We are also in the midst of booking a fall west coast tour, which is shaping up to be about two weeks in length, and alot of fun.

Lastly, on August 22nd fermata will be hosting an art opening, where madison and area artists will be creating pieces based of songs from our album “only ghosts remain”
The event will run from 7 to 930 at the gates of heaven in james madison park.  It will be free and Steam Century will be providing tea and other refreshments!

ps  We are still looking for more artists, so if you are interested (doesnt matter where you live, as long as you can make it to the opening) get in contact with us through the old myspace!

jon

howdy,

we have been on lastfm.com for a while now, but i keep forgetting to actually let anyone know… until now! ah, the glories of technology.

http://www.last.fm/music/+noredirect/_fermata_

so, it would be cool if anyone is so inclined to add us to their library.
ps im also still reminding everyone to vote for the madison area music awards.

take care,
jon

ps talk to cody about the after party. He is the man in charge.

After witnessing Fermata’s performance on Dec 15 at High Noon Saloon, time was set aside to find out more about this band. Now, through the modern marvel of e-mail, we have been granted a view into the workings of that which is Fermata.

“We’ve found that the term “Chamber Rock” best describes our sound,” begins band visionary Jon Koschoreck. “We try to build a sound that combines the intimacy of chamber music and the power of rock.  Plus, the very nature of our instruments allows for a great deal of flexibility in the venues we can play. We can fill a rock club with sound, but also play in a small coffee shop as well. We’ve found that the music appeals to a remarkably large range of people.”

Jon continues by informing us about the bands history and make up. “We formed over the last year, developing our sound and finding each other’s strengths. I have been playing guitar and writing songs for nine years while Cody Davis is a double bassist coming from a background of jazz and classical performance. Karl Stuen is a violist who comes from a strictly classical background, with a strong interest in chamber music and Lisa Mazza is a classically trained vocalist. Matthew Manske is a multi-instrumentalist with formal training in jazz guitar, but he performs on mandolin, banjo and accordion with Fermata.”

One thing striking and noteworthy about Fermata is the absence of drumming. “The lack of percussion was a conscience decision from the start,” Koschoreck relates. “We’ve all been in bands with percussion before, so we enjoy the challenge of creating that same rhythm and pulse of percussion using only stringed instruments. These instruments are each separately very expressive and collectively we believe that they compliment each other well and give us a good set of unique musical colors to work with.”

“A melody can have very different interpretations when it’s played on a banjo than it would have being played on an upright bass or piano,” Jon explains. “So, in a way, it’s nice to recognize and utilize these associations to help us paint certain ‘moods’, if you will, with our music. It’s also useful to consciously break away form these associations and expand the listener’s experience.”

This experience works in conjunction with Fermata’s vocal style and lyrical content.

“I get ideas for songs from everywhere.” Koschoreck notes. “Nature is one of the predominant themes that run through Fermata’s music. Sometimes it’s something that’s happened to me, or a part of a conversation I’ve overheard. Sometimes it’s the raw emotion of a personal event, but worked up into a fictionalized story. Currently, three of the songs on our new release “Only Ghosts Remain” have short stories that are written behind them. A fourth is in the works.”

Before closing, Jon takes time for one final plug. “Our debut album “Only Ghosts Remain” will be officially released on January 30th at the Frequency in Madison. We believe that the music will appeal to those who are hungry to find new music and explore it beyond just the surface. Also, the band has been working on finding local visual artists who are into the music and have them to do a piece inspired by a song on the album. We hope to have an art showing/performance sometime in February or March.”

We look forward to seeing which songs are painted!

But looks are deceiving. They’re not playing bluegrass, Irish folk or old-timey country. Instead, the local five-piece string band counts hard rock like Tantric, Days of the New, Seether and Shinedown among their influences.

“And Vivaldi, in the boldness of the strings,” said Cody Davis, the group’s upright bass player. “We call it chamber rock. It’s really bold, it’s aggressive, it’s dynamic, and it’s rock music when you really get down to it.”

At the end of December, the members of Fermata released their first album, “Only Ghosts Remain,” recorded at Paradyme Productions with producer Jake Johnson. They aren’t holding an official release party until January 30 at the Frequency, but in the meantime, the album is available at local record stores. The band has a show this Thursday, Jan. 8, at Cafe Montmartre with local psychedelic folk group Subvocal.

Fermata got its start in the summer of 2007 when guitarist Jon Koschoreck listed an ad on Craigslist looking for other musicians that shared his vision for eclectic acoustic music.

Then, he waited.

“I spent the summer pretty much on my porch playing the same two songs over and over, and piece by piece, everybody came up,” he said.

Vocalist Lisa Mazza said finding his ad was like an act of fate.

“I had gone on Craigslist looking for someone with the same vision. I’ve never been on Craigslist a day before in my life, and the first time I went on there I found Jon, which was pretty awesome,” she said.

Other responses starting coming in. There was Matt Manske, a Milwaukee native who studied jazz guitar at John Hopkins University before coming to the University of Wisconsin-Madison to study art. He juggles mandolin, banjo and accordion duties as well as making art for the album cover. (The band calls him “Miscellaneous Manske” for his multiplicity of talents.)

Davis comes mainly from a classical and jazz background, but he was looking for something new, “a cool project for a double bass player,” when he found the Craigslist posting.

After that, the ad lay dormant for a few months. Then, in January of 2008, Fermata found its fifth member: Karl Stuen, a graduate student in chemical engineering who was attracted to the UW program because it allowed him to play viola and violin in extracurricular chamber ensembles.

Together, the band draws on diverse musical backgrounds, some professional, some self-taught. Davis has a performance degree in strings from UW-Platteville, and his father has been playing guitar in local bands since the ’60s (like the Electric Road Kings and the Fabulous White Trash Blues Band), Mazza took classical voice lessons from her early teens through college, while Koschoreck’s skill comes mainly from “sitting on the corner of my bed playing guitar for years.”

Besides the two students, the rest of the members have day jobs — Davis is a staff consultant at an engineering firm, Koschoreck is a “coffee jockey” at Lazy Jane’s Cafe and Mazza performs facials and hair removal at a downtown spa.

What ties Fermata together is the thrill they get out of debunking the notion that “acoustic” equals sedate and old-fashioned.

“We try to take the instruments we have and figure out new ways to arrange the music that add depth and complexity to the sound beyond what people might expect from a band like ours,” said Stuen.

For Koschoreck, this means playing around not necessarily with decibels but with the dynamics of power and force within songs.

“We hope to move people in the same way as a traditional rock band, but with none of the same electronics,” he said.

Mazza has wanted to play in an acoustic band since the ’90s when the popularity of “MTV Unplugged” created a surge of acoustic albums from rock bands. A lot of the time, she liked the unplugged versions better than the original because they were “raw and broken down.” Instead of blasting the audience, the dynamics from the instruments and voices were broader and left the audience “thinking more about what’s happening on stage.”

Davis and Stuen agree that playing rock on stringed instruments allows them to stretch the boundaries of traditional playing. Violins usually play the melody, or “the frosting” as Stuen calls it. But in Fermata he’s more part of the rhythmic core.

Davis’ role as bass player is the same as it would be if he were playing electric bass, laying down the foundation. But he enjoys experimenting with “all the different voices you can get out of an upright bass,” sometimes plucking with his fingers, sometimes using a bow.

“The electric bass has only one sound, and it does one sound forever,” he said. With the acoustic stand-up bass, he works himself more into the overall rhythm section.

As the main songwriter, Koschoreck draws on early-to-mid-’90s punk rock for its percussive guitar and short songs, and from John Denver and other old country songs for lyrics that have a “connectivity to nature.” In general, lyrics germinate from the observations he writes down in a notebook — everything from overheard conversations and relationship woes to the dinosaur section of the Field Museum of Natural History in Chicago.

He brings his guitar part, the melody and lyrics to the band, and they hash it out from there.

“They take the song — which I look at as a tiny little shack — and when we finish, it’s a big mansion,” he said.

we are really excited to have a couple of upcoming interviews in maximum ink and 77 square magazines. they will both be out in the coming week or so. andrew frey from  the eclectic vibes section did the max ink article and katjusa cisar  did the 77 square piece.  I know you can go to the  magical interweb and read that article and  listen to one of the tracks off the album there. I dont know if the max ink one will be online though.

lastly, we are looking for artists interesting in doing pieces based off songs on the album and then we are going to have an art showing/performance to showcase the pieces and the artists.  please let us know if you are interested.  i will be posting about this again in the coming weeks.

see you all soon!
jon