Through the process of creating This Is Crime Wave, Ceschi Ramos and his fellow Codefendants became close. Not thick as thieves, but as strong as the glue that stuck punk rock and hip-hop together with whatever other musical inspiration they could find to create their self-described “crime wave” genre.
This is Crime Wave, the debut album released today on Fat Wreck Chords’ imprint Bottles To The Ground, features Fat Mike Burkett, Sam King of Get Dead, and Julio Francisco Ramos, better known as Ceschi Ramos, best known as simply Ceschi. The album features a host of “accomplices” including Stacey Dee from Bad Cop/Bad Cop, Onry Ozzborn of Dark Time Sunshine, and the incomparable DOC.
“We started the project in L.A. I was visiting family in Puerto Rico,” explains Ramos on how and where this genre-fluid “crime wave” music started. “I had been talking to Sam from Get Dead for a while, and he was like, ‘fly out.’ It was my first time breaking out from where I was living in New Haven, Connecticut during the pandemic. I think it was kind of risky, but I was losing my mind. From Puerto Rico, I went straight to L.A., and we recorded ‘Abscessed’ in a studio with our friend Baz the Frenchman, who is a producer and composer in L.A. We really liked how it felt.”
Ramos says he and King bonded quickly, and that’s when he decided to stay in Los Angeles and continue writing.
“We were just going hard. It just felt natural and just felt like we had been locked up for so long. Getting to write with somebody and getting out of my own creative block was really liberating and inspiring. I made a new best friend in Sam. We just bonded immediately. That’s how I met (Fat) Mike, and became really close with him shortly after that, just by hanging out, being around. None of it was forced. None of it was like a ‘super group’ that we tried to get together. I’ve been doing stuff on a DIY scale for so long, 20 years now. It was not something we planned. Sam was a fan of my music, or was aware of my music, and he brought me in. I basically just took the chance to record, and everything happened naturally from there.”
Admitting he’s not always chronicling life into a black book or a journal, Ramos explains, “I’m not consistent with my writing, but I do write small morsels all the time. I often go back to a sentence, but this project was a completely different experience. I had never written a song so collaboratively before. Something like “Suicide by Pigs” was a song Sam and I wrote bar for bar together. On “Def Cons,” I’m rapping some of Sam’s lyrics that he had written long before and then interjecting, editing, and adding my own rhythms to them. It was just an extremely collaborative writing process. Sometimes I’ll be like, ‘This will sound better.’ Sometimes Sam will have a line that I love the idea of, but I’ll help him edit it to make it sound different. I come from a rap background, so the way I write is a lot about syllable chopping. Sam does as well, but he’s been engulfed in punk for so long that he has a different way of approaching it. Writing Codefendants was not the way I would normally write. Sometimes I’ll be sitting on a song for eight months chipping away at it like a thesis or something. Codefendants was a whole different thing. It was just this natural explosion; it was like a conversation with friends. When Mike would get involved, he’d be like, ‘that line doesn’t make sense to me that way. Can you work on it?’ It was a conversation between all three of us really, even some of the lyric writing. It was cool. I’ve never done anything like that before.”
Codefendents deftly crosses and mixes genres, but also tackles issues like trauma in a unique way. “Something like ‘Disaster Scenes,’ I just hope somebody can hear that and relate to having parents with drug addiction issues,” says Ramons. “Inherited trauma. These ideas that we’re presenting are not necessarily common on a catchy tune. Maybe it could be therapeutic for somebody. That’s the hope. I still struggle with putting it into the world. I don’t want my parents to hear that, even though it’s real.
“I think it’s a hopeful record in many ways. It’s hopeful coming from a dark place. It really is us coming out of the pandemic and out of darkness. Sam had just come out of a divorce. I had come out of some of the deepest depression of my entire life. I really had to leave; I physically had to leave Connecticut because I was at the end of my rope. So that record is an expression of that. I can’t call it light or dark. It stems from darkness, yet it has a hope about it. I can’t explain it any other way.”
Ramos explains there’s very honest moments captured in the grooves of this record. A lot of what he’s expressing comes directly from living. In the case of “trauma dumping,” he jotted down the line and let the rest flow. He may not write down every moment or keep up on his journaling, but he doesn’t forget.
“I was accused of trauma dumping and I had never heard that term, so I thought it was such a funny thing,” says Ramos. “I wrote it down, and I just did that verse kind of almost like a freestyle. I think I recorded it in passing without thinking that anyone would notice. Cuz in this project, we might do 20 songs. Half of them might not make it to the point of even getting examined for our record. They might just be B-sides that don’t make it, especially with Mike involved. Mike is very particular about the things he wants to choose. He loved that one. So I was like, ‘now I gotta put my most embarrassing lyrics of all time out in public.’ I wanna blush when those lyrics come on and Sam does too. I know he feels that way, but those are moments that help people connect because they’re things that pop music doesn’t say to people on a regular basis.”
Ramos hopes his memories, some of the most valuable lessons he has learned, the things he is recording and sharing, help as many people who may need to hear them as they can reach.
“I’m not saying that we’re necessarily pop, but we would love to break into a space where these words can connect with a kid, hopefully, or a younger person. We’re making music that’s clear. We’re not screaming those lyrics. We’re making these words really clear for people to understand. And that’s all a decision we made. A lot of it is speaking to the youth in a way. I think that’s one of the patterns. That’s one of the tropes that keeps coming up. It’s something that keeps coming up throughout that record. It’s like, nobody taught me how to speak to cops properly when I was a kid. And unfortunately, because of that, I had to learn through experience how to speak to cops through being arrested time, time again, through making my mistakes. I wish I had elders at times that could kind of guide me in the right direction. Whether it’s, if we’re gonna break the law, learn how to break the law, and then how to deal with the law and what the law is gonna do to you over how it’s built and where you have power and where you don’t. Those are kind of subtle but clear ideas that are in those songs.”
Ramos explains how Codefendants put together This Is Crimewave from the first session recording “Abscessed” until the last track “Coda-fendants.”
“We were meticulous about the sequencing. That’s one thing Mike and I really bond on. We were just nerds about albums in that way. Sequencing and where songs fit, and we were going back and forth a lot. There was a point where Sam sat out for that and Mike and I would go back and forth, like, ‘okay, no, this one here and this one,’ until we agreed this is it. That was very deliberate.”
“One thing that I would like to express is that Sam and I have come from similarly difficult backgrounds; we bonded so deeply on just certain things we had gone through in life that we wanted to present it to perhaps a different demographic. We had both come out of the most experimental left field hip-hop scenes of the early 2000s and late ‘90s. We both have sort of been involved in punk scenes as well, our entire lives.
“I came more from like a hardcore scene. I was in metalcore bands coming up. I used to go to all the New Haven, Connecticut hardcore shows. When I moved from the Bay Area to New Haven when I was in my early teens, that was my life. Sam and I had this natural background of coming up in hip hop and punk, or hardcore, whatever you wanna call it. I think that connection, which felt so authentic to both of us, it didn’t feel like we had forced anything or forced our way into anything; it was just things that we grew up with. He had felt like he, in being part of Fat Wreck for a decade with his band Get Dead, he felt like he didn’t speak the same language as a lot of people on his label. A lot of people don’t know about Project Bloat or Anticon or super underground rap stuff, Aesop Rock or whatever. That’s the stuff he loved.”
As King and Ramos bonded over music and shared trauma, Codefendants took them both back to the places in life, in the heart, in the soul, in the world where they could start a new thing like “crime wave.”
“It was cool for him to get back,” Ramos says, “It was almost nostalgic, I think, for him to get back around people who knew all about that language and that genre. I know for a fact it was that pandemic nostalgia that created this project. Sam got way back into graffiti writing. I introduced him to some of his heroes in hip-hop just from hanging out at the studio cuz they’re some of my best friends. While he went in a more punk direction with his career, I ended up going in a more hip-hop direction.
“For me, getting to scream on a record again is more nostalgic. That’s the stuff I was doing when I was 16, my first touring band was on Stillborn Records. That’s nostalgic to me. So, there was like this beautiful nostalgia coming from similar backgrounds. In many ways Sam had a difficult upbringing. I did too. We just bonded deeply. He reminds me of some of my friends I’ve lost. I know I reminded him of his. It was a product of pandemic in a way, but it was more about something that felt so nurturing. It was a bonding that just felt nurturing. That’s what really created this record.”
King and Ramos did a thing with their writing that drew in their friends like Burkett. It’s the perfect plot for a heist movie: have a good idea, get a crew, and do a job. In this case the job was make a record.
“I think Mike witnessed that. He saw our friendship budding before his eyes, and I remember he was going through a lot. He had gone to rehab, and he was kind of dealing with a lot. When he saw us bonding and building these songs around him. We’ve been writing songs on his tennis court. He was like, ‘Hey, you guys are being loud.’ Go to the tennis court right over there. He was seeing these things happen and he was like, ‘I want to get down. I want to be in it.’”
Ramos concludes his appreciation for his other Codefendants by saying, “It just feels so good. It just felt so natural at the very end of the day. Those are just my bros. Hopefully other people can feel that energy. Even though we barely have any music out yet, I think people are feeling how it’s an energy that there’s nothing forced about it.”
Photo by Nik Hampshire
