Biography

Composer/Actor/Director won the Cannes Soundtrack Award for best score at the Cannes Film Festival in 2013 for "Only Lovers Left Alive" a vampire film by Jim Jarmusch. He performed live with Tilda Swinton and Jim Jarmusch and made several records with the director. In the film under John Hurt's part of Marlowe he plays a classical lute piece entitled ' Sick, Sick and Very Sick" mentioned by William Shakespeare in "Much Ado About Nothing". Van Wissem also acted in and did the soundtrack for "Red Right Return" He had an all black, one-of-a-kind baroque lute custom built for him. According to The New York Times "Van Wissem is both an avant-garde composer and a baroque lutenist, and thus no stranger to dichotomy". He has gained recognition for his innovative approach, the "liberation of the lute", as he describes it. Jozef Van Wissem is an avant-garde composer and lutenist who plays his unique all-black baroque lute all over the world. His timeless music is often described as hypnotic, minimal, and hauntingly atmospheric, merging beauty with a dark, meditative edge. His lyrics have a mythical Christian appeal, incorporating themes of love, faith, and the afterlife, often with a repetitive, mantra-like quality. He studied lute in New York with Patrick O'Brien in the 1990s and has since built a career that bridges classical traditions with modern sounds like drones, electronics, field recordings and voice. According to Richard Foster in The Quietus, "Van Wissem is possibly the best known lute player in the Western world. Early in his career he scored the Sims Medieval Video Game. In 2017 he was commissioned by the Hermitage museum in St Petersburg to perform the madrigal ' You Know That I Love You 'by Arcadelt as depicted by Caravaggio in his painting ' The Lute Player' (1596) at the event for the finalisation of the restoration of the painting. He collaborates 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. A world tour with Jarmusch and their 5th record " The Day The Angels Cried" is coming up in 2025. His solo work spans albums like Stations of The Cross (2008) which Wire Magazine labeled a small masterpiece, New Lute Music For Film (2013) and Behold! I Make All Things New (2022), as well as scores for films like Un Prince (2023). Van Wissem tours extensively, performing in diverse venues from rock festivals to churches, and has worked with artists like Tilda Swinton and Zola Jesus. In 2019 he was commissioned by Cinematheque Francaise to score the silent horror film Nosferatu (1922). He released the soundtrack in 2022 on his own Incunabulum label. The New York Times wrote: Beginning with a solo played on the lute, his performance will incorporate electric guitar and distorted recordings of extinct birds, graduating from subtlety to gothic horror. "My soundtrack goes from silence to noise over the course of 90 minutes," he said, culminating in "dense, slow death metal." In 2024 Van Wissem did a sold out nationwide American tour with the film. He has scored numerous feature films and documentaries. In 2022 four of his compositions including the vocal piece "Love Destroys All Evil" were featured in HBO's Irma Vep Series (starring Alicia Vikander). In 2023 Van Wissem scored the Cannes Award winning film Un Prince. The New York Times wrote " A subtly medieval score - distinguished by the thrum of a lute and composed by Jozef van Wissem - draws out a surreal dimension. Eventually, the film shifts into explicitly sexual and mythological terrain with a B.D.S.M. edge, and the score keeps pace, taking on a folk metal vibe." His latest projects include the 2024 album The Night Dwells in the Day. The Chicago Reader said " On The Night Dwells in the Day, he bolsters the lute's delicate progress through the palindromic melodic structures of his compositions using sequenced beats, subliminal electronic drones, and stern intonations". In 2024 Van Wissem was commissioned to score the silent film The Fall Of The House Of Usher (1928). In 2026 he will premiere his new live score for The Cabinet Of Dr. Caligari (1920) A new solo record and worldwide tour is slated for early 2026. He will be performing all new material consisting amongst others of cinematic hypnotist slide lute pieces evoking contemporary deserted landscapes.
- IMDb mini biography by: w habets