Santiago Ramones makes stuff for people that want to get deep.
Granted, that’s been obvious for a while to anyone who’s paid attention to his output over the years. His “Bit Depth” podcast series sits down with local creatives, digging at tough questions of life, psychology, and existentialism. His electronic and compositional work is often layered with choral arrangements and rhythmic trickery, and even every conversation is a nesting doll of philosophy, socio-politics, and personal insight.
So, how does someone with a musical and conceptual mind so cavernously deep also appease their own love of accessible, bleeding-heart pop-rock, an entire medium of songwriting normally celebrated for its relative simplicity and clear emotional urgency?
For Ramones, the answer seems to be fully embracing all of the melody and catchiness and accessibility at the surface level and then to fill in the bottomless ocean of concept and subtext below for anyone that wants to take that deeper dive.
That’s the path he charts throughout “Hypothetical,” both a brand new full-length album of creatively orchestrated alt-rock tracks and a head-spinning cyberspace maze of links, personal asides, and connections both tenuous and overt told mostly through barely-hidden links scattered among the album’s lyrics.
And even as Ramones himself describes the music of “Hypothetical” simply as “alt-rock,” the lyrical content goes predictably deep.
Each song is a window into a story or into some kind of imaginatively constructed fictional world, sometimes historical or starkly real and sometimes far-flung into science-fiction or animalistic fantasy.
“When I started writing songs, I didn’t feel like I had enough life experience that I felt comfortable sharing, or I didn’t feel like I had license to do so,” Ramones told me following the album’s drop on June 20th. “And so I just wrote stories instead. They’re just stories I made up or just creative little puzzles I made for myself to see if I could write a song.”
In some cases, those “little puzzles” resulted in futuristic space-based scenarios. In others, they ended up being deeply personal confrontations of loss, either real, imagined, or even just foreseen down the road for Ramones’ real life.
It’s all explored through varying degrees of mystery and murkiness throughout his own personally designed and purpose-built website at santiagoramones.com.
“Hypothetical is shapeshifting fiction,” reads the album’s tagline on the site. “It’s an anthology of stories that blur the line between what’s real and not real.”
From there, visitors are invited to click through the album’s track listing and lyrics and to search through the text for inconspicuously hidden hyperlinks, often just one or two letters of a word or even just a single blue period. Click them and you’ll find poems, short stories, personal anecdotes, links to fish food and ghost tours and video game cutscenes and even an obituary for someone tragically young and departed.
What’s real or fictional or somewhere in between is probably impossible for anyone but Ramones to say, but taken together, it all creates a labyrinth of conceptual accompaniment for each of the album’s songs and a recursive web of connections and thematic links between them.
But the site also lays out the album’s expansive credits, boasting names and players from across the OKC music scene, like singer/guitarist Mac Seigel, drummer Keegan Darrow, and contributions from SHIFT mad scientist Alyx Rosfeld and Lust Online drummer Don Data.
The biggest guest stars, though, are surely the remarkable rotating cast of spotlighted singers, from Kat Lock and Nia Mone to Bailey Gilbert, ROZ, Ciara Brooke, Sephra Sheuber, and the trademark Beach Boys-ian vocal arrangements of The Lunar Laugh’s Jared Lekites.
But the overall production is as much the star of the show as any of the names in the album credits.
Ramones layers each track with affected drums, twinkling video game leads, buried vocal constructions, synth harmonies, and more, all often mixed into a 21st century wall-of-sound that takes these often Jimmy Eat World-style, heart-on-sleeve pop-rockers and creates a tiny bespoke sonic world to match each hypothetical fiction.
He’s offering a characteristically deep dive into that approach by bringing back his long-dormant “Bit Depth” podcast for a multi-episode exploration of each track across the album, breaking down the stories and concepts behind the songs as well as the techniques that went into their productions.
The podcast is also a way to spotlight and champion the many helping hands that not only made “Hypothetical,” into the sprawling community showcase that it is, but that have served to lift up and support Ramones on his own personal journey.
And maybe that’s all exactly why someone with a musical palette and an esoterically creative mind as deep and diverse as Ramones’ would want to make an album of catchy alt-rock bangers. Because it’s a chance to reconnect with the feeling and to do the main thing that drew us all toward music in the first place: playing with our friends.
“There are a lot of people now that just make music for the internet, you know, and then there are people that want to actually exist within a music scene,” Ramones told me. “And that’s what I am. I’m a local musician and I’m a part of this scene. So why not have local musicians? Why not showcase the scene?”
“Hypothetical” by Santiago Ramones is available on streaming services now.
For a deep dive into the full conceptual album project and online “Hypothetical” experience, visit santiagoramones.com.
A full album release show is planned for Thursday, July 17th at OKC’s Resonant Head with special guests Moriah Bailey and Baileyboy.
Brett Fieldcamp has been covering arts, entertainment, news, housing, and culture in Oklahoma for nearly 15 years, writing for several local and state publications. He’s also a musician and songwriter and holds a certification as Specialist of Spirits from The Society of Wine Educators.
