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? Right up front: Our improvisations are meant to be different every time. We don’t play songs or compositions that are known in advance or rehearsed. Generally, there is very little or no planning/discussion about what we will improvise before we begin. A central goal of the project is not to repeat ourselves – To always say something new: New in general character and New in the specific details. However, this is still a very interesting question and, frankly, not one that I had previously considered, so I have got some things to say about it. Repetition in music comes in lots of flavors. Conventional musics from many cultures utilize repetition in distinct ways, which include but are not limited to: Rhythmic patterns repeating into grooves; Pulses repeating into tempo; Scalar patterns repeating into common tonal centers; Harmonic patterns of chords repeating into harmonic rhythm; Melodic patterns combined into melody which is repeated and repeated with variation and development; and many others. Pre-planned combinations of the above types of patterns create the form of a Composition which may be repeated and repeated with variations within a performance of that work. This Composition may be repeated on different occasions and by different ensembles. When Songs and Compositions are performed to an audience that is familiar already with the form, structure and detail of the work, they have an expectation of what will occur and an aesthetic payoff when the musicians execute the form in a way that satisfies the audience’s expectations. That happens in many musical forms like blues and jazz where the repetition of the song form, tonal center and melodic structure provide plenty of information for the audience to build an expectation of how the musical parts should interact with each other even when the song is unfamiliar. The Expectation-Payoff mechanisms present in the vast majority of conventional musics all rely on Repetition at some level to create the Expectation in the observer. One primary goal of avant-garde music in general and certainly my music is not to rely on established musical conventions, so I’m not very interested in music that repeats too much in some regular way – I want my music to transform across lots of highly varied sonorities over the duration of each work. I want those transformations to surprise both the performers and the observers and not to be easily anticipated or predictable. Breaking the reliance on “Overt Repetition” in musical structure multiplies the available options for transformations into new sonorities and helps me to meet these goals. Let’s define an Overt Repetition as an exact repeat of a phrase’s notes and rhythms, or the exact repeat of some other structural element of the form. Most Conventional Musics rely on Overt Repetition at some level as a central organizational element. Music could be categorized into structural groups by which core elements are Repeatable and by how much. Through-Composed music, like classical music, has every sound written down with precise music notation and is by design completely Repeatable. Pure-improvisation music, like my music, is not Repeatable at all. These are two extremes of a continuum with a lot of ground in between. Different kinds of music have different kinds of repetition. Jazz compositions have a melody with an associated set of chord changes. The musicians perform the changes with the melody and then the rhythm players improvise supporting parts while the soloist improvises the feature solo. The cycle of changes repeats, and the content is improvised over that. This is in the middle ground between through-composed and pure improvisation in Repeatability where almost all music lives. Certain elements are Repeatable; those elements form the core of the Composition; how those elements are realized in performance is subject to variation and is not as Repeatable. Other musics similarly contain Repeatable elements that comprise their core organizational structures at different levels of abstraction falling somewhere on this continuum. Generally, the more improvisation a music has the less Repeatable it is. I have never read any music theory which attempts to perform this categorization, but even after brief consideration it is clear such an analysis is possible. All these theoretical concepts inform my musical decision process when I am improvising. 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 chord sequences – again, they can occur, but they shouldn’t continue too long before moving into some other space. I frequently use melodic patterns (motifs), but I don’t usually repeat them verbatim, instead, I transpose them up or down in pitch, transform their intervallic and tension relationships, speed them up/slow them down, in short use a kernel of material to develop a line which is thematically and gesturally related but not repeating itself in a strict sense – in music theory this is called motivic development. When interacting with the other improvisors, I often react to a melodic statement or sound gesture with my own statement which is similar in melodic contour and gesture – this is an imitation, rather than a repetition, but it is relating my statement to the one that I am interacting with, by echoing back a transformation of its sound material. A musical phrase is a short, connected series of notes/sounds with a beginning and an end, for horn players no longer than a beath supply and often very short (a few seconds). The rhythmic and gestural content of a phrase can be echoed between players (imitation absent the pitch element) – this is gestural repetition which is in no way repetition of the pitch details. So, while I do not use many Overt Repetitions in the structure of my musical materials, there are many subtle elements of repetition that are retained under transformation of musical statements into variations that I do use all the time. This sound-space of imitation and variation is one tool we use to construct the sequence of sonorities that comprise a long-form improvisation. Others exist also that are simply about what the sounds are and how they fit together and that do not imply the repetition or imitation of any element of any other present part of the sonority. Sometimes, however, strict repetitions of patterns are effective when juxtaposed against strict repetitions of other patterns that someone else is playing forming polytonal or polyrhythmic movement in the work. Sometimes I play strict repeating patterns (often slow moving) in the lowest registers of low horn as a harmonic pedal point for the sound of the ensemble’s total sonority. There are many other occasions where the sonority of the moment might lead me to play an Overt Repetition as the most interesting possibility for that moment. So, it is not the case that I am completely uninterested in the musical use of repetition as one or several elements in a sonority. Generally, our music is improvised at the level of form. All sounds that are available to the resources available are allowed. You cannot make a mistake; you can only make a more interesting or less interesting choice. All of what I have said above is theoretical. In practice, each unique ensemble will leverage the resources that they have on hand and make the music that they make on that occasion. Some performances will have more instances of Overt Repetition than others – neither extreme of that spectrum is inherently preferable. Preparing an Aesthetic Decision Space is a kind of loose composition. You define the possible set of sororities and transformations available to the resources of the moment and then you let the Decision Space breathe. I have also made much more formal compositions which use a device called frame notation to specify broad instructions to the performers for specific time indices which the players monitor on a large digital clock. No melodic, rhythmic or harmonic information is provided. Instructions are either written language directions (words) or simple symbols which are explained in a key. The directions are written in little boxes and arranged on a timeline which stretches from the left to the right across the top of the page. Players are told when to play and a general description of what to do but the actual content of their musical statements are fully improvised. I wrote 6 Frame Notation Compositions which were performed by the Leap of Faith Orchestra between 2016 and 2019. The large-scale Form and the Events of each of these Compositions are fixed in their placement in time and their general character and development but the exact details of the sounds used are determined by the decision making of the improvisors in the Orchestra. The large ensemble size (15 to 25 performers) and the details provided in the score directing the improvisation allow the creation of a story through a huge number of controlled textures over the 75-minute duration of the works.(https://evilclown.rocks/lofogsp-essay/) Two different performances of the same score with the same ensemble would have exactly the same overall Form, Event Structure and Sequence, but differ entirely in every specific detail. This is questioning Repetition in a fundamental way: The Composition is Repeatable, while the exact details of a performance of the Composition are not. The performance of a Repeatable Composition produces a unique Non-Repeatable object. Procedural Repetition is in a completely different category. I am very interested in identifying compelling Aesthetic Problems to solve and then repeatedly solving those. When you repeatedly address a similar Aesthetic Problem, each time you should achieve a different solution – The repetition is in the Procedure/Process, but the music can and should 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 Aesthetic Decision Space 30-40 times per year, each time producing new music. Ironically, I have built a Repeatable System whose intention is to create music that does not repeat itself. We Repeat this System with different combinations of resources, each time solving a new Aesthetic Problem, and creating new music which is fundamentally not repetitive of other solutions in the details. My initial response to Count Robot’s blog questions took about a week. I thought about them for a while and then wrote out my responses over a few days. His questions were excellent since he is part of one of the projects (Neurodivergent Orchestra), so he has good insight into how Evil Clown operates. I write a fair amount about the music and my thinking about the music between social media and the website so most of his questions covered things that I had thought about or even written about before. This was a particularly good question because I had not thought about my music from this point of view. My initial answer was a brief couple of paragraphs that are still contained within the above response; but after I submitted my writings to Count Robot, I kept thinking to myself “I should have said…” Anyway, that went on for a month or so after I wrote the first set of answers and when Count Robot was here last weekend for Neurodivergent Orchestra - Monsters Gonna Monster I told him I was going to give him a longer answer for this question. It seems like a simple question, “How Much of a Concern is Repetition?”, but it’s not a simple question: The issue is that Repetition at one level or another of abstraction is a central element in the structure of nearly all music, and the mere decision to minimize it or to severely abstract it is inherently a radical one. So, the short answer is, “A lot,” and the long answer needs the why of it. This answer reports my initial thoughts and turned out to be more of an essay than my original intention.
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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