Jozef Van Wissem - It's Time for You to Return

The New York-based Dutch lutenist Jozef Van Wissem has been given wider exposure with the award-winning soundtrack he composed for Jim Jarmusch's film Only Lovers Left Alive. As an avant-garde composer as well as a baroque lutenist, on this overtly melodic album he pushes the lute's agenda out of the academy and into more accessible circles.

Unusually, as well as the music, Van Wissem has written and performed hypnotic vocals for some of the nine compositions and on one he is joined by Jim Jarmusch, on guitar, and Lebanese singer Yasmine Hamdan. The album also features electronic programming on a couple of tracks.

Van Wissem has performed over 800 solo lute shows at concert venues around the world, including prestigious rock festivals like ATP, playing his unique all-black, custom-built baroque lute, and invariably fascinating the unsuspecting audiences. MOJO has written you don't need to understand [his] compositional idiom to be mesmerised by his hall-of-mirrors instrumentals and Wire Magazine has described an album as a masterpiece.

He has recorded three albums with cult film director Jim Jarmusch (in his guitarist incarnation). This collaboration led to Van Wissem composing the soundtrack for Jarmusch's film, starring Tilda Swinton and Tom Hiddleston, which won the Cannes Soundtrack Award. He was also commissioned by London's National Gallery to compose a sound piece to Hans Holbein's painting The Ambassadors and has composed and performed lute and voice pieces for the Sims Medieval video game.

Personnel: Jozef Van Wissem (lutes, voice, words), Yasmine Hamdan (voice), Jim Jarmusch (guitar), Domingo Garcia-Huidobro (beats, glitch)