It’s never too late. That’s one of the messages behind “Fathoms + Atoms,” the debut album by local alternative rock band Vox Ultima. It’s a message discovered by the band during the past four years of writing and recording the album. The process, described by guitarist Brian Kalish as “a marathon,” marks an important, and much desired, change in life direction for the band members.
The band was formed following a chance meeting by Kalish and vocalist/lyricist Orlando DiValentin in 2022 at Jerry’s Music in Wausau, where DiValentin was working. Kalish started dropping in to the store every Saturday to chat with DiValentin, eventually mentioning that he was looking for some musicians to jam with.
“So this just kind of magically fell together,” DiValentin said. “We started hanging out and we started playing, we figured out kind of our roles and some of those roles changed over the years and some people are gone now but it sparked this project at a really strange time in my life and I think a strange time in [Kalish’s] life.”
That winter, both Kalish and DiValentin were experiencing hardship and music was a creative outlet that helped guide them toward better times.
“I had just gone through a divorce,” Kalish said. “I hadn’t played music or really done anything musically for many years before that, so I was just getting back into playing guitar and writing some songs. I’m an older guy so I wasn’t plugged into the scene or anything so I didn’t know how to meet people or how to get into the same room with people and start playing. We just happened to run into each other at the music store and then it clicked from there.”
“I was a stay-at-home dad during Covid,” DiValentin said. “During flu season for like 15 days I hadn’t left the house and I had a one-year-old and a three-year-old. I started having anxiety attacks.”
DiValentin’s wife quickly set up childcare plans and encouraged him to start therapy.
“I went to therapy and they were very pro me working on art,” he said. “My wife asked ‘Well, what do you want to do?’ and I said I want to build a recording studio and run it as a business and she’s like, ‘That’s what we’ll do.’”
Over the coming months, DiValentin built Push Sound Studio in Schofield with the help of community members and a state grant that helped fund the purchase of analog audio equipment.
“Now I have a full state-of-the-art recording studio and it’s just such an awesome thing the universe laid out,” DiValentin said.
Now that diValentin had the means to record an album, he, Kalish and former Vox Ultima band-mates Matt Priewe, Dillon Knoblock and later Rori Martell started writing music and jamming.
“This is just a glorified midlife crisis, essentially,” DiValentin joked.
After a couple years of playing music and writing songs, the band went through some changes and only founding members Kalish and DiValentin remained. They needed a drummer, and found both percussion and a sense of brotherhood in Dustin Hauke, who joined the Vox Ultima in summer 2025.
“All of a sudden we had Dustin in the band and we had a bunch of people that were very supportive of each other’s ideas,” DiValentin said.
“There’s a trust that we have in each other — for whatever reason — because they were both total strangers to me five years ago,” Kalish said. “It’s like if I bring an idea I know you guys are gonna pick it up and we’ll take it from there and make it into something great.”
In those initial years, the Vox Ultima wrote a small catalog of songs, anchored by DiValentin’s lyrics which were driven by personal introspection.
“During that time period I was doing a lot of soul searching,” he said. “A lot of it has to do with my own personal beliefs and my own personal experiences ... the lyrics cover things from death in the family to learning how to have a better mindset in life and going forward that we should be thankful for things.”
The debut single released this month, “Tempting Fate,” was the first song the band wrote.
“It’s about how all the stars aligned and all our dreams came true ... which I thought was interesting because it was almost like a premonition of what we’re expecting to happen,” DiValentin said. “We want to take this as far as we possibly can — even if we just end up in Wausau as hometown heroes or a great local band, we’re just having a blast doing it.”
When Hauke came on board in 2025, the Vox Ultima were preparing to record their debut album. It was an intentional decision to produce a complete work rather than an EP or singles. Kalish was the one driving an effort to buck the modern trend of releasing singles on streaming apps, only to vanish into the digital ether a week later.
“Your 15 friends will listen to it maybe once or twice and then it gets lost in the shuffle,” he said. “Listening to the bands of the ’90s, that was all I really knew — putting a collection of songs together ... I don’t think that our band could express what we wanted to express just by putting out one song here and one song there.”
There’s another reason many bands don’t put together an album straight out the gate: it’s incredibly arduous and time consuming (especially on analog equipment), all with no immediate result. Kalish said Hauke started recording drums in September 2025 and the band didn’t wrap up recording until July of this year.
“Towards the end it was four days a week, probably four hours every night,” Kalish said. “It was an incredible amount of time — you work eight hours a day, go to [Orlando’s] house and get into the studio, work for four hours, go to sleep, wake up again and just repeat that endlessly until we finally came out the other side.”
At the end of recording, the band took the tracks to Chicago for professional mixing and mastering at Electrical Audio, the legendary recording studio founded by Steve Albini where artists like Nirvana, the Pixies and PJ Harvey laid down some of the most influential alternative rock tracks ever recorded.
“We were way too close to it at the end and I was pretty adamant early on that I wanted to have somebody outside mix it,” Kalish said. “We spent countless hours in front of a computer screen deciding if the first take of this part of the song is better than the 13th one.”
Now on the eve of the “Fathoms + Atoms” release, Vox Ultima are preparing for a special masquerade-themed album release party and concert at Coral Lanes in Rothschild on Saturday, Oct. 24. For $5, guests can come listen to Vox Ultima perform the complete album. It’s also the only place to purchase “Fathoms + Atoms” right now, as the album tracks are being released one by one over the next year on streaming apps and on the band’s website: thevoxultima.com.
As the band stands on the precipice of a four-year writing and recording process that brought profound change to their lives, members are excited to share their music with the public.
“I’d love for people to love it and I’m OK if people don’t,” diValentin said. “I just I hope it inspires people to see that there’s way more to this life than just doing whatever it is that makes them not happy. There’s so many things out there you could be doing ... I know musicians talk about this all the time, but I see so many people working a grind, working two jobs and then talking about how they’re always exhausted and they’re miserable. Whatever it is you want to do — if you want to make music, make music.”
“If you’ve got an idea and you’ve got the will, we’ve got a studio in town now, so it’s totally possible,” Kalish said. “You can do amazing things just right here in the small town that we live in. Anything’s possible.”
The story of “Fathoms + Atoms” development is a reminder that dreams are the seeds of a healthy life. They need to be planted, carefully tended and regularly nourished. It’s a lot of work, but if properly cared for and supported, they bear a rare fruit: deep satisfaction and a sense of profound purpose.
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