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