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THE DEVIL IS A FAIR ANGEL AND THE SERPENT A SUBTLE BEAST

from THE NIGHT DWELLS IN THE DAY by jozefvanwissem

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NATHAN WILKINS
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János László
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Aimée ElizaBeth Swank
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about

Currently based out of The Netherlands’ second city of Rotterdam, Jozef Van Wissem is a composer, and lute player whose back catalogue includes everything from collaborations with Jim Jarmusch and Tilda Swinton, through to computer game scores including, fittingly for a lute player, The Sims Medieval. While some musicians seem to use instruments as tools, Jozef’s relationship with the loot seems a little closer, “it’s like a part of my body,” as he puts it, “the complexity of it is what keeps me going because you can always find something new’. And Jozef has certainly been looking for something new for a long time, having moved to New York in the 1990s to study with Patrick O’Brien, and never really parted with the instrument since. Alongside all his soundtrack work, Jozef also has a vast back catalogue of solo releases, “equally as rooted in classical Renaissance and Baroque forms of lute music, as contemporary sounds spanning drones, electronics and field recordings”. His latest offering The Night Dwells in the Day, will see the light of day in January via Incunabulum Records, and today he’s premiering the latest offering from it, the catchily titled, The Devil is a Fair Angel and the Serpent a Subtle Beast.
The opening track on The Night Dwells in the Day, The Devil is a Fair Angel and the Serpent a Subtle Beast is an instrumental piece, which in Jozef’s words, “grapples with the world as it moves on and all the dualism and dichotomies that follow“. The track seems to exist in life’s grey areas, the complexities and contrasts that reality always offers us, “darkness and light, happy and sad at the same time“.

Musically, the track is a beautiful melding of tradition and modernity, the looping, slowly evolving tones of the lute cut through by drum rhythms that shift from a thumping heartbeat through to skittering shaker-like urgency. The intensity of the piece swells and swells, even as it takes nearly two minutes for the lute to change form from the opening arpeggio to a brief spiralling, descending form, before quickly returning back to its place of comfort. There’s a hypnotic quality in the use of repetition, which only serves to emphasise the way everything around the song’s central focus is constantly shifting and evolving. It’s a moody and foreboding musical headspace certainly, yet what really glistens in the world Jozef has created is the distinctly human, organic quality of it, all the textural darkness only serves to emphasise the eerie beauty of the shimmering light.

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from THE NIGHT DWELLS IN THE DAY, released January 19, 2024

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jozefvanwissem Rotterdam, Netherlands

Van Wissem is ‘both an avant-garde composer and a baroque lutenist, and thus no stranger to dichotomy,’ (New York Times). He has been ‘pushing the lute’s agenda out of the academy and into more accessible circles’ (Pitchfork).

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