David Peck (AKA PEK) is a DIY (do it yourself) musician (primarily playing
woodwinds) running his own record label Evil Clown
and most notably live streaming 70 minute free improv music concerts
from a studio on almost a weekly basis! He has many different ensembles that
perform in his live streams which are also available for free after the fact on
The audio only versions of his ensembles (spoiler alert, I am in one of the
ensembles!) are available on bandcamp
Here is an email interview with the amazing PEK who put out 44 albums last
year!!!
What do you wish that you knew when you first started these performances?
I have been evolving as a musician over many decades. At this point in my musical life, I am making the best music of any time in my history. So, I have lots of knowledge, technique, etc. now that would have been useful to me 10 years ago in 2015 when Evil Clown Headquarters was born and the Evil Clown Contemporary Period began. However, it is the work of the time and all the time between that has got me from where I was then to where I am now. You don’t gain knowledge, technique, etc. Willy Nilly, you earn it from doing the work. I have been advancing my music since I was a teenager in the 80s, Everything that I have done over that entire time contributes. I can’t think of anything that I would have done differently in 2015 – I learned what I needed to know as I needed to know it. Some of the technical issues with the video camera placement and lighting were solved ultimately by remodelling the house to move the studio into a more appropriate space which was finished in January of 2023.
How would you describe the differences in experiencing your band’s performances on video vs just listening to the audio?
We make a lot of very unusual sounds using both ordinary and unconventional instruments. Ultimately, the audio is the point – we are musicians making music, which is fundamentally sound, but our physical process is unusual and visually very interesting. I think the audience can be drawn in to music that might be challenging or confusing to them more easily if there is a compelling visual component, so I have always considered that live performances are the best way to experience improvisation. Being able to see the actions taken by the performer to produce the sounds that you hear provides a deeper understanding of the means of the artistic statement than hearing the sound alone without that additional context – especially with acoustic instruments where the physical action taken has so much impact on the resulting sounds produced. The broad-palette improvisation concept requires a tremendous amount of equipment to realize – you need lots and lots of instruments which are hard to mobilize. Since the end of the pandemic and the creation of the current Evil Clown Headquarters Livestreaming studio, the broad-palette improvisation concept is immediately realizable in the ECH space at any time to a real-time internet audience and another internet audience that watches afterwards. This is the primary motivator for doing mostly Livestreams and much less public performance. We get more total viewers with this model than we ever have in live concert attendance. So Livestreaming is a convenient performance method in the internet era and somewhere in between audio only and public live performances in terms of visual connection. The viewer can still see the performer’s actions and relate them to the sounds produced, but they are limited to the portion of the event which is captured by the video mix.
You've said that part of what your bands are doing is “solving an aesthetic problem” could you elaborate on that?
People often think that the word “Free” in Free Jazz or Free Improvisation means that the music does not contain any structure – “You just do what you want…”. I don’t really like these labels for that reason, but they are widely used and here to stay. Our improvisation is fundamentally different than music with the traditional Western structures of melody, harmony, rhythm, harmonic rhythm and melodic/harmonic relationships. The structure of the music arises from the collective aesthetic choices made by the musicians as the improvisation proceeds. Each player listens to the other sounds, reacts to the other sounds, predicts where the sound space will go next, and decides when to introduce new elements that drive the sonority into transformation. While it is true that I “just do what I want”, deciding what I want to do is conditioned upon a huge number of contributing factors. When all the players know each other’s musical language and are making their decisions according to similar principles, the group collectively makes decisions that guide the improvisation through a set of distinct sonorities over the duration. This is the form of the work. The process I’m describing here is not dependent on any set of players or group instrumentation. One of the goals of my enterprise is to do lots of very different music with a bunch of projects and many different musicians. While exact formations do occasionally repeat, generally the performers on the sessions vary a lot and the instrumentation for a session varies a lot from show to show. A particular session has an available set of resources comprised of the performers, the instruments, and other sound making objects available. The Aesthetic Problem posed to the performance is to use the improvisation techniques described above with available resources to craft a musical soundscape that is as interesting as we can make it. If you alter the set of available resources but still use the same improvisational concept you solve a different Aesthetic Problem and make different music with fundamentally the same techniques.
Describe the post process after a show has been filmed.
There is a clearly defined list of tasks that I do every time very quickly and in roughly the same order. Our process is optimized for the best quality product that can be achieved in the minimum amount of time. The audio is recorded with Joel Simches, our house engineer, making a live 2-track mix with the 48-channel board in the control room plus the sub-boards in the performance space. The video is shot with 7 fixed cameras and one camera handheld by Paul Brennan and mixed in real-time by Raffi for the Livestream. There is no complex mix down to do. I master the audio by limiting it to level the top end of the dynamic and then normalizing it to boost the max to -1 db. I filter out any noise floor from the room. Then the audio mix is done – it takes less than an hour. I send audio files to the performers via file download before I go to bed the same night as the performance. Next, I watch the video master which we record onto a hard drive simultaneously with the Livestream. I master the audio for the video mix the same way I master the audio only recording. I have the CD packaging file open while the video plays and I observe and record the instruments used by each of the performers in the packaging file. During this pass I capture still photo screen grabs from the video and I extract short 3-to-5-minute video “Shorties.” I write liner notes for the album in a Word file, I finish the packaging design for the CD, upload the tracks to Bandcamp along with the notes and packaging images, I upload the tracks to Soundcloud, and I place a CD order with Bison for physical discs. I post the photos that Paul takes and the still video grabs on facebook. I edit the video file to add a cover image from the CD packaging and I post that file to YouTube and facebook. I post the video Shorties to the second YouTube site which I put up just for them. I update the Evil Clown Website in four separate areas: 1) Each ensemble has a section with the albums listed in alphabetical order showing the cover, personal, track list and links, 2) Album Page which contains all the album artwork, full liner notes, photos, links to full length video and video shorties on YouTube, 3) Performance Pages lists the year’s shows in descending chronological order and have some of the packaging images, some of the data, and all the important links, and 4) Update the bios of each performer with the album cover for the new album which is a link to the Album Page. All these tasks are detailed in columns in a spreadsheet. and I record the date that I finish each, so that I know exactly what is completed and what remains. I’ve done this a couple of hundred times, and I am very efficient. It takes 12 or 15 hours or so to perform all this work and it usually takes no more than 4 days following a performance for the work to be completed. Of course, this is by design – I have built a highly compressed system that enables me to produce very high quality (but never perfect) product in the bare minimum of time making me immediately ready for the next session. There are other cycles of work that happen, but these are the post-processing steps that occur immediately following each performance and generally prior to the next one.
How much of a concern is repetition?
Repetition comes in lots of flavours. I’m not very interested in music that repeats too much in some regular way – I want music to transform across lots of different sound-spaces. I don’t mind grooves, but I’m not interested in having them all the time – if they occur, they should transform into something else before going on too long. We don’t use chord progressions or repeating sequences – again, they can occur, but they shouldn’t continue to long before moving into some other space. I am very interested in identifying compelling Aesthetic Problems to solve and then repeating them. When you repeatedly address a similar Aesthetic Problem, each time you achieve a different solution – The repetition is in the process, but the music can be very different each time. I consider the entire Evil Clown Enterprise to be a single massive Aesthetic Problem posed by the studio, my instruments, the auxiliary instruments permanently installed in the space and the roughly 50-person roster that make up the performer pool and their instruments. We repeat solutions to a different section through this same problem 30-40 times per year, each time producing a different result.
What are some of your favorite moments from the live stream performances?
My favorite moments from the Livestream performances are when a new element is added that broadens the scope of the Aesthetic Problem somehow. Usually, this means when a new player comes in with musical skills/background that are different than other available resources. When somebody new comes and it is immediately obvious that they are a good fit with a new voice that broadens the scope, and their interest level is high so they will come back often, that is a prize moment. Occasionally the new element might be the addition of a new instrument to the Evil Clown Arsenal that broadens the sound palette. Making music is by far the most enjoyable thing I do, and I love every session that we do, so isolating a few specific moments and naming them the favorites is hard to do…
Lately you've been putting out a lot of “shorties” can you explain what they are, where the idea came from, and how you choose what becomes a “shorty”.
I have listened to a huge amount of music and a full CD or record album is roughly the length of a performance and I’m perfectly happy to listen to music that is an hour or two in length as a single undivided work. I have always performed very long works, typically one piece of music for the entire concert. This meets my aesthetic goals of letting the music develop organically and transform through diverse sonority over its length without a lot of stopping and blabbing during the length of it. In my view, it’s not that different from playing a continuous series of shorter works with longer pauses in between for the length of a concert. That doesn’t mean long form improvisation doesn’t have grand pauses that naturally divide the work into movements, it just means they arise naturally through the improvisation process. For a long time, most Evil Clown releases were a single 70-minute-long continuous work – we track the time with a large sports clock so the performers know when to make an ending. In 2023, the Music Industry’s digital distribution system instituted a new rule that said a one-track CD could only be sold at the price point of a CD-Single. My music is pretty weird, and what little I sell I need to make a fair price for. So, at that time, I started to record a short 5-minute work at the end of the sound check at every Livestream performance at Evil Clown Headquarters. These “Shorties” are not part of the video broadcast, but they go on the CD which now has two tracks and qualifies as full length while letting me still make the 70-minute track exactly as I have always done. I make an Evil Clown Shorties Compilation CD whenever I have a full CDs work of shorties (typically 14 tracks). I have released 5 of these discs between 2023 and this writing in June 2025. Also, I have always known that most people consume music in small chunks and do not necessarily have the patience for very long works, so at about the same time I started recording Audio Shorties, I started excerpting Video Shorties from the full videos. I divide the full-length video into 3-to-5-minute excerpts at the movement changes, and I post those videos to a separate YouTube site. These “bite-size-chunks” are often well self-contained and are attractive content for our audience getting comparatively a lot of views on the YouTube channel.
If anyone reading this wants to start mounting performances like what you do, what advice would you give them?
Be prepared to work your ass off. This enterprise functions well because I spend an enormous amount of time doing it. In fact, I only do three things really, I work at my day job which generates the money I need to do this, I do Evil Clown, and on Friday and the weekends I watch a few movies with my housemate Raffi.
What was the most surprising thing that has arisen from the Evil Clown sessions?
I’m not easily surprised. I have a thoroughly defined process that works well and predictably produces results that satisfy me. I love it when the music surprises me, which does happen, but that is a big part of the goal – to always be achieving new musical territory, so the fact that a new unique sonority is achieved is not surprising even while the sounds themselves might be new and exciting.
If you had an unlimited budget for your productions at Evil Clown headquarters, what would you do? I would blow up the scope. A much bigger space, a much bigger console, much more instruments and technical equipment, and an army of minions to handle the physical moving of the equipment and some portion of the administrative tasks that consume so much of my time. More space would allow large instruments that don’t fit at the current ECH – pianos, timpani, marimba, Gamelan, big synths, really huge gongs… Oh man, don’t get me going…
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