Fake Flowers [LP]

Fake Flowers is the long out-of-print first solo album from Ceschi (current member of Codefendants and founder of Fake Four Inc.) made up of fractured bedroom recordings between 1999 and 2003 on an 8-track machine while emerging from the worlds of underground hip hop, DIY punk, noise, and psychedelic indie folk. Originally conceived as an extremely limited noise tape collaboration with his cousin Ernesto Mercado between rehearsals with their band Anonymous Inc., the project slowly mutated into something much larger : an accidental blueprint for the genre-defying path that would later define Ceschi's work, the formation of Fake Four Inc., and a decades-long career moving between punk basements, Project Blowed cyphers, folk confessionals, and stages around the world. Initially released in 2004 through Beyond Space Entertainment, the songs on Fake Flowers grew an underground following in the earliest 2000s by being traded on tapes, burned CDs, AIM instant messenger, and message boards. Influenced as much by the abstract lyricism and left-field production of the Project Blowed and Anticon worlds as by the tape-saturated psychedelia of the Elephant 6 Recording Company collective, Fake Flowers drifts through quick-tongued poetry, lo-fi hip hop, damaged indie pop, and found sound experiments with little concern for genre boundaries. The recordings are raw, imperfect, occasionally immature, deeply vulnerable, and entirely unfiltered. It's a surreal album about lost childhood and growing up made by an artist in his late teens and early 20s discovering his solo voice in real time. Now available on vinyl again for the first time in over a decade, this new pressing via Old Soul Music / OTHAR resurrects a long-lost piece of underground history... a snapshot of a pre-streaming DIY era where burned CDs, four-track experiments, basement shows, and grassroots scenes created lifelong movements from the margins.