Jozef Van Wissem is a Dutch, Rotterdam-based classical Renaissance and Baroque lutenist and an avant-garde composer, working with drones, electronics, and field recordings. He is influenced by the no wave and industrial scenes, alongside a dedicated approach to minimalism, but for him, the lute is a contemporary instrument. He collaborated with filmmaker and musician Jim Jarmusch, including the award-winning soundtrack for Only Lovers Left Alive, for which Van Wissem won the Cannes Soundtrack Award in 2013, and did a world tour in duo with Jarmusch in 2025 when their fifth album, The Day The Angels Cried, was released.

This Is My Blood is Van Wissem’s solo album, where he plays a Baroque Lute (all black, one-of-a-kind lute), electronics. The album opens and ends with two cinematic, hypnotic slide lute pieces, «What The Eternal Beginning Is» and «What The Eternal End Is», both of which evoke the seminal Ry Cooder’s deserted landscapes from the soundtrack for Wim Wenders’ Paris, Texas (1984). These pieces were born from improvisation for Maquina, a film shot in the Colorado desert during a psychedelic trip by filmmaker Joaquim Pujol.

The five other pieces match contemporary, dark yet intimate melancholia with ritualistic textures, highlighting Van Wissem’s singular, intricate, and deeply resonant lute playing, echoed and intensified by a subtle, atmospheric layer of electronics. In these meditative, minimalist pieces, repetition becomes ritual and listening turns devotional. These pieces circle themes of grief, erosion, and the quiet violence of memory and call for renewed patience in long-form listening. The lone cocal incantation «Remission» deepens the ritualist, devotional Christian spirit of This Is My Blood.

This Is My Blood is a timeless sonic meditation, carefully structuring a spiritual, ascetic narrative that has an accumulative emotional impact.

Eyal hareuveni

Jozef Van Wissem (Baroque Lute, vocals, electronics)