Electronic Press Kit

Contact

Carlisle Evans Peck / (309) 507-3433

Bio

A bard is a mythic storyteller in song. Re-interpreting this ancient tradition with characteristic sparkle, Carlisle Evans Peck . As a consummate storyteller and captivating live performer, Carlisle’s musical tales take listeners on journeys to the beginnings and endings of a life, through grief and joy, through love and heartbreak, within the transcendental queer complexity of being. Their music brings to mind music-theater rather than typical songwriter fare, ranging from grandiose musical epics to hushed songs laid bare. They transform any stage into a theater and any moment into high drama. You will hear orchestral grandiosity, rock-operatic maximalism, hushed balladry, and lyrical storytelling, all interwoven into a shapeshifting tapestry that defies classification.

In 2018 Carlisle released the ambitious orchestral rock epic Electric Porcelain, which was followed by performances throughout the midwest with their eight piece band “The Lady’s Slippers” and a self-organized national solo tour. In January of 2020, they retreated to hearth and home to record in one snowy evening a collection of virtuosic piano-driven songs about apocalypse as rebirth. These would become the solo EP The Last Noble Thing, released in 2021 with an accompanying lyric and art book by Ramshackle Press. With their 2021 single Hyacinth and Apollo, recorded at their home in Minneapolis, they turn to the guitar as a muse in an ethereal and heartbreaking retelling of Greek mythology. In 2022, they returned to glamorous rock and roll drama with Iconoclasm at the Cedar Cultural Center, and later expanded into a mythic cabaret musical in 2024 on a tour throughout Minnesota. As emcee and a chanteuse doing drag as queer ancestors, and with a seven piece band and a trio of fates, Iconoclasm conjured memories of forgotten queer history in a one-of-a-kind new mythology.

Carlisle is an attentive student of place and landscape, and their music evokes the ecologies they hold dear - the soughing of red pines and the wind through big bluestem prairies, the murmuring of the incoming Pacific tide and the gurgle of the Mississippi River currents, the plaintive call of loons and the warble of dragonflies. In 2020 they began an ongoing project dedicated to place-based musical performance and acoustic ecology called “Requiem Sylvarum” while living in a cabin in the boreal forest of northern Minnesota. The project has since taken them throughout the state of Minnesota, west to the Pacific Northwest, and to Southeast Alaska recording soundscapes, composing music, and performing rituals of song in collaboration with local ecologies. 

Carlisle has received many accolades for their composition and songwriting work, including the 2018 Composer-Librettist Studio at Nautilus Music-Theater in Saint Paul, MN; the 2020 Minnesota Music Creators Award from the American Composers Forum; and the 2022 Cedar Commissions. Their compositions have been part of performances at The Southern Theater, Studio Z St. Paul, In The Heart of the Beast Puppet and Mask Theater, and Barebones Puppets. Their recorded music has been played on Radio K, KFAI, and 89.3 The Current.

Their music will likely appeal to fans of Joanna Newsom, Sufjan Stevens, Fiona Apple, and Adrianne Lenker. With lyricism that will turn your ear upside down, melodic strains that will wring the tears from your eyes, and refrains that will tumble through your mind for days to come, this is music to break your heart and leap to fly.

Gig List

2024 Minnesota State Arts Board Arts Individuals Grant recipient

2023-2024 Southern Theater Performance Partner

2022 Cedar Commissions Artist

2020 Minnesota Emerging Composer Award from the American Composers Forum

Minneapolis/St. Paul:

The Southern Theater, Cedar Cultural Center, Icehouse, Mortimer’s, Uptown VFW, Mirrorlab, Aster Cafe, Seward Cafe, Honey, Moon Palace Books, Bryant Lake Bowl, Eagles #34, Troubadour Wine Bar, Uptown Church, Pinwheel Arts and Movement Studio, Black Dog Cafe, The Warming House, Studio Z St. Paul

Regional/National:

The YES! House (Granite Falls, MN), Little Theatre Auditorium (New London, MN), Uncommon Ground Edgewater (Chicago), Driftless Books and Music (Viroqua, WI), Blush and Red Herring (Duluth MN), Coffee Hag (Mankato, MN), Rozz Tox (Rock Island, IL), Augustana College (Rock Island, IL), The Root Note (LaCrosse, WI), Ca D'Zan (Cambridge, IL), The Lingonberry (Decorah, IA), The Courtyard and Cellar (Decorah, IA), The Contented Cow (Northfield, MN),`Red Herring Lounge (Duluth, MN), Laughing Sun (Bismarck, ND), School for Contemporary Dance and Thought (Northampton, MA), Gateway City Arts (Holyoke, MA), The Fire (Philadelphia PA) The Rino (Kansas City MO), Cafe Beit (NYC), Club Passim (Cambridge MA) Radio Bean (Burlington VT), La Marche a Cote (Montreal QC), Twisted Pine (Boulder, CO), Milltown Coffee (Moline, IL)

Festivalsm, residencies, and showcases:

Barebones Puppet Extravaganza (2022 & 2023), Cedar Commissions (February 2022), CampFire Festival (Cambridge MA, August 2019),

Err (Produced by Err Artist Collective) (March 2016 and June 2019), Mother

Goose’s Bedtime Stories - In the Garden of Celestial Dreams (Fall 2017), Zeitgeist New Music

ensemble Halloween Music Festival (Fall 2018), Electric Porcelain Live album Performances

(Summer 2017, Summer 2018), Electric Porcelain Album Release (Fall 2018), Mama Caught

Fire’s Solstice/Equinox series Spring Equinox Show (Spring 2018), Good Arts Collective

residency (Spring 2018)

TOURS

Minnesota: Summer 2024

East Coast: Summer 2019

Midwest: Spring 2016, Spring 2018, Spring 2019

West Coast: Fall 2016

Sounds like: Benjamin Clementine, Antony and the Johnsons, Joanna Newsom, Gabriel Kahane,

Patrick Watson, Sufjan Stevens, Kate Bush

Quotes

“what comes across clearest is Evans Peck’s intense individual pathos...it makes for a beautiful

and transportive listening experience.”

-Jon Behm at Reviler.org, reviewing Electric Porcelain

“Though his compositions are otherworldly, with lyrics spoken like incantations and a

combination of methodically constructed instrumental melodies and collected sounds, Evans

Peck’s work draws us toward a mirror he holds up to our own consciousness.”

-Anna Selle at Hear-Queer

“Carlisle Evans Peck has crafted what may be his best work yet. WATER||SHED is haunting and

hypnotic, politically charged, yet spiritually uplifting. The music blends the grace of choral

music with a jagged prophetic voice reminiscent of Laurie Anderson or Antony and the

Johnsons.”

-Vernon Meidlinger-Chin, Floodmark Magazine

“Carlisle Evans Peck embodies this sense of ethereal otherness and mystery while exuding such

a knowledge of himself and his work that it centers the audience to a point where they are safe to

lose themselves in the dynamic and sensorial artscape that Carlisle creates in his music.”

- Jen Bluhm/Waltzing On Waves: Performing Artist, Composer, Neurodiversity/Mental Health

Advocate

"Artists who manufacture melancholy are a dime a dozen. What Carlisle does goes so much

beyond that--he creates music that shoulders past my loud emotions and finds the small feelings

that I am too distracted to notice. He gives word and melody to the silent parts of myself, and

lifts them right in front of my face.”

-Tyler Sit, Minneapolis pastor and church planter