Music Op - I Got The Cheese Touch
Hello everyone! Welcome to the third edition of Music Op on Sacred Spiral Studios. While it feels like we still have a decent chunk of time left in 2024, this will be the final edition of the year. Get ready, because the next edition on January 6th will likely be heavily list-y, including my personal choices for best songs of 2024, top albums, and maybe some shoutouts from other SSS members! We haven’t talked that last idea over yet, but I doubt that they would be opposed to sharing their opinions as well.
November was interesting for me; I am still in pursuit of a nice iPod Classic Gen. 7, I bought a few notable CDs, I posted a lot on my YouTube channel, but the biggest events for me personally came in more ‘business-like’ or ‘journalistic’ forms.
Interviewing cheese touch + ‘meeting’ Orono of Superorganism
On November 8th, I had the chance to speak to and meet the goofy & creative musical duo cheese touch, who recently started putting out music and playing shows. I had heard about them through Orono, one of their two members who is also in the band Superorganism. While said band isn’t very active right now, she stated that they are still on good terms but at the moment, cheese touch is her top priority. I also think that Superorganism mostly exists virtually, so it's likely hard to seem together and ‘active’ when they are not together, actively working on music. The other member of cheese touch named Mitch Marsico is a UArts graduate as well as a very nice dude, and it was a pleasure to speak with and relate to through our similar college experience in Philadelphia.
Even though I discuss this in the interview (which I obviously encourage you to watch), Orono and I first ‘met’ online in 2017 via Instagram. I had been listening to Frank Ocean’s Blonded Radio show and heard Superorganism’s debut single “Something For Your M.I.N.D.,” prompting me to investigate this random band with an odd but super-catchy song that came out of nowhere. I then found that their lead singer had gone to high school in Maine, and proceeded to find her on Instagram and follow her since I liked the band’s music and wanted to know where in Maine she had lived. Maybe a month later, she followed me back and told me that my name sounded familiar… and we quickly realized that we had gone to high schools very close by, mine being Ellsworth High School and hers being John Bapst in Bangor.
Until the interview, we had never met in person and barely talked online since that initial interaction. It was an awesome full-circle moment for me, especially since I was doing this interview for my own platform, and not as an assignment from any publication or anything. The interview went great, even though I wish I had kept the camera rolling for longer than I did since we went on to talk about Maine intel for a bit that would’ve been cool to have but whatever.
It also made me think about the weight of ‘meeting people online,’ which still seems odd enough to me that I need to use quotes around it I guess, but did you really ‘meet’ someone if you messaged online? Yes, I knew who Orono was before the interview and I could say I have been in contact with her before, but had we ‘met’ already before the interview? It didn’t really feel like it. Maybe once I ‘meet’ more people for the first time online it’ll seem like the appropriate term to use, but it definitely made me think.
WXPN festival vlog goes live!
Back in late September, I attended the XPoNential Music Festival as part of the WXPN freelance media team. I was tasked with covering two or three performances per day, writing quick articles after the sets ended for their website as the festival happened in real time. I also had pitched the idea of a ‘festival vlog,’ since I knew that the editor / head of the digital team John Vettese had seen and enjoyed a vlog I had done for my friend / bandmate Lena Fine over the summer. I had vlogged and attended a few music festivals before, so I felt confident in my abilities to navigate the event and catch as much music and activities as I could. Luckily, John and the other full-time XPN team liked the idea and basically gave me full control to film and edit the video!
I was finally able to get the seal of approval on the video in early November, and we agreed that it was going to be posted to my YouTube channel. It was interesting to see how they wanted to roll out the video, which is something I never really do since I tend to keep my YouTube channel pretty separate from my social media (a reason why I love posting to YouTube so much more than trying to promote my music). I ended up creating a reel for the vlog and sharing it as a ‘collaborative’ Instagram post, which made me feel cool and official with my account next to the XPN account.
All in all, this was an awesome second wind to an already-awesome experience working at a music festival, and hopefully something I can use on a resume for future music journalism work. Big thanks to John, Em, and Paige at WXPN for believing in the vlog vision and helping me get the video out there :)
Coolest album rollouts of the year?
Ok, enough with the self-promo. There are two albums (one released, one yet-to-release) that I would like to talk about, specifically focusing on their intriguing rollouts. Let’s start with Kendrick Lamar’s GNX, a surprise album that dropped at midday on November 22 with only a trailer to promote it. Obviously, this was huge with the type of year Kendrick was having, and would’ve been huge even if it had a normal rollout with singles and a release date announced earlier. But the excitement of a true surprise album is unmatched, and this album has had the best surprise release in a long time. It might've been even more surprising if it wasn't on a Friday, but nonetheless it was a great surprise and I enjoyed the album quite a bit.
In a more slow-burn, cryptic fashion, Geese’s frontman Cameron Winter has now properly announced his debut solo album Heavy Metal, however the details of the album had been teased before the official announcement in cool ways only discoverable with some digging. His single “$0” was originally released as an actual $0 download on his website, and within the files metadata, the song was revealed as track 9 on a project titled Heavy Metal, and also contained the project’s cover art. A now-deleted website was also found that had a vinyl pre-order for the album, which stated that it would ship upon the album’s release on 12/6.
Since this, the album has been fully announced and pre-sold by Winter and his label, but as someone who downloaded “$0” while it was a website-exclusive, the thrill of finding this info through iTunes was great, and it made me feel like a sleuth that discovered a secret. I must also add that the song is beautifully odd and magnificent in such a half-serious way. As I mentioned in last month’s edition, Winter’s solo music has been a fantastic surprise at the end of this year, and I am very excited to hear his full album at the end of this week.
My top 10 favorite songs of November 2024
To be honest, this was a bit of a down month for me in comparison to the last few. I don’t have incredibly strong feelings about many of the songs here except for the top two, which make me look like a real lover of slow, dramatic songs. It’s a funny contrast with BabyTron and Uzi bringing up the lower half, who both reminded me that they could still be great if they wanted to, but likely will never top their older work, at least for me. I hope “luther” doesn’t get overplayed.
