Jozef Van Wissem provides a night of Baroque wonder and macabre delight in Klub RE’s medieval cellar.
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We all gathered at the court of Jozef Van Wissem in Klub RE on 13 Oct. The Dutch experimental lutist is currently on a European tour, and he regaled us with a set of mostly instrumental pieces, at times menacing, but often with a refined air of regal splendor and joyousness. The lute originated in the Arab world as the ūd and probably ended up in Spain with the Moors around the 13th century. It became popular as the lute in the Baroque and Renaissance periods.
By the second number, the shallow veil of 21st century modernity and our gadget-obsessed obsequiousness falls away (even though some folk are still annoyingly filming on their phones), and most of us are swept off by the man’s skillful chimes and plucking, arriving in a completely different epoch. It’s dissonant and drony, interspersed with the most deliciously minor melodies bristling with exquisite sadness and lost hope. What a gorgeous dream – shame it lasts only 50 mins. Van Wissem looks fittingly otherworldly, like a shaman, the kind of soul who might guide you through a rather troublesome psilocybin journey, but who also might, given the wrong circumstances, make that trip even worse; he emanates pure serenity and calm wisdom. Dry ice shrouds the audience in a dense mist, setting the scene for a selection of beautifully finger-picked numbers that span the artist’s recent work. It’s been a busy time – three albums released in the last five years – he’s obviously brimming over with creativity. Van Wissem has collaborated with many people, including famed film director and musician, Jim Jarmusch, on 2012’s The Mystery of Heaven. He is mostly involved in sculpting panoramic and epic soundtracks, vast, yet personal, disquietingly minimalistic, always devastatingly intimate.
One of his most successful and haunting contributions is for the soundtrack to Jarmusch’s post-covid, classic, modern vampire tale Only Lovers Left Alive, that involves collaborations with SQūRL. The eerie melodies from his custom-made lute and the tone of sombre resignation with which he fills every space of the room, are the ideal accompaniment to a tale of two vampire lovers who have weathered the centuries, only to find themselves living apart, besieged by the inanity of contemporary society, isolated and alienated from the world around them, struggling to survive in a reality where uncontaminated blood is at a premium. It’s a modern fable, prescient and uncanny, rife with paranoia, bubbling over with contempt, but with plenty of tongue-in-cheek humor to offset the rest: the music he forges is the perfect backdrop.
Depending on where you are in the audience, the double-headed lute, strikingly unique, both headstocks set close to a 70 degree angle from each other, give the odd impression that the tuning heads are jagged black teeth, occasionally taking the form of a crocodile’s head – the trick of the angle creating an illusion that the mouth is opening and closing in a hunger-ravaged stupor; lusting for another victim, desperate for fresh blood. His new album Behold! I Make All Things New is out now.
