Fermata Nowhere celebrates second album release

PLATTSBURGH | Fermata Nowhere is more than just Stafford Middle School's A Capella group. It's a group of insanely talented, passionate, and dedicated students who work to achieve excellence in everything they do. This group was a day away from competing in the International Championship of Highschool A Capella, the first middle school A Capella group to do so. "If COVID never hit then we would've gone to Massachusetts and competed in semi-finals," Alexander Dion, an eighth-grader in the group explained. Fermata Nowhere had made it to the semi-finals round of the competition, making them among the top eight A Capella groups in the Northeastern United States. Cody Hampton, the Stafford Middle School vocal/general/string music teacher who founded the group six years ago, did not let the pandemic slow them down, and together the group has been working on making their second album. "Well he sticks you in a broom closet and there's a microphone in there and you have these headphones and you just sing into the microphone and you can talk to Mr. Hampton from outside, there's like a tiny little window where you can see," Kara Kretser, an eighth-grader in the group, described. "They all individually record, and really it's just a practice room, it's not a broom closest," clarified Hampton. Although this is the second album made by this group, the recording process was a bit different this time around due to COVID restrictions. Hampton stated, "I essentially purchased recording equipment to record them myself, for the last album I actually hired an engineer to come in and do it but because of COVID we weren't allowed to have guests come in our school, so I pretty much like had to learn myself to do it." This album is also unique due to the fact that five of the songs on it feature members from last year's group. The album also contains three original songs. "I wrote 'Resilience', which is also the name of the album. Mr. Hampton and I got the idea to write a song, it was early last year when we got the idea and we finished like a couple [of] months later, then soon we shot a music video and it went viral," said Alexander. The music video for "Resilience" currently has 6,400 views on the Fermata Nowhere Facebook page. Daniel Alexis another eighth-grader in the group wrote an original song as well with help from Elijah Adams and Sophia Amaya-Guittierez. "It was one of those secret songs I told no one about and now it's a music video," Daniel said about the process. "The group, current group, we needed to come up with a final song for our album, and the group basically like, I would say, pressured him to make it an A Capella arrangement and he did. He wrote all the music, and that's how it really came about," said Hampton on how Daniel's song "Lollipop in my Heart" came to fruition. To celebrate all the hard work and dedication that went into the making of this album, Fermata Nowhere will be holding an album release show Thursday, June 2 at 6:30 p.m. in the Stafford Middle School auditorium. This event is free and open to the public. The show will feature current members of the group along with the eighth-graders from last year that moved up to high school. There will also be four guest groups performing: Cumberland Bay Barbershop Chorus, Champlain Valley Sweet Adeline Chorus, a high school A Capella group from Northeastern Clinton Central School District- CAVE, and the Lake City Dancers from Center Stage Dance Studio. Daniel said, "It's going to be a really great show with a lot of music and we took a lot of time to prepare it so the results are going to be mind-blowing." The album "Resilience" will be available for purchase during the show. There will only be 200 physical copies available for purchase, but the album will be available on streaming sites such as Spotify. The money raised from album purchases will be used to help the group with other projects in the future. "If they don't want to do it I don't work on it, but if they want to do it I make it happen for them, and everything that we've accomplished is fundraised through our group," explained Hampton on how the group chooses what to do. To learn more about what Fermata Nowhere is currently up to follow their Facebook page Fermata Nowhere, @smsfermata.

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Fermata Nowhere celebrates second album release

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