2024 in Review

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.

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