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Fermata plays Cafe Montmartre on Thursday, Jan. 8. -

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Fermata doesn't live by the rock 'n' roll maxim that louder is better. And that probably wouldn't surprise you if you've seen the instruments the band members play: viola, mandolin, banjo, accordion, upright bass and acoustic guitar.

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.

(Listen to Fermata's song "Ablaze" by clicking the play button below.)

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.

IF YOU GO

Who: Fermata with Subvocal

Where: Cafe Montmartre, 127 E. Mifflin St.

When: Thursday, Jan. 8, 9:30 p.m.

Cover: $5