Deep Archive (1984 to 1992)
Asterismos
at the Western Front (5/27/1991)
YouTube 1 | YouTube 2 | YouTube 3 | YouTube Playlist
Excerpt From Liner Notes by PEK
“… Unlike the rest of my work with Masashi and most of my own work under Evil Clown which was/is all purely improvised, The Masashi Harada Sextet performed Masashi’s compositions. I think there were 10 or so in the book and they contained structural devices controlling the form and melodic information that was used in several different ways in the context of long works that were mostly improvisational. It was a great band that had perhaps 10 or so performances over a period of about a year and a half.…”
27 May 1991
Asterismos at the Western Front
Trio 1 – 23:38
Trio 2 – 14:37
Quintet – 1:00:18
Masashi Harada, Ricardo Frota, PEK, Glynis Lomon, Taylor McLean
Notes by PEK
I’ve been thinking a bit about early times in my music career recently, so I dug through my hard drives and found the one that has the digitized files of my early work from 84 to 92. Most of it is not well recorded, but there are some studio sessions, and some things were better recorded by Space on a 4-channel Reel to Reel recorder.
After moving from California to Boston to attend the Berklee School of Music in 1989, my most important mentor in free improvisation was Masashi Harada. Masashi is a gifted improvisor who used piano, percussion, voice, dance, and visual imagery in his art making. For a few years we played music constantly in different settings and Masashi recorded everything. Some of the sets were at his loft apartment with a whole bunch of different players from the scene, but we also had several bands. Masashi was the leader of this scene, but I was his helper and a constant participant.
One of our bands was a trio with the excellent violinist Ricardo Frota. If I have recordings of all the sets in my records, Asterismos played 10 times between January and August of 1991. I don’t recall why we did not do more, since the musicianship was excellent, but Ricardo was not from the US and perhaps he returned home.
This concert at the Western Front was our only public performance and it is the last but one to occur. All of the other sessions must have been at Masashi’s loft apartment. We did two full sets: the first one was two trios, and the second set was a long piece where Glynis Lomon joined us on cello and Taylor McLean joined on percussion. I love playing with string players, so this trio was a lot of fun. In some ways it reminds me of some of the Leap of Faith sets with Me, Glynis on cello and Yuri on the drums which first occurred at the end of the 90s. The Sonority Space of percussion, strings and winds is a very interesting space – listening to these sessions with 35 years of perspective I would say that we address this Aesthetic Problem very well, but somewhat differently than string trios I later performed with Glynis.
These are the first Asterismos recordings that I am pushing to the Evil Clown Deep Archive. As I work my way though all the material I just recovered, I will identify 2 or 3 more sessions from this ensemble to add to the public record.
PEK – 10/30/2026
