock climbers and he went on many trips to the wilderness with these people where they would go climbing and he would play his instruments all day in natural settings. He acquired his initial collection of instruments which included clarinet, flute and soprano, alto, tenor and baritone saxophones.
Moved to Boston to attend Berklee…
In 1989, he left California to study performance with George Garzone and composition with Mark McGrain and others at the Berklee School of Music in Boston. While at Berklee he performed with George Garzone’s Avante Garde Ensemble and fronted a recital with the Swamp Men comprised of PEK, George Garzone (tenor sax), Masashi Harada (percussion and piano) and John Fugarino (trumpet). He knew several people studying Recording Engineering and was able to create new recordings of his composition Descent Into Madness, Masashi Harada’s composition Plexus for sextet, and several pieces by Eric Zinman.
Masashi Harada..
Within several months of his arrival in Boston he entered an immersive association with Masashi Harada. Masashi had performed and recorded with Cecil Taylor, William Parker, Joe Maneri, Mat Maneri, Randy Peterson and Glynis Lomon and was rightly a leader in the New Music scene in Boston, later becoming a member of the New England Conservatory faculty teaching improvisation. Masashi had a number of bands with PEK including the Masashi Harada Sextet (Masashi on composition and piano, PEK on clarinets and saxes, John Fugarino on slide trumpet, Glynis Lomon on cello and voice, Atemu Aton on bass, and Laurence Cooke on drums with guest William Parker on bass for one gig), Asterismos (Masashi on percussion, PEK, Ricardo Frota on violin with Glynis on cello and Taylor McLean on percussion as guests on some occasions), and The Candanction Ensemble where Masashi used dance to conduct a much larger ensemble (PEK, Glynis, Sam Lobel on tenor sax and clarinets, Glen Peterson on microtonal guitar and many others). In 1991, Masashi organized a performance of Cecil Taylor’s composition Burning Poles at New England Conservatory for a large ensemble of students and pros that included PEK, Glynis, Raphe Malik on trumpet, Glen Spearman on tenor sax, Eric Zinman on piano and many others. Cecil Taylor was in attendance at the performance.
Other Berklee Period Gigs..
During the Berklee period he also performed with the Insane Sax Quartet (including PEK on tenor saxophone and Charlie Kohlhase on baritone saxophone), the Lourdes Avenue Trio (PEK, Eric Zinman on piano and John Fugarino on slide trumpet) and the Jump Cut Orchestra lead by Chris Florio. He met Martha Ritchey (piano), who became an important collaborator and supporter, and played stretched out jazz standards and then later improvisations with her. He continued making tape music with Glen Peterson.
Evil Clown Archival Period (1992 – 2001)
Expansions..
In late 1992, after completing the Berklee certificate, PEK spent two years composing Expansions, a 90 minute work for 10 instrumentalists and 4 performing engineers. The work utilized frame notation to trigger musical events at times displayed on a digital clock and included tape music and abstract video. The score was assembled into a single sheet of paper about 30 feet wide and 40 inches tall. Expansions was performed 3 times in September 1994 at the Mobius performance space in Boston by the Pointy Toes Ensemble which was comprised of PEK (clarinets and saxes), Sam Lobel (clarinets, tenor sax), Raqib Hassan (bass clarinet, saxes, mussette), Steve Norton (clarinets and saxes), Keith Hedger (trumpet), Mark McGrain (trombone), Glynis Lomon (cello), David “Tiger” Lyons (guitar), Nick Lloyd (double bass), Sydney Smart (drums), Aib Gomez-Delgado (timekeeper), Thom Jones (tape preparation, mixer, tape manipulation, guitar), Glen Peterson (tape preparation, primary mixer, microtonal guitar), Matt Samolis (mixer, tape manipulation), Macha (sound reinforcement engineer, recording engineer), and Lynton Vanderstein (video documentation).
Leaping Water Trio…
Leaping Water Trio was the first band led by PEK and Glynis Lomon. The third member was Sam Lobel who played tenor sax, clarinet and bass clarinet. Sam had played in Cecil Taylor’s large student ensemble in Antioch in the early 70s. He had a huge sound on tenor and bass clarinet and played with a modal style. PEK and Glynis had both played in the Masashi Harada Sextet from 1990 to 1992 and had each developed new language in response to each others playing. On the ending of the Masashi Harada Sextet, PEK and Glynis decided to extend their musical partnership and formed this trio with Sam Lobel. This was PEK and Glynis’ main band for several years.
The Fractal Period…
At this time PEK took a day job running the receiving department of the newly opened Harvard Square Tower Records where he remained for the next 6 years. This was an excellent opportunity to study the history of all music and accumulate many recordings, but did not pay very well. He also started to change his instruments, selling off his higher register saxophones and eventually settling on tenor and baritone saxophones, clarinet, bass clarinet, contrabass clarinet and bassoon. He worked with a guy named Gene Williams at Tower who was using a program called Fractint to create mathematically generated images call fractals. For several years PEK became obsessed with writing little Fractint programs called formulas to create images which can be either static or animated via color cycling. He and Martha Ritchey set up a fractal lab with several computers and video equipment at her apartment and spent many hundreds of hours making fractals.
The earliest of this work was ready in time to include as a portion of the Expansions video. Later, they set up multiple screen environments at large night-clubs like Avalon (next to Fenway Park) and for overnight Raves. PEK’s friend Raffi Batalian organized these events and arranged for the fractal video to support several internationally known DJs including Armand Van Helden, DJ Sneak and Mixmaster Morris. These performances were a live fractal mix involving two computer operators and a video mixer to large night club audiences enabling the video mix to fit rhythmically with the club music.
Composing with Fractals…
Matha and PEK also created a Videographic Fractal Score for guided improvisation which was interpreted a number of times by various ensembles including the yet to be formed Leap of Faith. The score acted as a density map with some sections being smooth and flowing and others aggressive and rapidly changing. Another Videographic Score was entitled Fractal Suite and was performed to video with improvisation by the Free Trance Ensemble (PEK, Martha on piano and Thom Jones on all kinds of acoustic and electronic devices). The fractal artwork created by Martha and PEK are the source material for the album artwork of the Evil Clown label during the Archival Period.
Click the links below to view the 5 movements of the Fractal Suite.
Raqib Hassan..
Raqib Hassan (tenor sax and musette) who studied with Archie Shepp and played several times with Sun Ra had several bands involving PEK. Raqib’s music was more composed than PEK’s later work and is properly categorized as free jazz rather than free improvisation. His large band, Ensemble Mogra, featured Raqib, PEK, Glynis, Sam Lobel, Tor Snyder (guitar), Michael Shea (keyboard), Larry Roland (double bass) Dennis Warren (drums), Syndey Smart (drums), Yuri Zbitnov (drums), Shenol Kuchukildirim (drums), Trevor Daniel (percussion) and others. The smaller unit was called Cosmocentric Trio and featured Raqib, PEK, and Yuri in the unusual configuration of two reeds and drums. PEK played in a number of Raqib’s performances between 1993 and 1999 with these ensembles and other ensembles. PEK’s tape music composition, Configurations, was performed in mid-1993 with PEK, Raqib and Sam Lobel all playing tenor sax.
When Raqib passed a while back, PEK spoke with his brother Bernard and received permission to put out recordings that he made on DAT during this period. They are available on bandcamp here.
Boston Improvisors’ Collective
Matt Samolis (flute, flax, game calls and other), who performed an engineer role on Expansions, had an improvisation ensemble with fluid membership called the Boston Improvisers’ Collective. PEK performed a number of times between 1994 and 1996 with this band at the Bookcellar Café in Somerville MA. Performers on these gigs included Matt, PEK, Steve Norton (saxes, clarinets, game calls), Tom Plsek (trombone, didgeridoo), Craig Schildhauer, John Fugarino (trumpet), Ann Dover (poetry recitation), Jason Rodgers (trombone), Tomo Gondo (euphonium, game calls), and John Voigt (bass).
Composer’s Orchestra
In 1995, Eric Zinman organized a Zeitgeist Gallery concert for the Composers Orchestra to play his and Raphe Malik’s compositions. Performing at this concert were Raphe Malik (trumpet), Glenn Spearman (tenor sax), Eric Zinman (piano), PEK and some unknown others.
Leap of Faith
In 1995, Glynis and PEK decided that they wanted to move their collaboration in a different direction than Leaping Water Trio. They started their first ensemble named Leap of Faith with Mark McGrain (trombone and alp horn). Leap of Faith is the long-term collaboration between Glynis and PEK, officially starting at this time and continuing to 2001 with varying other permanent members and a large number of guests. For a detailed history of Leap of Faith, see the band bio page of this site. PEK and Sam Lobel continued their musical relationship by forming Wind, sometimes a woodwind duo and sometimes a wind instrument trio with the addition of Alec Haavik (saxophones, trombone). Leap of Faith worked continuously in one format or another from this point to the hiatus starting in 2001.
Leap of Faith – Linear Combinations and Transformations
One important project occurred at the beginning of the transition between the PEK-Glynis–Mark McGrain core Leap of Faith trio and the PEK-Glynis-Craig Schildhauer core Leap of Faith trio in October 1996 when PEK rented Killian Hall at MIT for a weekend. Leap of Faith recorded Linear Combinations and Transformations – a suite of three improvised movements with a varying ensemble. All three movements had the core group of PEK-Glynis-Mark McGrain – the first added Craig Schildhauer and Syd Smart; the second was just trio; and the third was septet with Rob Bethel on cello and Forrest Larsen on viola, Craig, and Laurence Cook on drums. I hired a professional photographer who took many excellent photographs. PEK released a self produced CD at the time, and recently dug the unused tracks out, creating a second version of the entire suite, and including the other tracks with newly recorded Material on Regenerations, our reunion album in 2015.
Mental Notes
For many years Craig Schildhauer hosted Mental Notes at WMFO (Tufts University, Medford MA) from midnight until 2. Mental Notes was a different kind of Radio Show than you have ever experienced. You might call it a Radio Broadcast Performance (with mad genius Craig using the entire Radio Station as an instrument). He would make a single uninterrupted mix for the entire length of his program. His show was 2 hours, but he would do it until the next DJ arrived – sometimes for 5 or 6 hours in a row. WMFO had three studios and Craig would use all three of them at the same time. He created loops and tapes in advance, he set up huge analog tape loops with two reel-to-reel decks, he sampled albums of all kinds from the library, he set up his bass and then he ran around between the three studios all night like a crazed fiend. He invited all kinds of different improvising musicians to come and play both as ensembles and as ensembles with Radio Station accompaniment. PEK participated about 20 times in 1996 and 1997 and always brought blank DAT tapes so he could document the results. Performing on various Mental Notes broadcasts were Leap of Faith, Bottom Feeder (Craig and PEK as a duet), Jeff Hudgens (woodwinds), Keith Fullerton Whitman (guitar, electronics), Ayler’s Angels (trio with 2 altos and drums), Leslie Ross (bassoon), Rob Bethel (cello), El-Ron (?), Wayne Rogers (guitar, electronics, owner of the Twisted Village record shop and record label), Kate Biggar (bass) and others.
Seventh Generation Ensemble
In February 1997, Tor Snyder had a 3 day run at Mobius for his multimedia band, the Seventh Generation Ensemble, entitled Reinventing Ritual. It featured Tor (guitar and electronics), Raqib Hassan (tenor saxophone, musette, xurna), Earl Grant Lawrence (piccolo, flutes), Glynis, PEK, Craig, Michael Shea (piano), Dennis Warren (drums, percussion), Linda King (poetry), Guadulesa (live painting), Ebony Pushkin-Nova (dance), Anita Havel (dance), PEK and Martha Ritchey (videographic score).
New Leap of Faith Core Unit
In 1997, Mark McGrain relocated to New Orleans and PEK and Glynis reformed Leap of Faith with Craig Schildhauer as the principal third member. For a detailed history of Leap of Faith, see the band bio at the beginning of this document.
Equilibrium
In September 1999, Glynis couldn’t make a Leap of Faith gig at the last second at Mass Art in Boston. At the concert the first set was a sax duet between Charlie Kohlhase and Matt Langley, the second set was a trio with PEK, James Coleman (theremin) and Tatsuya Nakatani (drums and bowed percussion) and the third set featured all 5 players. PEK called the band Equilibrium since Glynis was not playing. The Evil Clown release of this performance contains the second and third sets
Review by Bruce Lee Gallanter, Downtown Music Gallery
EQUILIBRIUM [With PEK/JAMES COLEMAN/TATSUYA NAKATANI + CHARLIE KOHLHASE /MATT LANGLEY] – Fitness Landscapes (Evil Clown; USA) Featuring Pek on saxes, clarinet & bassoon, James Coleman on theremin, Tatsuya Nakatani on percussion plus added on one long track: Charlie Kohlhase & Matt Langley on saxes. Equilibrium is another of Dave Peck’s (aka Pek) projects. Equilibrium consists of Pek, James Coleman on theremin (who has worked with Bhob Rainey & Greg Kelley) and percussion wiz Tatsuya Nakatani (one of my fave players, who has worked with Dr. Chadbourne, Mary Halvorson and Billy Bang). Both guest saxists here, Charlie Kohlhase & Matt Langely, are Boston-based and have recorded together on more than a half dozen discs. This is the one disc by Mr. Peck and his cohorts that has all familiar names on board. This disc consists of two long pieces, the first of which features just the trio of Pek, Coleman and Nakatani. It was recorded live at Mass Art in Boston in September of 1999. I dig the way the trio take their time and improvise, quietly at first, slowly getting to know each other as they evolve together. At nearly 40 minutes long, it is like a long story unfolding, paced just right never too busy or too intense but always interesting. The second piece is called “Phase Space” and it features three reeds, theremin & percussion. This piece again takes it time but lets all three reeds work together in strong and spirited ways, building, criss-crossing with sections of free/jazz frenetics. Again, the balance, recording and pace is careful and well-handled. Often Mr. Nakatani’s unique approach to percussion (bowed gongs, etc.) and theremin are in similar timbral terrain. More great music form points little known.
New Leap of Faith Core Unit
In late 1999, Craig relocated to Hawaii and PEK and Glynis reformed Leap of Faith into a quartet with PEK, Glynis, James Coleman and Yuri Zbitnov (drums and percussion). For a detailed history of Leap of Faith, see the band bio at the beginning of this document.
Leap of Faith vs. The Fringe
PEK set up a concert at Killian Hall MIT for Leap of Faith and the band of his old Berklee teacher George Garzone. Leap of Faith worked for 6 months to prepare for this show and recorded half a dozen great albums at Yuri’s Haus in Dorchester… The Fringe played a set, Leap of Faith played a set and then both groups played together… Unfortunately, due to George’s contractual obligations with his label I could not release the excellent septet of both groups combined.
Archival Period Winds Down
In 1998, not making any meaningful money at Tower Records, PEK returned to college at the University of Massachusetts and finally completed a bachelor’s degree in Computer Science. He then took a technical job working for the structural engineering firm Simpson Gumpertz & Heger. For several years, while completing the degree at night, he worked this strenuous job and also continued his music career, but in 2001, following the Leap of Faith vs. the Fringe performance, PEK decided to discontinue regular musical performance, preferring not to do it part time.
Performances during the Hiatus
In 1998, not making any meaningful money at Tower Records, PEK returned to college at the University of Massachusetts and finally completed a bachelor’s degree in Computer Science. He then took a technical job working for the structural engineering firm Simpson Gumpertz & Heger. For several years, while completing the degree at night, he worked this strenuous job and also continued his music career, but in 2001, following the Leap of Faith vs. the Fringe performance, PEK decided to discontinue regular musical performance, preferring not to do it part time. The Evil Clown Hiatus continued until 2015. PEK did do some performances on some of Yuri’s projects.
Sky Saw
Yuri had several pop culture bands combining elements of rock and jazz and improvisation. PEK played on a number of the Skysaw performances during 2002. Skysaw was a duet between Yuri on drums and Core Redonnett (Blue Man Group) on electric zither. Skysaw utilized prerecorded electronic tracks and loops and real time electronic performance interacting with the zither and percussion. One of the shows including PEK also featured Brandon Seabrook on guitar and banjo.
Mission Creep
In 2012, PEK once again started performing with one of Yuri’s bands, Mission Creep. In early 2014, the Mission Creep studio band recorded an album entitled On the Sea of Suns. The 2014 live performance version of this band is a collaboration between Gregory Damien Grinnell (composition, electronics, bass, guitar, and trumpet) and Yuri Zbitnov (composition, drums) with the other regular members being Tony Savarino (guitar), PEK (baritone saxophone), Steve Norton (alto sax, horn arrangements), Johnny Blazes (vocals), and Tamora Gooding (electronic percussion).
The PEK Long Bio above this point was written in 2015 as I rebooted Evil Clown and created the first version of the Evil Clown website. Now, as of this writing in January 2024, the Archival Period and the Contemporary Period are roughly the same length and I am taking the opportunity to extend this long bio to include Evil Clown’s activity from 2015 to the present .
Evil Clown Contemporary Period
(2015 – present)
Note: The Contemporary Period is broken down by year….
2015
2015 was a huge year for Evil Clown, as we emerged from a 14-year hiatus following a 10 year period of intense activity in the 90s. I had ceased musical activity in 2001 due to the demands of my day gig and the impossibility of doing both at the same time with any seriousness. In 2012 to 2014, Yuri Zbitnov (drummer from the last few years of the Archival Period) invited me to play on a few shows with his band Mission Creep. Also on those shows was reed player Steve Norton who had played on Expansions in 1994 and the BIC sets later in the 90s lead by Matt Samolis.
I also visited the Downtown Music Gallery in Manhattan while working in NYC for my day gig. I had a great conversation with proprietor Bruce Lee Gallanter who knew me as a frequent and long-term customer, but not as a musician. The next week, I sent Bruce a box with 10 or 12 of the CD titles that we had made during the Archival Period and Bruce was able to sell virtually all of it.
These two things made me realize that I was ready to resume musical activity and that there was an audience for our approach to Free Improvisation. I reformed Leap of Faith as the core trio from 1999 to 2001 (PEK, Yuri and Glynis Lomon) with the addition of Steve Norton as a second horn. Our first Leap of Faith session (Regenerations) occurred In January 2015 in Yuri’s Dorchester MA.
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.
2016
2016 was a huge year for Evil Clown. The first performance of a graphic score by PEK to be performed by the Leap of Faith Orchestra, The Expanding Universe, occurred in June. To prepare for the show, I put on 5 shows at the Nave Gallery of the Clarendon St Church in Somerville. Each of the shows featured Leap of Faith and one of the other Evil Clown Ensembles (String Theory, Metal Chaos Ensemble, Turbulence) where the smaller units performed shorter sets in the first hour and everyone played together for the second hour. The Church had plenty of space for a large ensemble and lots of equipment, so I rented a large U-Haul and brought a ton of the percussion gear… There were a lot of stairs for the load in, so after this series, I sought other venues for the full orchestra.
Turbulence, the ensemble which is mostly horn players, had its first session early in the year as a duet with Steve Norton and me at Evil Clown Headquarters (Vortex Generation Mechanisms). There were a couple of other performances and at the end of the year we debuted Turbulence Doom Choir which was me, two tubas, and Yuri on drums with lots of electronic processing.
Mid-year I switched our regular venue from the Lilypad to Outpost 186 which is right around the corner in Inman square. Outpost 186 is not as nice a space and had no beer, but it was much cheaper and persistent problems at the Lilypad about time of load-in were not a issue. For 5 years starting at the beginning of 2017, this was a once a month residency on the 3rd Saturday of the month.
Towards the end of the year, Mekaniks, the first Evil Clown Ensemble to be centered on electronic sounds and signal processing, had it’s first 3 sessions at Evil Clown Headquarters.
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.
2018
2018 was a huge year for Evil Clown. There was one Leap of Faith Orchestra performance of a Graphic Score by PEK (Cosmological Horizons) at a great room at MIT called Killian Hall. I rented this room in 1996 for a Leap of Faith recording session which produced Linear Combinations and Transformations and later a second album of alternate takes.
There were 5 more performances by Leap of Faith Orchestra & Sub-Units at Third Life Studios following the same pattern of short sets by small sub-units and a long set with everyone. Albey onBass (Albey Balgochian) arrived on the scene at one of these shows. Albey was Cecil Taylor’s regular bassist for over a decade in the 00’s. He became a regular performing with many of the bands.
Towards the end of the year we had the first performance by Axioms (Manifestations), a trio with me, Albey and Jane SpokenWord. Jane and Albey are married and for years have performed Jane’s poetry with the accompaniment of Albey and scores of prominent improvisors.
There were a full dozens sets at the Outpost 186 residency and more sessions at Evil Clown Headquarters by the active ensembles of 2018: Mekaniks, Metal Chaos Ensemble, PEK Solo, Turbulence, and String Theory.
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.
Mike turned out to be a great fit and Metal Chaos Ensemble started regularly performing more groove oriented sets that included Narration drawn from movie and literature starting with Proteus 4. We settled on a sextet lineup that has remained pretty consistent to the present.
Evil Clown regular trumpeter Eric Dahlman, introduced me to Michael Knoblach, a percussion player who plays lots of very unusual objects along with some traditional hand percussion from a seated position on the floor. We did a Evil Clown Headquarters set (Main Sequence) as Sub-Unit No. 1 which is the band name I use when the unit does not fit neatly into the aesthetic definition of one of the regular Evil Clown Ensembles. Since this was a big success, we formed a new unit called Expanse build around this duet.
We had a dozen shows at Outpost 186 and a bunch of sets at Evil Clown Headquarters with the active ensembles: Leap of Faith, Metal Chaos Ensemble, Turbulence, String Theory, PEK Solo, and Sub-Unit No. 1.
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 Bos 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.
2021
2021 was a very eventful year for Evil Clown. I spent January to May on another 9 PEK Solo albums 8 of which were either PEK Solo – A Quartet of PEKs, or PEK Solo – AN Orchestra of PEKs. One of these was a second massive 3 CD composition – PEK Solo – An Orchestra of PEKs – Semantic Notions. When it was clear that the pandemic was winding down and it was safe to resume playing with others I compiled the third massive Evil Clown 25 CD box set PEK Solo – Fundamental Units – Complete Solo Works Jan 2020 to May 2021.
The first set of the year with other players was a trio (Vacuum Energy) with percussionist Michael Knoblach and sax wiz Michael Caglianone and was the debut session for Expanse, the band name assigned to my project with Mike K. Our next set brought in the other players from Michael’s band the JMDE Quartet (Scope). One of these players was the excellent Chinese musician Jimmy Zhao.
Albey and Jane moved back to NYC from New Orleans but were frequently in the Boston area and Albey resumed regular performance in a bunch of settings included Axioms featuring Jane’s poetry. The first new set was called Hypotheses.
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.
2022
2022 was a huge year for Evil Clown. Now fully recovered from the distractions of the pandemic, we proceeded to have a very busy year. We recorded 32 albums in 9 months – a frantic pace of over 3 1/2 albums per month. The last 3 months of the year were devoted to construction in the house to exchange the Theater Room and the Studio’s position in the house. This involved taking out a wall, cutting in new doors, building custom furniture for a new 60 channel Soundcraft mixing console, mounting 2 inch pipe to the ceiling for a lighting fixture truss, and a thousand other details. Joel and I spent a full two weeks over my Xmas vacation wiring it up. Every wall in the studio space is covered with instruments, mics and video equipment. In short, there is a fully equipped professional recording studio complete with 8 high end video cameras and a video mixing rig that sends a Livestream to YouTube.
The new ensemble for the year is Perturbations – originally a duet with me and Joel Simches, our house engineer, tweaking the hell out of my sounds with a ton of signal processing gear while he runs the recording. The first set was called Agitation. Later sets by Perturbations grow the instrumentalist count to two or three for a fuller sound still sparse enough for Joel’s contribution to the performance to be musical.
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.
2023
2023 was a huge year for Evil Clown.
The Evil Clown Headquarters studio renovations were complete enough to start Livestreaming sessions in January and finalized a few months later. All the ECH sessions from 2023 were broadcast from the new space.
The tool I had been using to build the Evil Clown website since 2015 finally expired and I was forced to rebuild the site from scratch. It took hundreds of PEK hours to accomplish, but the new site is better in every way, so the effort was worth it. As of this writing (12/31/2023) there is more to do, but the navigation shell is completely in place along with all of the album pages and bios.
We released 37 albums by 9 ensembles. Most were YouTube Livestreams from ECH, but we did a few live performances at the Lilypad in Cambridge MA and at John Loggia’s 118 Elliot Street Gallery in Brattleboro VT. I have enjoyed the live shows, but am happy with the balance where most of the performances are livestreams, since I don’t have to haul equipment to present the broad palate improvisation concept nearly so often.
Also included below are videos from a few Non-Evil Clown sessions that I did with John Loggia and Dennis Warren.
We have established huge momentum coming out of the pandemic and I expect 2024 to continue to be equally productive. Stay Tuned.
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 in 2001 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 sound palette with many new horns, percussion, electronics and other instruments – A significant expansion over 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.
Also in 2023, I was forced to rebuild the Evil Clown Website from scratch with a much more modern web authoring tool. I redesigned it, of course, sliming down some areas, and adding some new things. I decided that I would start creating 10 or so short video excerpts (called Video Shorties) from each YouTube LIVESTREAM and live in-person performance and post them to a second YouTube Site and Instagram. I spent the first 3 months of the year creating Shorties for all the Videos back to 2022, plus all the Leap of Faith Orchestra Scored Performances, all the Leap of Faith Orchestra & Sub Units Shows at Third Life, and all the Narrated Metal Chaos Ensemble LIVESTREAMS. I integrated a viewer showing the YouTube Shorties in these Evil Clown Performances Pages (see below) and on each Evil Clown Album Page. By April, I had the new Site more or less up to the current day after maybe 7 months of steady effort.
I created the new YouTube site on March 3, and there are now (as of 12/24/24) 1,381 Shorties posted and 13,546 views. We have always had lots of views of the full length videos (39,773 views since July 2015), but this offering of more bite size pieces gives the audience a chance to see our work in more digestible pieces. I plan to work back through the Catalog and create Shorties for many more performances during the contemporary period (2015 to the present).
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.
Evil Clown produced 41 albums in 2024 by 7 ensembles with variations and 3 albums of Evil Clown Shorties Compilations, which is the most production of any year in the history of Evil Clown.
Leap of Faith and the Leap of Faith Chinese Orchestra recorded 13 times, Metal Chaos Ensemble recorded 3 times, Expanse and Expanse Percussion Edition recorded 4 times, Turbulence and the Turbulence Orchestra recorded 10 times, Perturbations recorded 3 times, Simulacrum recorded times, and Neurodivergent and the Neurodivergent Orchestra recorded 3 times.
There were three Performances to Live audiences. The current version of the very large Evil Clown improvisation ensemble is the Turbulence Orchestra and Sub-Units Project which played twice in 2024 at John Loggia’s venue, 118 Elliot St Gallery in Brattleboto VT, and which will perform twice per year there going forward in the Spring and the Fall. This show merges the Boston scene that I lead from Evil Clown Headquarters with the Brattleboro scene where John is a leader and the Western Mass scene where Bonnie Kane is a leader. So far the shows have each had 25 musicians and have followed the format of the Leap of Faith Orchestra and Sub-Units shows from 2016-2019 at Third Life Studios in Somerville MA. I split the players into small units that each play a short set of 15 minutes or so for the first hour and then we do a single huge ensemble improvisation for the second hour.
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!!!
2025
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.
