Browse by Artist: VAN WISSEM, JOZEF

Artist:	VAN WISSEM, JOZEF
Title:	A Rose By Any Other Name
Label:	BVHAAST (NETHERLANDS)
Format:	CD
Price:	$16.00
Catalog #:	BVHAAST 0606

Subtitled: Anonymous Lute Solos of the Golden Age. Jozef van Wissem - Renaissance lute. "The work of Dutch born composer and lute player Jozef van Wissem is based on application of mirror images in lute composition. The work is idiomatic to lute tablature of around 1600. The pieces on this recording exhibit a large musical variety, ranging from decidedly peasant dances to refined melancholic forms that were most likely intended for a more refined public. The black side to Elizabethan life in the mythic 'Golden Age' of prosperity, fed by anxieties of disease, religious intolerance and future pessimism resulted in a vogue for the cultural and literary Melancholy cult. It was believed that religious uncertainties caused by the English Reformation and a greater attention being paid to issues of sin, damnation, and salvation, led to this effect. The melancholy man, known to contemporaries as a 'malcontent,' is epitomized by Shakespeare's Prince Hamlet."

Artist:	VAN WISSEM, JOZEF
Title:	Objects In Mirror Are Closer Than They Appear
Label:	BVHAAST (NETHERLANDS)
Format:	CD
Price:	$16.00
Catalog #:	BVHAAST 0905

First solo release by Van Wissem on Bvhaast, 2005 release. Performed by Jozef van Wissem (lute, airfield recordings, electronics), Arnold Marinissen (palindrome percussion on track 7). "Though Van Wissem draws inspiration from Renaissance period forms, the use of computer-edited airport recordings fixes these pieces firmly in the now, and his approach to the lute is such that this CD would not be out of place in the John Fahey section of your music collection. Dreamy, oblique and minimal, the music insinuates itself into the listener's mind like a subliminal message or an overheard snippet of conversation." --Pete Gershon, Signal to Noise

Artist:	VAN WISSEM, JOZEF
Title:	Stations Of The Cross
Label:	INCUNABULUM (NETHERLANDS)
Format:	CD
Price:	$16.00
Catalog #:	INC 004CD

"New release from baroque conceptualist and improviser, Jozef Van Wissem, who, for more than a decade, has been quietly but surely reinventing the vocabulary of that most unlikely of instruments, the lute. With the exception of the odd Renaissance preservationist context, the lute, which was once the most popular portable instrument in the Western world, has all but disappeared from our musical landscape. Despite the arcane associations of his chosen instrument, Van Wissem is no revivalist; his compositions often marry a deep and self-conscious knowledge of the instrument's weighty history with a rigorous post-modern sensibility that has encompassed everything from appropriation to minimalist free improvisation, electronic manipulation, and the mirrored or palindrome musical structures for which he is perhaps best known. These palindrome compositions, a group of which are collected on Stations Of The Cross, are compositions that, like the words 'radar' or 'wow,' or the phrase, 'Madam, I'm Adam,' read the same forwards or backwards. Each composition progresses through a series of notes to the midpoint of the piece, where the sequence then reverses and the pitches are played in retrograde order back to the composition's starting point. The effect is strange and subtle, and oddly psychological -- there is a sense that time expands and contracts back to the point of origin, while the exact moment of reversal is difficult to detect. Compositional expectations are similarly, subtly undercut and, being that the beginning is always also the end, these pieces tend to come to a close without resolution, which gives them a quietly unsettling, question-like quality. To make things even more interesting, these mirrored structures are often superimposed onto field recordings of airport terminal interiors which are digitally manipulated into mirrored structures of their own. These recordings lend an eerie, impersonal atmosphere, the specificity and contemporary nature of which stands in stark contrast to the timeless, esoteric quality of Van Wissem's gut stringed lutes. Stations is a record of quiet, stately beauty and concept."

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