Panagiotis
Peter Valsamis

Panagiotis Peter Valsamis is a Los Angeles-based drummer and percussionist with a practice spanning four decades — free jazz, improvised music, world music, electroacoustic performance, and concert dance. He left a university anthropology program at McGill to tour, training later at Mills College on a Hellman Scholarship in Performance under William Winant.

His performance credits include over forty albums and collaborations with Cecil Taylor, Steve Lacy, Anthony Davis, Pauline Oliveros, Wadada Leo Smith, Alvin Curran, Butch Morris, Don Preston, Marco Eneidi, Glenn Spearman, Glen Moore, Mark Dresser, J.D. Parran, Dana Reason, Luc Ferrari, David Behrman, Bob Ostertag, Nina Hagen, and Agustí Fernández. He served as musical director and percussionist in residence at the Banff Centre for the Arts and performed at festivals across North America, Europe, and Asia — including Jazzahead! in Bremen, the Vancouver Jazz Festival, and FrauMusicNova in Germany. He studied Balinese gamelan with I Wayan Suweca at the Université de Montréal (1991–92).

His approach treats the drum kit as a compositional instrument — rhythm, texture, density, and space as primary musical language, drawn from West African polyrhythm, Gnawa, Konokol, Brazilian, and Balinese traditions. He is currently active in the Los Angeles jazz and experimental music scene.

Valsamis composes from a percussionist's perspective: rhythm as primary language, texture as structure, silence as architecture. His training as an improviser shapes his approach to form — not as a container for musical ideas but as a product of them.

He currently scores silent films for Kino Lorber, including Wonder Dogs, Vitagraph Comedies, Sign of the Claw, The Bellhop, and The Haunted Rocker. Earlier concert works include original scores for choreographers Molissa Fenley (Wind Trails, Theater Artaud, San Francisco, 1999) and June Watanabe (Still Moving, Theater Artaud, 1999–2000). Trance Mission — his long-running ensemble with Tracy Lipp — released on City of Tribes and Zoë/Rounder at the intersection of world music, free jazz, and ambient composition.

He studied composition at Mills College under Alvin Curran and Pauline Oliveros, and electroacoustic composition at Concordia University in Montréal. His compositional language draws on West African polyrhythm, Balinese interlocking patterns, and electronic processing — tools developed through performance, using methods from IRCAM.

Valsamis served as Lead Audio Designer IV at International Game Technology (IGT) from 2005 to 2024, building the sonic identity for major licensed franchises under commercial deadlines. Before IGT: WagerWorks (Lead Audio Designer, 2001–2005) and Silicon Gaming (Audio Designer, 1999–2001).

His sound design for Channels of Recognition (dir. Chen-Wei Liu) won Best Sound Design at the UCLA Festival of New Creative Work, 2010. As a record producer and mixer, his credits include the Dana Reason Trio's Angle of Vision (feat. Glen Moore — ★★★★ Downbeat), Jerry Blue's Fluttered Thinking (Sucata Tapes, 2022), and audio and video production for Jarboe. Re-Recording Mixer and Music Producer on The Wonder and the Worry (Oregon State University, 2024).

Valsamis holds an MFA in Electronic Music and Recording Media from Mills College (1999), where he trained on a Hellman Scholarship in Performance, and a BFA in Fine Arts from Concordia University, Montréal (1994). He studied Balinese gamelan with I Wayan Suweca at the Université de Montréal and uses compositional tools developed at IRCAM.

His thesis, "Machines Drumming," was published in Convergence: The International Journal of Research into New Media Technologies (SAGE Publications, 2001) — examining groove, drum machines, and the phenomenology of rhythm, proposing three modes of drumming (physical, synthetic, fixed) and their relationship to time, feel, and human perception of pulse.

He currently teaches Music for Film and Games at Oregon State University, bringing two decades of commercial game audio experience and experimental music practice to bear on composition and sound design for interactive media.