Brian Slattery Photo
Julio Ramos — a.k.a. Ceschi — fluttered his fingers as he rocketed through some of the tightest rhymes he’s ever written on “Sad, Fat Luck,” the title track off his latest album. On the stage nearby, Alyssa Kai waited on clarinet, along with Jane Boxall on vibraphone and David Ramos on drums. It fell to fellow MC Siul Hughes to match Ramos’s flow. Hughes fell off it a couple times. Then he got it. They moved to another part of the song, where Boxall matched Ramos’s flow beat for beat. She revealed that she’d been driving around for hours practicing it in the car.
“That’s major points,” Hughes laughed.
It was on a recent weekend, in the off-hours at the Rough Draft in Hamden, where Ramos and part of his band were practicing for the now sold-out release show of Sad, Fat Luck, to be held at the State House at 8 p.m. on April 5, featuring Ceschi and a full band including Sammus and Astronautalis, with an afterparty at Cafe Nine around the corner at 10 p.m. featuring José Oyola, Sketch tha Catalclysm, Stumblebum Brass Band, and DJ Halo.
“Let’s try something else,” Ramos said. They moved to another part of the song and the whole thing started to click, with Ramos, Hughes, and Boxall trading rat-a-tat lines while brother David nailed the drum hits and Kai brought in the clarinet. Smiles spread on all their faces.
It was like Ramos said later: “There’s something about the joy that comes out of confronting sadness.”
As the first word in the title implies, Sad, Fat Luck is not a party record. What it is, is emotional, raw, and honest, achingly sweet in some places, breathtakingly rough in others, and in many places, beyond cathartic; it’s exhilarating. It’s a channeling and exorcism of the pain of a hard year, made into art. Because in 2018 he lost friends, to accident and suicide, and in his grief he thought hard about what he was doing with his own life, and where he wanted to go next — and acted.
Sans Soleil
“I’ve always struggled with rules since I was a child,” Ramos said. ‘It’s the reason I’ve been arrested 11 times.” That drive and defiance is also what led him to blaze his own way in the independent music scene as an artist and head of a small record label, Fake Four. He created a life, and a living, for himself one gig, one friendship, and one album at a time.
But he also saw that his friends were dying, some of them “because of the subcultures I lived in,” he said. In 2018, it got particularly bad, as Ramos lost seven friends to accident, suicide, overdoses, and health complications. Scotty Trimble, a.k.a. Sixo, was a fellow musician and producer as well as a motocross bike racer; he died of heat stroke during a race in May of that year. Another friend and musician, Niles Christopher, died by suicide in August. At the very end of 2018, Ramos lost one of his oldest friends, artist Jon Nagel. Some of “my dead,” Ramos continued, “are graffiti artists.” Graffiti art is “ephemeral, short-lived — just like the artists,” he said, who “take wild risks to create something temporary.”
“What I end up doing to combat my depression is to work really hard — sometimes in a way that’s not healthy,” he said. “But it’s all I’ve ever wanted.”
In August, when Ramos learned Christopher had died, he had already finished nine songs for the album that would become Sad, Fat Luck. and happened to be on tour.
“I’m in Europe,” he said, “finding ways to cope with” the news. His longtime producer Factor Chandelier sent him a “folder of new beats, like ‘hey, check these out.’”
Andy McAlpine
In the car, Ramos said, “I put on my voice memo and wrote freestyle, part by part, on a drive from Berlin to Amsterdam.” He smiled recalling the memory of pulling over at a rest stop to shout lyrics into his phone, the music pumping hard on the car’s stereo, surrounded by “vacationing German families in tiny shorts.”
He visited the Karl Marx House in Trier, Germany — the house where he was born, now a museum dedicated to his life — and “felt this deep wave of inspiration,” Ramos said. “I’m looking at the chair he died in — he died in his chair, still thinking and writing.” He’d been “chipping away” at one of the songs, “Daybreak.” on the album for a while and finished it then and there on the sidewalk outside the house.
He returned to New Haven and immediately booked studio sessions with Factor Chandelier. The number of songs for the album rose from nine to 12. Then Factor put on another beat he’d been working on. “I freestyle and record it in 10 minutes,” he said. That became the song “Jobs.”
The onrush of creativity also found Ramos making some of the most personal music of his career. In particular, “Sans Soleil,” which finds him talking to his departed friends Sixo and Christopher. But “the parts I’m singing to my mother are the hardest for me,” Ramos said. They’re drawn from a trip that he and his mother took to the Galápagos Islands in the midst of all of it in 2018. He thought of the ways Darwin’s trip to those islands led to his forming the theory of evolution. Meanwhile, as he raps on the song, “I’m only discovering ways to hide this heart-pounding anxiety from my mother’s eyes / I feel her sensing that I’m not fine and she’s right / She sees the creases on my forehead grow darker from feeling the cold breath of death on the back of my neck each night.”
It put Ramos in a particular place mentally. “The constant thought of death and life,” was on his mind, he said, as he stood next to tortoises that were 130 years old, and thought not only of the friends he had lost, but “all the deaths that happened in their lifetimes.”
Daybreak
As he rushes headlong into 2019, Ramos has a simple overarching plan. “I want to do less, really well,” he said. “A big part of my end goal is having passive income from music. I’m going really hard this year to reach that end goal.” Sad, Fat Luck is, in fact, the first of three albums of new material Ramos has slated for the year.
Part of the plan may involve moving back to Southern California, where he was in the late 1990s. Another part of the plan involves creating a “festival-ready band,” which he feels he has already accomplished with the band he assembled for the State House show. “This one can fly on the big stages,” he said.
Ceschi, David Ramos, Max Heath.
All of the musicians have a long history of playing, and have connections to Ramos. Kai is formerly of the anarchist band Ramshackle Glory, which also had Caschi collaborator Pat the Bunny in it. Jane Boxall is “a studio musician who loves hip hop,” Ramos said. “Vibraphone and marimba are two of my favorite instruments ever”; to his mind it’s crazy they don’t show up in hip hop more often than they do. On bass is Storm Shimp, a punk band veteran who plays electric and upright. On keys and drums, respectively, are Ramos’s longest-running musical partners, Max Heath and brother David Ramos. And manning the turntables is producer Factor Chandelier.
“There’s a lot of stress to freedom,” Ramos said; it’s a lot of work being your own boss, in charge of your own destiny. But with Sad, Fat Luck coming out, a tour, and two more albums on the way — the three albums together are, in Ramos’s opinion, “the greatest work of my life, I’m not going to lie” — he’s taken the sadness of 2019 and turned it into a hard-earned joy.
