Karen Ponzio Photo
Sketch tha Cataclysm.
The first song of the soon-to-be-released album The Maya Demos Remastered, by Sketch tha Cataclysm begins rather prophetically. “I woke in a mist amidst mountains of nameless CD-Rs and philosophical writings, the previous evening still in the corners of my eyes.” If you are following along with the accompanying lyric booklet, you will have already read the introduction, where he explains that this current project is based on almost exactly that premise.
Sketch — real name, Armando Acevedo — will release Maya on May 4, and celebrates that with a show at the recently opened Rough Draft in Hamden on May 19. It’s the result of making the most of a musical situation that involves multiple formats and even multiple states — beginning with the fact that the 12 songs originally recorded as a follow-up album to the New Haven-based MC’s Indie Rappers Do it for Gas Money Volume 2 were lost due a computer crash in 2013 when Acevedo moved from Minneapolis to Connecticut.
“I turned on the computer and it was done,” Acevedo said. “Technically I lost all of these songs, but then I found all of them on different CDRs, like different takes too, multiple different versions of mixes and everything, versions without parts of the instrumental piece.” In 2015 he found six of the 12 and put together 20 CD-Rs with lyric sheets for around 15 of them. He sold those few in a limited run, but the project was never far from his thoughts of trying to elaborate upon it. And then inspiration struck.
“The thing that kind of made me do this now is that I took over distribution of my work. I had to rerelease Indie Rappers, and for the first time I put up Party Music for Pissed off People for download everywhere. So I decided for this year I was going to really go hard with rereleasing my old catalog a little bit at a time and then putting out new things. This is the first of the newer things that I put out.”
Acevedo also began to find more of that “lost” music in new places.
“I came across one of the newer tracks I added to this that I believe was a cell phone recording a cappella of one of the verses. I completely lost any of the music that was attached to it, but I found the recording in an email under a different title. And then I found a damaged cassette tape, a four-track cassette tape, that had this song ‘Feathers’ on it. It ends the whole project. The vocals were all messed up. I got rid of the vocals and rerecorded it with Era Redux out of Windsor. The lyrics for that were lost too, so finding the damaged vocals helped me rewrite all the lyrics.”
“I forgot that song existed,” he said with a laugh.
Acevedo had some local help with the music as well. “I had them all remastered by Sam Carlson,” he said. “He evened out all the sound quality for all of them. And luckily for me when I do demos and stuff I mix them as entire full songs with full mixdowns.”
“The full intention was that after those demos were completed I was going to do all of the music over with live instrumentation. I started that process with the original tracks, I got about six or seven songs in with that before I had to move to Connecticut, so the only thing that survived of the live instrumentation is that Johnny Durkin did percussion on ‘Sleep Deprivation.’”
It is easy when listening to Acevedo describe his process to have a view of the man behind the musical machinations, but according to him it is “hard” sometimes to get across what he wants the audience to see and hear. But the project is there for the taking for those who want to go on that journey.
“There are a lot of layers to everything” on the project, he said. A lot of it is personal. “Some of it is really obvious and some of it is little nuggets for me.”
Karen Ponzio Photo
The Maya Demos lyric booklet
The accompanying lyric booklet is a major part of that, and perhaps the most endearing part of the project.
“I have it on a Playbill based on my theater background,” Acevedo said. “The painting that the original cover is based off — The Death of Marat [by Jacques-Louis David] — is one of my favorite paintings. But that’s also a multilayered multi-meaning piece.”
The booklet contains the lyrics to the eight songs as well as a download code for the album from Bandcamp. That, along with a cassette tape, are the hard copies of the project. Acevedo went for cassettes in homage to the original cassette tape he found that was damaged but that he was able to rescue a song off of.
“All of these songs were poems originally that I turned into songs, pretty much across-the-board adaptations of poems I wrote at different points in time,” Acevedo said. “Everything is open to interpretation, but sometimes things are just obvious and direct. I like to write. Sometimes I use metaphor, but sometimes I just like to tell a story directly too, just because maybe the reason I’m telling it is a whole other thing.”
“And honestly,” he continued, “the other thing with the lyric book too is in response to being told some people are not able to pick up on the things I’m saying in a live setting. Sometimes they say they don’t understand it because I’ll rhyme in multisyllabic rhyme schemes and things like that, so they’re not catching stuff. The lyrics book is trying to push the actual words of everything.”
“I’m not putting out a CD. I’m putting out a book that you can listen to,” he said with a smile.
He’s not kidding either. The eight poetic verses, with titles such as “I Got Dreams Man” and “Afraid of Heaven,” offer an array of takes on one man’s hopes, expectations, and experiences. Nods to artists, writers and filmmakers are sprinkled throughout, and though the organic and poetic nature of the music is always at the forefront while listening, there are also songs that make you move, such as “Sleep Deprivation and the Artist” as well as “Seasons Through Pen’s Ascension.”
Acevedo’s flurry of activity around the album began on a triple bill last Thursday, in which Sketch was one of the acts. He and two other local acts — The Forest Room and Kwanduit — came together for three completely different sets that each exemplified the creative ways in which music can be shared.
The Forest Room — musician Matt Streit, his guitar, a pedal board, and two majestic light towers — opened the show. Framed by the towers and with the pedals at his feet, he introduced himself, told the audience to “party on,” and launched into a dreamy soundscape of loops and strings all offering an easy groove to sway to. At times one may have wondered if the lights were following along with the music or vice versa, or if it was all just pure coincidence. Either way, tthe spacey and sweet “Primitive Scientist” and the stunning set ender, the aptly titled “World Ender,” was eagerly accepted by the small but dedicated crowd who fell under his spell and grooved along with him.
The second set belonged to Sketch, shoeless as always and backed by his laptop. He gave the audience and the other performers many shout-outs and thanks in between a tight set of older songs and new selections from The Maya Demos, including “Forever With the Moon” and the a cappella “Post Ghost Hopes.” “Sleep Deprivation and the Artist” led him off the stage and to the floor. “Feathers” found him seated on a stool in front of the stage, offering his words to the attentive audience members before him. Another layer of passion was brought to these songs live, as Acevedo gave each word and phrase physicality, the poetry bursting out of him with each flick of his wrist and switch of his hip.
The final act of the night, Kwanduit, came to the stage and sat behind the extensive drum set that had been waiting there all evening. He also was armed also with a laptop and soundboards to his left. He began by telling the audience that he would “let the music do the talking” and, except for a couple of songs that he came out from behind the set to provide words for, he did exactly that.
Kwanduit was seemingly indefatigable as a percussionist, the audience cheering and shouting his name between songs as he went from piece to funky piece with added loops and sounds and vocal samplings as needed, eyes closed at times and serenely feeling the groove himself, other times smiling wide and in a seemingly higher plane than the rest of us but willing to take us along with him if we chose. The music did not let up for over an hour. It got to a point where it was difficult to separate the music from the man, as if he were some mythical creature created by a fusion of rhythm and beats.
The Maya Demos Remastered will be released on May 4 and can be pre-ordered here.
