i’ll be upfront here: writing about sans soleil is intimidating. it’s a relatively huge record — 21 tracks long — but more than that, it’s an ambitious record released by an established and beloved artist who i am not completely familiar with, working in a genre that i don’t often write about. but here’s the thing: i think that ceschi’s sans soleil is too good. it’s too good for me to try to make an excuse to not write about it; it’s too good for me to pass on it; it’s too good for me to not at least try to tell you why you should hear it. so hey, i’m a novice and an amateur, but i’ll play the part of a journalist, reporting the feelings that sans soleil gives me. here we go.
ceschi is a new haven hip hop musician who is known in equal parts behind-the-scenes and behind-the-mic. before i had even heard ceschi ramos’s music, i’d heard some of the artists on his fake four inc. label: noah23, busdriver, and gregory pepper. sans soleil finds him in the middle of his career. not only has he been releasing music for over a decade-and-a-half, but this record is the middle entry in a planned trilogy (sad, fat luck came out earlier in april of this year, and bring us the head of francisco false will be released before the year is over in december).
and by this point, i’m already two paragraphs in, and i haven’t really told you what sans soleil sounds like. i’ve told you that ceschi is a hip hop musician, but i wouldn’t call sans soleil a hip hop record. sure, others might — bandcamp.com does — but give it a listen! there are several tracks with no hip hop beats on them. there are several tracks with no rapping on them. and there’s even more tracks that blend several different genres into styles they just don’t have words for yet. like the cover art depicts, the album is an explosion and a scattering. it’s all over the place. and usually that’d be a mark of criticism, but in his own description of the album, the album “completely ignores cohesiveness”. that’s misleading, of course, because track-by-track, the songs my vary wildly in styles, but they are all bound by an energy and an exploration. it’s experimental pop music: you’ll hear irish folk, pop, hip hop, rock, and even some Spanish reggaeton. you’ll hear contributions from a similarly diverse cast of players, too, including open mike eagle, gregory pepper, yoni (from WHY?), and kenny dennis (aka serengeti). sans soleil expands outward, like the universe after the big bang, getting faster and faster away from its center.
all of this musical and stylistic diversity has me raising my eyebrow when sans soleil is considered a “hip hop” record. is it because that’s just the easiest way to communicate what you might hear on the record? or is there something more political afoot, in the same way that certain gatekeepers did not want to consider “old town road” as “country” because it had some hip hop DNA in it? maybe i’m just being cynical. yeah, maybe i’m just reading too much into it, but it is hard for me to ignore that kind of pigeon-holing tactic when the first track on sans soleil, “nonchalant”, directly wrestles with issues of classification (race and ethnicity prominently on that song). neither people nor music are allowed to just exist as they are in society: they must be named, labeled, and given a group.
here are my three favorite moments of sans soleil:
“my bad (feat. gregory pepper and kenny dennis)”: at track #18, the positioning of “my bad” is perfect. it’s a late track that allows ceschi to reflect on several ideas that have come earlier. the phrase “animal instinct” is given notice — a self-reference to one of the album’s standout tracks. but we also get a shout-out to “this monkey’s gone to heaven”, a clear name-check of a favorite pixies track. it’s a slower, somber track that emphasizes the room for growth that we all have, rubbing against many previous songs’ themes.
“1988 (feat. anonymous inc.)”: a slick synth-pop track, this song is so catchy that it will have you wanting to sing along before you have really learned the lyrics. “it’s such a gift to be young,” ceschi offers in a falsetto, reaching back to nostalgic feelings. it’s a nice sentiment, but it’s also undercut by the fact that he is in his mid-to-late 30s making the best music of his career. it’s part-Beck, part-Prince.
“red emma”: if you sent me this track under the guise of it being a 13-era blur track, i’d probably believe you. “are you better off without me there?” ceschi sings with scarcely more than an electric guitar and some backing instrumental layers. ceschi never gets an answer in the song, so we are left reading into the lyrics: are they curious or insecure? do they seek connection or re-affirmation? maybe it’s both, and maybe it’s none of the above. when i listen to the song, it changes as i imagine the characters and what their lives are like. and that slippery inability to reach a solid conclusion, to have a definitive answer, feels integral to sans soleil. after all, once you’ve done that, there’s nothing else to talk about: you’ve named that interaction, and you can move on, feeling comfortable in your decision.
you can order the physical copy of sans soleil here.
