(background) Although my involvement with percussion ensemble goes all the way back to high school, i've always been amazed how very few pieces made any impression on me. There are, of course, notable exceptions - Edgar Varese's Ionization, John Cage's Constructions, Roscoe Mitchell's The Maze, etc. Those pieces, along with ensembles like the Lovens/Lytton duo, EasSide Percussion, Brad Dutz's Obliteration Quartet and Stomu Yama'shta's solo recordings got me excited about writing and performing percussion ensemble music. My main outlet for percussion music from the years 2000-2003 has been the two very different trios, NOD and Wormhole. So the formation of the SKPE was a chance to bridge these different ways of working, while at the same time strengthening the music that I've been creating in duo collaborations with Curtis Glatter (Glatter/Hubbard), Marcos Fernandes, Nate Atwood (The Builders Association of Encinitas) and James Burton.

In the early stages of this group, we performed numerous gigs with different lineups. Most of these gigs were completely improvised with occasional performances with notation. In the past few years, we have performed at the Percussive Arts Society San Diego Day Of Percussion 2004 (premiering three new pieces by Hubbard), premiered new music for Louis Hocks cinemural Southern California at MCA in 2005, collaborated with dancer Rebecca Bryant at Spring Reverb 2005 and recorded Hubbards large scale work for the ghosts/while we sleep at St. Cecilias in San Diego. More recently we have performed on the Spring Reverb Festival 2007, presenting two sets, one all electronic, the second an acoustic collaboration with dancers based around the Neto pieces at MCA SD.

As the years have passed, the SKPE has slowly morphed into an electro-acoustic ensemble, using acoustic percussion and various forms of electronics (no input pedals, sample based material, circuit bent instruments, field recordings, etc.).

- NMH