CONCERT: Jozef van Wissem & Hilary Woods

20:00 Doors
21:00 Hilary Woods
22:00 Jozef van Wissem

Tickets:
https://ra.co/events/1806384


JOZEF VAN WISSEM:
Jozef van Wissem is an avant-garde composer and lutenist playing his all black, one-of-a-kind custom-made baroque lute all around the world. The titles and the nature of his works often have a Christian-mystical appeal and the music he creates is simply timeless. In 2013 van Wissem won the Cannes Soundtrack Award at the Cannes Film Festival for Jim Jarmusch’s “Only Lovers Left Alive “. In December 2017 Jozef van Wissem was invited to perform the madrigal depicted in Caravaggio’s painting The Lute Player (1596) at the Hermitage museum of Saint Petersburg.

An autodidactic author, a Renaissance talent in the cruelty of the 21st century, who switched the intense lifestyle of a new wave artist and bar owner from Groningen to a modern-age thinker who studied lute in New York, and later became one of the most influential contemporary songwriters, known for his solo and cinematic works.

Van Wissem has earned much critical acclaim for his work, the ‘ liberation of the lute’ as he calls it. According to the New York times “Van Wissem is ‘both an avant-garde composer and a baroque lutenist, and thus no stranger to dichotomy”. According to The Quietus “Van Wissem is possibly the best know lute player in the western world. To get into van Jozef Van Wissem’s world is to surrender to the inevitability – and timelessness – of a strange music created at its own pace, in a manner wholly of its cre-ator’s making. He sets the listener into a private world, looking out through a glass darkly, such is the intense quality of the music. Brevity, simplicity, directness is the key. (The Quietus)

The release of new albums “Behold! I Make All Things New” and “Nosferatu: The Call Of The Deathbird” complete the picture of the last three years of extensive, succesful touring together with the rendition, presented in 2023, of the live scoring of cult movie “Destiny” by Fritz Lang (1921).


HILARY WOODS
Hilary Woods is a self-avowed outsider working across sound, song, writing and analogue filmmaking. Her fiercely DIY work ethic cultivates practices that are almost in call and response to each other. Evocative experimentalism and sonically heavy excavations give way to the intimacy and tenderness of a deeply personal and intuitive song-writing. Her sound is embedded with a visual potency, physicality and a moving majesty that is accompanied by her own hand processed 16mm film in live performance.

Early independent music releases were hailed as ‘a revelation in terms of the depth of song writing’ (The Sunday Times), and were followed by her critically acclaimed debut LP Colt on Sacred Bones Records in 2018. Encompassing “the stuff of Bosch paintings’, Colt comprises eight ‘stark and haunting compositions that stand on the edge of a knife” (Bandcamp). Her sophomore LP Birthmarks (‘a thrilling and scopic round trip” - The Quietus), was released in 2020, before Isolation Tank emerged on tape as part of the Documenting Sound series on Boomkat Editions. The reverberating songs and charcoal skies of Woods’ simmering EP Feral Hymns were released on cassette in 2021.

2023 will see the release of Hilary’s third full length record on Sacred Bones Records.

Hilary Woods has toured extensively throughout Europe and the US playing special guest to Grouper, Low and Marissa Nadler, with solo headline performances at Le Guess Who, Southbank, Sonic City, Zemlika and Quarter Block Party, to name but a few.