INC 001 Jozef van Wissem
A ROSE BY ANY OTHER NAME
ANONYMOUS LUTE SOLOS OF THE GOLDEN AGE

(INCUNABULUM 001)

Jozef van Wissem
A ROSE BY ANY OTHER NAME
ANONYMOUS LUTE SOLOS OF THE GOLDEN AGE
1. Untitled
2. Maggae Hamfor
3. Untitled
4. Katherines Bairdie
5. Untitled
6. Corne Yards
7. Lamento di Tristano - Rotta
8. Whip my Toudie
9. Hench me Malie Gray
10. A Port
11. Woe betyd thy Wearie Body
12. Canaries
13. Robin is to the Greenwood Gone
14. Bransle
15. En me revenant
16. General Leslys Godnight
17. I choys to ly my Lon
18. Lady lie near Me
19. Blue Ribbon
20. Lilt Milne
21. Packingtones pound
22. Sick, Sick and Very Sick

Jozef van Wissem - Renaissance lute

Barcode: 6 89076 54824 3

Jozef Van Wissem continues to liberate the lute.
Once the most popular of portable instrument, it then entered 250 years of neglect, but today suffers from being regarded as a museum piece, only to be played in accordance with theories about authenticity.
Van Wissem has improvised with guitarists Gary Lucas and Tetuzi Akiyama, while his solo Objects In Mirror Are Closer Than They Appear alternated his own palindromic compositions with processed field recordings of airport lounges.
     The excellent A Rose By Any Other Name is a 'straight' lute record, though Van Wissem's scary monochrome cover photo harks back to a more innocent age when lute playing, like vegetarianism, would have been evidence of mild insanity.
    All 22 pieces here are anonymous- as Van Wissem points out, this could have been because the composer was too much of a celebrity to be worth naming, or else an aristocratic amateur unwilling to demean himself by appearing as a professional musician. There's one 14th century Italian drone-dance, but most are from the early 17th century, late Renaissance and pre-Baroque. Many have a forthright and folksy quality, and it's not until " En Me Revenant" ( from the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge) that we hear the tricky contrapuntal lines typical of upmarket Renaissance lute. This is straight away followed by "General Leslys Godnight", which sounds like the bastard offspring of a sarabande and the blues.
Rendered still stranger by a sharp tuning (an experiment characteristic of the period, apparently). This Scottish melodie illuminates how European tunes were shortly to traverse the Atlantic and mutate in the New World.
     Van Wissem's playing is unfetterd and lacks tea-party politeness. He ranges from moody to muscular, and coaxes a good range of colors from his ten-course, Canadian-built lute, evoking African kora as well as blues guitar. My favorite, "Untitled", by Anonymous, is a stirring, spacious Scottish lament, conjuring up windswept wastes.

MAURIZIO BIANCHI /M. B.
 "DAS PLATINZEITALTER" 
 (Incunabulum 002)

Bianchi began to produce music in 1979, at the peak of the industrial scene ,since 1980 using electronic equipment with the avowed goal "to produce technological sounds and in such a way to work on complete realizing of the modern decadence",  but his works harked back to the musique concrete of the 1950s
This cd is a return to his early work.

AUREA AETAS
DIE ERBSUENDE
DECADENCE
THE PROMISED SEED
NEW HEAVENS NEW EARTH
DAS PLATINZEITALTER

Maurizio Bianchi/M. B.: archaic waves, ancient loops, primitive electronics

Barcode : 689076548045

TETUZI AKIYAMA & JOZEF VAN WISSEM
 Hymn for a Fallen Angel
 (Incunabulum 003)

The second release highlights the improvisatory aspect of Van Wissem's activity, but as is always the case with him, the approach is not so easy to categorize. Hymn for a Fallen Angel pairs Van Wissem with another rigorously iconoclastic artist, Japanese guitarist and Off-Site alum, Tetuzi Akiyama. Van Wissem improvised to a recording of Akiyama that he had entered into Garageband, a program which allowed him to "see Akiyama's notes coming." The result is something like a duo improvisation in which the participants are separated in time, with one player given the benefit (or burden) of precognition. This is austere, yet open music that unfolds slowly and laterally, with Van Wissem's lute and Akiyama's bottleneck guitar tightly echoing one another or sounding together in strange clusters of tones that are allowed to decay slowly into deep chasms of silence. Full of spectral chords, microtonal glissandi, and iron concentration, Hymn draws firmly from the work of both artists in forging a sound world that is as barren as it is deep. [CC]
Minimal Classical Contemporary Folk Blues played by Japanese Rising Improv Star guitarist Tetuzi Akiyama and Dutch/American Lute player/composer Jozef van Wissem, Their second cd as a duo.
"The music is gradual and contemplative, unfolding like an unhurried chess game, edging forward in a shared yet adaptable and accommodating language. Courtly arpeggios, blues slurs and other pointers beyond the frame don't disrupt the Feldmanesque autonomy of their continually mutating, freely paterned flow." The Wire, UK

It Never Rains But It Pours
Silver Angels Across The Way
The Cry of the Hawk
Southern Cross
The Road of Excess  Leads To The Palace of Wisdom
Dark is the Sun
No Murmur at the Door So Frequent On It's Hinge Before

Tetuzi Akiyama , Martin HD-28 Guitar, Bottle Neck
Jozef van Wissem , Baroque Lute, Bottle Neck, Edits

 Barcode  689076547949

Jozef van Wissem / Tetuzi Akiyama
 Many guitar-players in the contemporary scene take a restrained, not-in-your-face approach to playing the guitar, an approach that is often highly personal and seemingly anti-virtuoso. They bring the guitar in new directions, in areas that maybe even Derek Bailey and Keith Rowe did not touch upon, drawing us even further into the specific sound of the guitar..  Tetuzi Akiyama initiated the famous Off-Site series of improvised music in Tokyo (together with Toshimaru Nakamura), a series that became one of the birth-places of 'silent' electro-acoustic improvisation. As a guitar player Akiyama has performed solo, and cooperated and recorded with amongst others Taku Sugimoto, Günther Müller and Jason Kahn Sometimes these collaborations lead to very sparse improvisations, with sounds that are on the brink of silence; sometimes they resulted in a layering of sound combining bleeps, clicks, shrieking electronics with relentless, yet not necessarily loud, sounds from Akiyama's guitar. In his playing of both nylon- and steelstring acoustic guitars, and various electric guitars, Akiyama focusses very much on resonance and timbre. This is most apparent on what is without doubt his most appealing release until now: the aptly titled Don't Forget to Boogie (2004). On this LP Akiyama plays the most rudimentary blues-licks often using a distorted guitar sound. restrained and minimal at the same time. Although in his duo with Van Wissem we probably will not hear the 'rock 'n roll'-side of Akiyama (his latest band seems to be called the Satanic Abandoned Rock 'n Roll Society), there is even in Akiyama's playing of the nylon string guitar, some sort of grainy, rudimentary influence of the blues – filtered through 40 years of improvised music.  Jozef van Wissem probably plays the most unlikely instrument in the world of contemporary improvised music: the Renaissance lute. He has accomplished the strange feat of bridging the idiom of seventeenth century lute literature and twenty-first century free improv of the silent type – especially in his working duo with Tetuzi Akiyama. Although Van Wissem uses subtle electronic sound manipulation, he has largely stayed faithful to the particular timbre, resonance and playing technique of the lute. This turns out to blend particularly well with Akiyama's prepared guitar. Van Wissem first came to be noticed a few years ago because of his radical conceptual approach to Renaissance lute music: he deconstructed existing compositions, for instance by playing them backwards. He also composed his own pieces for lute, using palindromes and mirrored structures. His music therefore does not have a traditional linear progression, nor leads to a climax, it rather stays on the same level of intensity. His music is quiet and not so much demands concentrated listening, as it will bring the listener in a state of concentrated listening – an aspect that makes Van Wissem a natural ally of the current post-reductionist improvising musicians.

JOZEF  VAN WISSEM
 Stations of the Cross
 (Incunabulum 004)

New CD of solo Lute Compositions by Jozef van Wissem mixed in with manipulated airport lounge and train station recordings. More minimal and delicately psychedelic than his previuos A Rose By Any Other Name, here van Wissem drops solitary single notes deep into stately black space with all of the graceful, slow-motion focus of a feather on the breath of God. There's an eerie sense of pregnant, occult space here that will surely chime with fans of Current 93 circa Of Ruine... or Sandy Bull's more baroque, psychedelic work but it also files nicely alongside your favourite major minimalist, making this another profoundly defiant side from this out-of-time thinker.ICUNA
 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 his latest solo release, 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 compositions 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.

Jozef van Wissem
THE STATIONS OF THE CROSS

1. dew drops fall like tears at eventide
 2. propempticon
 3. low mass
 4. the weeping virgin, trembling, kneels before the rising sun
 5. you can't go home again
 6. smokeless altar
 7. beyond the veil
 8. all day within the dreamy house the doors upon their hinges creaked
 9. passage of his presence
 10 a visit not measured with a return in kind
 11 without the rose
 12 pilgrim talk
 13 the lowering
 14.all earth was black, all heaven was blind

Jozef van Wissem - 10 course Renaissance lute, 13 course Baroque lute, Tape

Recordings concluded at Locksley Hall on Easter 7-4-7
 Other material taped at Grand Central Station, NYC, Heathrow Airport, London and Liberty International Airport, Newark, New Jersey on various occasions.Instruments built by Michael Schreiner, Toronto, Canada in 1998 and 2005 respectively
Barcode: 6 89076 54864 9