Incuna Bulum 
Jozef Van Wissem : Stations Of The Cross (NL/US,2007)***
Jozef Van Wissem, (now residing in Brooklyn, but of Dutch origin) learned classical guitar, but soon discovered transcriptions of Baroque and Renaissance lute music. He didn’t mind switching from playing Vivaldi one day and playing with local punks the next. When he finally turned to his New York lute teacher, he encouraged him to concentrate on his own pieces for lute, so he started to focus on the lute tablatures, and turned them upside down, played them in reverse and so on to discover its true meaning and own interpretation forms.
After a first attempt of a contemporary look at these Renaissance pieces, he made two albums with Captain Beefheart’s guitarist Gary Lucas, a first cooperation with Japanese improviser Tetuzi Akiyama, another cooperation, at a distance, with industrial composer Maurizio Bianchi, and then this concept piece.
At one stage, when travelling, listening to airport sounds, and having heard someone sobbing at a silent airport, he was impressed by the impact of these minimal sounds. This album, “stations of the cross”, is meant as “a commentary on the religious experience of travellers who gather in airports and railway stations. A sort of a Mass..” Jozef says. Therefore he used some software to edit taped field recordings of airports, so that the sounds come up and fade out like winds, like natural machinery.
His lute pieces, played on a 10 string Renaissance lute, and a 13 string Baroque lute are very minimal but mostly with two layers of development with the chord tune on one hand, and an additional collection of plucked overtones (track 1), or bass strings, slowed down so much with its picked or stroke chords that the music is one level more complex than with the neo-folk association, creates a meditative effect, takes time to develop, in breathing tempos, minimal, improvised and moody, taking time for the sounds of resonance. The idea and approach is done consequently while the environmental recordings make a natural intermission, this I guess almost becomes like a religious experience of a source of inspiration.
