2020 was a very eventful year for Evil Clown. After two shows in the beginning of the year, Outpost 186 got into a beef with the City of Cambridge and the shows stopped. We thought for a minute that it would get resolved but the pandemic hit right after and the room is still not back 4 years later.

I was really bummed about the interruption since we had tremendous momentum and were pumping out a huge amount of high quality music. We did about 10 great sessions in the first few months of the year including Principles of an Open Future, which we recorded for Kevin Reilly’s label Relative Pitch.

Yuri decided that he was not going to continue playing with Leap of Faith, but I convinced him to go on with Metal Chaos Ensemble. His last set with the sextet edition of MCE was The Riddle of Steel took place right before the pandemic got bad. I cancelled 5 or 6 really exciting sessions that were in the calendar and took a few weeks off. Then I spent a minute compiling the second huge Evil Clown Box set (25 CDs) Best of MCE 2015 to 2020. Yuri came back for one more MCE session, Don Quixote, where we used overdubbing to make a thick mix with just the two of us performing. Then he decided to withdraw from Evil Clown altogether.

Most of 2020 and a chunk of 2021 was spent on solo projects and comprise the bulk of the work by the PEK Solo ensemble. The solo albums fall into a few categories with a bunch of them being either PEK Solo – A Quartet of PEKs or PEK Solo – An Orchestra of PEKs. These albums were constructed with overdubbing and studio techniques. Notable in this group is a massive 3 CD major work entitled PEK Solo – An Orchestra of PEKs – Some Truths Are Known.

Oddly enough, I think I spent more time actually playing my instruments to create the 25 albums from 2020 than I do in a year where there are ensemble albums and we usually record around 35 albums.