Jozef van Wissem

Van Wissem has earned much critical acclaim for his work, the ‘ liberation of the lute’ as he calls it. According to the New York Times“  Van Wissem is ‘both an avant-garde composer and a baroque lutenist, and thus no stranger to dichotomy". According to the Quietus “ Van Wissem is possibly the best known lute player in the western world. To get into van Jozef Van Wissem’s world is to surrender to the inevitability – and timelessness – of a strange music created at its own pace, in a manner wholly of its creator’s making. He sets the listener into a private world, looking out through a glass darkly, such is the intense quality of the music. Brevity, simplicity, directness is the key. (Quietus)

According to NPR's All Songs Considered, "his compositions are heavy and set in hypnotic darkness". When Van Wissem " started to think about new compositions for lute he made the decision to perform the classical lute repertoire backwards. From this mirror image writing followed the idea to compose in layered palindromes only and repeat them over elongated periods of time. The challenges are the minimalist idea of using only a few chords, one or two tunings, one instrument and then to be interesting within these limits and constraints. And to come up with a simple melody" In December 2017, Van Wissem was commissioned by the Hermitage Museum in St Petersburg to perform the piece "You Know That I Love You' depicted by Caravaggio in his painting The Lute Player (1596) for the event for the final restoration of the painting. Confronted with the sound system, acoustics of the museum, and the number of people in the hall, Van Wissem decided to do a more fluent drone version instead of the classical version" In January 2020 Van Wissem performed in Aalborg, Denmark "in the magnificent baroque interior of the medieval Budolfi church. His pizzicato looks so effortless that the ancient lute with three pegboxes at first seems to be a prop. Occasionally giving a piercing look towards the audience, the musician skillfully steers the course between the past and now. One of the time-travel themes is You Know That I Love You, a 16th-century madrigal by the Renaissance composer Jacques Arcadelt. Three years ago van Wissem was commissioned to perform this piece at St Petersburg’s Hermitage museum which displays Caravaggio’s The Lute Player which also depicts a young man reading the notes of the same madrigal…The further this lute player travels, the more intense these shamanic charms are. Having performed a few minimalist instrumentals, van Wissem starts singing. The effect of these enchanting loops is enhanced by the mantra-sounding lines “Do you feel like you want to? Do you ever feel like you want to?”. Later, for the encore, he plays another piece including all-the-more hypnotising lyrics “Love destroys all Evil and frees us” multiplied and intensified.”

Concerning the Entrance into Eternity, his first collaborative album with Jim Jarmusch, was released on Important Records in early 2012. The Mystery of Heaven, his second collaborative album with Jarmusch, was released on Sacred Bones Records later that year. The More She Burns the More Beautifully She Glows, a track off the album, featured a guest appearance from Tilda Swinton. Van Wissem scored Jarmusch's 2013 film Only Lovers Left Alive . When Shall This Bright Day Begin, featuring guest vocals by Zola Jesus, was released by Consouling Sounds in 2016. The same label released Nobody Living Can Ever Make Me Turn Back in 2017. Van Wissem reactivated Incunabulum for his 2017 release New Lute Music for Film. His third Consouling Sounds release, We Adore You, You Have No Name, followed in 2018. In 2019, Van Wissem and Jarmusch returned to Sacred Bones with the full-length An Attempt to Draw Aside the Veil.

Jozef van Wissem's solo albums, It Is All That Is Made (2009) and Ex Patris (2010), were both released on Important Records. He released The Joy That Never Ends, an album with Jim Jarmusch on the label in 2011. He also wrote a score for the video game The Sims Medieval.

Jozef van Wissem was born in Maastricht. An incessantly touring musician, van Wissem studied lute in New York with Patrick O'Brien in 1990s.

Jozef van Wissem (born 22 November 1962) is a Dutch minimalist composer and lute player based in Brooklyn. In 2013 van Wissem won the Cannes Soundtrack Award for the score of Only Lovers Left Alive at the Cannes Film Festival.