This Is My Blood finds Jozef van Wissem deepening his long project of dragging the lute out of its historical frame and into the present, this time with a gaze fixed on deserted, contemporary landscapes. The album is literally framed by two “cinematic hypnotist slide lute” pieces, improvised for Maquina, a psychedelic road‑movie shot in the Colorado desert by filmmaker Joaquim Pujol.
Rather than moving through tidy song forms, these bookending tracks feel like mirages: scorched, hallucinatory reveries that “seem to shimmer in the heat of abandoned horizons rather than unfold in time,” as the press material puts it. Long, bent notes, slowly evolving figures and smeared overtones turn the slide‑treated lute into a kind of broken lap‑steel choir; the music…
Tag Archive: Jozef Van Wissem
You need to be logged in to view the rest of the content. Please Log In.
Trust a man whose ideal compositional form is the palindrome to reckon with this axiom: Everything comes back to where you started, then you start over again. 2023’s American Landscapes, the last record by Dutch lutenist/multi-instrumentalist Jozef Van Wissem and American guitarist/filmmaker Jim Jarmusch, ground their sound down to the essentials of pealing feedback and patiently cycling lute melodies, then let it sprawl, taking up all available space. After that, what can you do but build things back up?
That’s one gambit that they employ on their new LP. The quivering, e-bowed guitar tones that Jarmusch wraps around gradual progress on The Day The Angels Cried opener “Concerning Celestial Hierarchy” blossom like a chorus of…
You need to be logged in to view the rest of the content. Please Log In.