Jozef van Wissem

“It’s like a part of my body,” says Jozef Van Wissem of the relationship he has to his chosen instrument, the lute. “The complexity of it is what keeps me going because you can always find something new.”

The ability to constantly extract something different and explore fresh terrain is evident throughout Wissem’s sprawling back catalogue and up to his latest album, The Night Dwells in the Day. Over the years he’s released countless solo albums stretching into double figures, there’s been collaborations with Jim Jarmusch and Tilda Swinton, award-winning computer game soundtracks, along with award-winning film soundtracks, from Jarmusch’s Only Lovers Left Alive to Pierre Creton’s 2023 film A Prince.

Since studying the lute in New York with Patrick O’Brien in the 1990s, Van Wissem has gone on to create works equally as rooted in classical Renaissance and Baroque forms of lute music, as contemporary sounds spanning drones, electronics and field recordings. Throw in some of his formative influences from the no wave and industrial scenes, alongside a dedicated approach to minimalism and this has resulted in Wissem producing distinct and singular work whose sound is often a marriage of opposites; meditative and intense, forward thinking but with a sense of the arcane. The Quietus has called him “probably the most famous lutenist in the world”.

The lyrics on the album’s final track, “The Day of the Lord”, are based on an old hymn book he found. As Van Wissem’s voice booms about “darkness and death” with the lute locked into a pulsing groove alongside looping electronics, it creates a heightened sense of things coming to an end – the album’s own closing rapture. Although, it’s very much a case of only an ending for now, as Van Wissem’s plans for extracting more from his beloved instrument remain plentiful – infinite even, as he proclaims: “the lute is eternal.”