After 16 years of albums, tours, collaborations and compilations, Ceschi, a.k.a. Julio Ramos — the New Haven-based musician who cut a burning swath though indie hip hop and folk and started a record label in the process — is done. This spring saw a final East Coast tour, and November featured a final swing through the West Coast, culminating in a return home for a sold-out show at Space Ballroom.
His newest album, released in November — Bring Us the Head of Francisco False, Part 2, which completes Part 1, released in April, and finishes a cycle of albums that started with Sad, Fat Luck in 2019 — explains why. And doesn’t. And doesn’t have to. It’s a wrenching goodbye and a wistful farewell, a reintroduction and moment of liberation, all at once. As a final gesture on a long arc of artistic work, it’s a firework thrown into the sun, and it leaves us bathing in the glow of a thousand colors.
“Life is changing, my career is changing … social media is ending for me,” Ramos wrote recently on Patreon, which “will be the continuing space, beyond the algorithms and streaming corporations and official discographies.” It doesn’t mean the end of music from Ramos, who has been making new music and touring as a member of Codefendants since 2023. It’s hard to imagine there won’t be other releases through Bandcamp and Patreon, where, as Ramos writes, “I will share whatever I am doing hopefully for years to come.” In addition, he writes, “I hope to play random solo shows once in a while for as long as I live.”
Sometimes this kind of talk is interpreted as a cry for help, especially on the social media that Ramos has already left. But a long listen through Bring Us the Head of Francisco False — both parts — suggests, if anything, the opposite. Ramos is saying goodbye to Ceschi because he’s ready for something else, something more. Maybe something better, and more humane, for him and those who love his music.
“Bring Us The Head Of Francisco False is the final album of Ceschi Ramos’ solo discography which started in 2004 with the album Fake Flowers — a lo-fi bedroom hip hop unraveling of childhood trauma. This finale is an exercise in confronting overwhelming grief by closing doors in order to open new ones. It is a two headed, oftentimes emotionally contradictory, record inspired by rebirth after death, the beauty of endings & the multiple meanings of the term ‘revolution.’ It is as tender as it is rage driven & as naively hopeful as it is disenchanted. It is a goodbye to shady drug games & even shadier music games while serving as a thank you to the countless lost along those paths,” Ramos writes in the liner notes to Part 1. “Throughout this 70-minute exorcism there are odes to musicians, thinkers & friends who helped form Ceschi’s artistic identity. There are sentences from shredded up love notes and suicide notes all piled up amongst each other, rolled into balls and thrown at unsuspecting listeners. All of those half-thought scribbles written by someone who never expected to make it to 40 but decided to stick around and sift his way through the cultural recycling bin that is modernity. This is freedom from previously built expectations. This is appreciation for all of the obstacles & experiences of the past while marking an official start to a new life, new family, new priorities. It’s closure. A eulogy can really be the most important type of love letter.”
The mood of Part 1 hits fast and furious from the second track, “Fin.” “Slept on a death bed of nails / Sipping on Molotov cocktails / Cock out / Screaming fuck the world / Cops tripling up the body count / Automatic weapon in the mouth of a beast / Celebrities singing about peace,” Ceschi raps. “I’m singing about physical blood that we bleed / Armored vehicle ATV / They just wanna yell about the kids being PC / Pepe the frog drawn on a machine gun / Don’t nobody wanna admit the dream’s done / Martin Luther King was martyred for the sin of / Believing in humans even those that hated him.”
It’s a heady mix of past and present, fused together through the urgency of Ceschi’s delivery. As the tension mounts, the solo piano grows into a wave of sound that threatens to overwhelm the voice, but Ceschi won’t let his words be drowned. The music lunges headlong off a cliff and Ceschi keeps going, bringing the song to a landing: “Dancing and celebration can be the physical manifestation of a scream / Burning down a police station may be the physical manifestation of a scream.”
This song of defiance and despair sets the tone for the rest of Part 1. Despite the almost-party anthem of “We Are Enough,” the following song, “Beginning of a New Era” undermines the hope in its title with a song exploding with rage and sadness. “4:44 am / Just found out about another dead friend / Is it suicide or heroin? / Wondering if I am next / 4:44 am / Shaking in my bed / Drenched in sweat / Am I gonna get out of the life I lead? / Am I gonna have my body filled with lead? / My brain is stuck between trying to kill me or take me away from the violence / Cacophony is still surrounding me so I’m sitting here praying for silence.”
“This is the beginning of a new era,” he raps in the chorus. “I can feel it / I wanna live again / I mean it.” His voice is fully committed to the message, but the tone and music convey the distinct impression that Ceschi may want to start over, but at the moment of writing, has no idea how. It’s an impression solidified on the next lush and wistful track, “Keep It Inside.” “Every day in limbo / I’m feeling my physical go / But I don’t know a better way to dig myself out of this hole,” he raps.
But there are glimmers of light in the darkness. “Stop your inner voices talking garbage,” he raps on Foie Gras. “Make some sense / Or create art again.” As the music swells around him, this time full of uplift, “What a loss, What a loss, Phil sang,” Ceschi sings. “But a lot comes from letting go.”
As it turns out, the promise of Bring Us the Head of Francisco False, Part 1 is fulfilled on Part 2,which picks up, on its first track, where Part 1 leaves off. If the first installment was written from a deep sadness, at the bottom of Part 2 is a bruised yet indomitable hope. The same elements in Part 2 are present in Part 1 — overwhelming grief, fear of never feeling better, but also rage, fight, strength, and hope — but in Part 2 the balance subtly and deeply shifts. In Part 1, Ceschi is holding a tiny light in a huge darkness. In Part 2, he finds his way out of darkness into a greater light.
“You saved me from my ugly own hand / help me not end this.… I need some resurrection,” Ceschi sings on “Clone You,” which rides a serene cloud of synthesizers to speak of past pains, but it’s almost as if we’re hearing him process them in real time. “Stop, Watch, and Laugh” is not just a chronicle of grieving, but a helping help for others who are grieving as well. “I am seen the edge of life so many times I can’t believe I’m alive,” he raps on “Sky High,” but the music and delivery give the keen sense that he’s figuring out how to step away from that edge. “I might find light at the bottom,” he raps. “Touch what I never touched before / See what I never seen.” By the time the album is halfway done, on “For the Golden Cows,” Ceschi is seeing far beyond himself. “Fact is they don’t hate you / they’re stuck in their own wars / all focused on themselves / don’t take it personal.” In this new perspective, he finds something approaching acceptance.
“Not sure what this all means,” he sings, but “I’m not rushing to my grave.”
The album reaches an emotional and thematic peak on “Thank Plath,” in which all the pain and grief of the previous Part 1 leads to a bruised understanding. “Grateful for the highs and the lows / any time that we shared / and the pain of this growth,” Ceschi raps. “Hurt so much to watch you go / It has taken its toll / But it’s made me whole / and built me up into this individual / There would be no Francisco without the broken bones.” If on Part 1 Ceschi lay at the bottom of a hole, in Part 2 he climbs out, and stands up.
The rest of the album suddenly finds Ceschi rejuvenated. “Big Black Cloud” and “Circle the A” gallop forward on club beats. “I got the reins / Nothing is holding me back / Circle the A / Horses are running on track,” he raps, full of new life. “Are you ready for the revolution?”
But he takes time to look back one last time. “Beauty in the Mystery” is an impossibly tender ballad about watching a loved one die in the hospital that blooms into a declaration of strength and life. “There’s so much we won’t ever understand / So much we take for granted / There’s so much we’ll leave never knowing it / There’s beauty in the mystery,” Ceschi sings. What follows is some of the most hopeful, uplifting music Ceschi has ever written. There are no words to accompany it, none needed. It all ends with a track produced by Sixo, who died in a biking accident — one of the friends Ceschi has grieved publicly the most. It’s a brooding track that Ceschi reharmonizes into unbridled hope. “Feel like a ghost that has been given a second chance,” Ceschi raps, then sings: “There is a bright day ahead of us.” He repeats it over and over. This time, you believe him.