Brian Slattery Photos
Ceschi.
Ceschi, Phat A$tronaut, and Siul Hughes stood together on the stage of the Space Ballroom Friday night, near the end of a triple bill that marked the reopening of the venue since Covid-19 shutdown restrictions were lifted. A packed house stood close to the stage in front of them.
“I was very hesitant” to put on the show, Ceschi (a.k.a. Julio Ramos) said. “I didn’t know if people wanted to do this. Obviously you do.”
The audience arrived early and stayed to the end of the night, which meant Siul Hughes opened the show to a full house. He began a cappella. The audience kept completely quiet to hear what he had to say, then responded with dense applause.
Hughes.
“First one since the pandemic,” Hughes said. “Do you know what Ceschi is going to do? Do you know what Phat A$tronaut is going to do?” He said these things to hype the audience, but they didn’t need a lot of hyping. As Hughes tore into a set of songs that ranged from introspective to cathartically excoriating, the audience pulled a little closer to the stage, cheering him on. He began seated, but soon was prowling the stage and then owning the stage. At one moment Hughes took the opportunity to open up in between songs, with the same intelligence, candor, and wry wit that marks his lyrics.
“I put my entire life into music and cut off everything else,” he said of a decision he made before the pandemic began. He described it a needed move for him personally, to wrestle with things inside. “That’s what was necessary to come to terms,” he said.
“Do you feel better?” an audience member asked. Hughes took the question at face value. “You know, that’s the first time anyone’s ever asked,” he said.
The audience member persisted. “Did it work?” he said.
“You tell me,” Hughes replied.
Phat A$tronaut — Chad Browne-Springer on vocals, Mark Lyon on guitar, Stephen Gritz King on keys, Dylan McDonnell on flute and sax, Brendan Wolfe on bass, and Travis Hall and Mike Knobloch on drums — then took the stage for a set that started off with slow, smoky grooves and built steam song after song. Browne-Springer invited guest MCs including Sketch Tha Cataclysm and Sotorios Fedeli to the stage to throw in verses. Tempos quickening and rhythms hitting harder, until the seven-piece had morphed into a full-on dance band. As the musicians traded smiles all night and people in the audience moved their feet in time, Browne-Springer traversed the stage and served as bandleader and main provocateur. The band’s tight exits and entrances between songs left almost no room for banter, but Browne-Springer left room for a simple message.
“Take care of each other. We got a long way to go,” he said.
The audience nearly mobbed the stage for Ceschi from his very first song, as he switched from electric guitar to diving into the audience and jumping back onto the stage for a blazing hip hop set. Having worked up the audience fully, Ceschi then took to the floor to perform a set sitting on the floor. Nearly everyone sat with him and listened, fans in front singing his lyrics back to him. It was somewhere between a campfire and a communal prayer.
He then invited Phat A$tronaut and Hughes to rejoin him on stage — “this is a family affair,” he said — and the assembled force of all three acts drove the audience in front into an ecstatic frenzy. Bodies collided with bodies as people pogoed and shouted the lyrics back to the stage. In time Ceschi reached the final song in his set, “This Won’t Last Forever,” from Broken Bone Ballads, which he explained had been written as a letter to his mother just before he was sent to prison for marijuana possession a decade ago. He described the remorse he felt at the pain his prison sentence caused his family. But in the pandemic and its reemergence, he found the lyrics about finding strength and resilience acquiring a new meaning. As with his prison time, so, perhaps with the pandemic, “nothing lasts forever,” he said.
