Picking up a record by Dutch lute player and composer Jozef Van Wissem - be it solo or a collaboration, like Brethren Of The Free Spirit (with guitarist James Blackshaw) - is always a deeply (spi)ritual experience, starting from the beautiful covers and the titles related to the Christian esoteric tradition and the holy writings. After all, the history of the instrument he chose, the Renaissance and Baroque lute, is strictly connected with a form of art which was devotional, meditative, and esoteric. But the last thing we can say about his music is that it sounds "old". This is despite his deep knowledge of Reinassance and Baroque music, despite making use of ideas that have already been employed in a non-deconstructivist way in the Middle Ages and despite his works sometimes sounding like primitive folk. These elements are mere building blocks with which to construct new compositions by means of procedures which are typical of the 21st century, such as palindromes, mirroring, reversing, negating climaxes, inducing static. This is also confirmed by the list of influences he declares on his MySpace page, ranging from Feldman to Robert Johnson, Bas Jan Ader to Chris Burden and from Crowley to Deleuze, but without forgetting the mystic St. John of the Cross.

The recent commission of a work related to Holbein's masterpiece The Ambassedors also came as an "expected surprise": in this 1533 painting, the complex perspective and symbolical construction were already made uncanny by the presence of the anamorphic skull, but also by the - imperceptible at first - different perspectival reference systems employed to represent each of the many objects set on the wooden piece of furniture and showing the respective fields of influence of the two men depicted. If we re-project in true shape each of these objects according to the main perspectival system of the painting, the one which would appear more distorted is probably the lute, which is also the bigger. If anamorphic and geometrical distortions are nowadays back in the interests of visual artists and architects (just think about William Kentridge and Preston Scott Cohen) after two centuries of rationalist and modernist blindness, it is also thanks to Van Wissem's music that we can finally be aware of a similar attitude in the art of sound. His music is suspended in time, but it is also both aware of the cultural roots of the Western world and manifesting a deep knowledge of the status of the present time.

On a more immediate and emotional plane, all his quoted references show another constant presence of his music: melancholy. Moreover, the most evident and recurring strategy also for this new album seems to be repetition, intended in a Feldmanian way: the melodies and harmonies are never rephrased exactly, but there is always a slight variation on the theme, as if to explore the same small meditative space under all the possible behaviors of light and of course under the possibilities of the musical instrument Van Wissem masters like few other in the world.

There is a functional alternation between richer, brighter and faster pieces (as in the title track #2, and in #4), with other simpler, darker and slower works (tracks #3 and #5). Darkness Falls Upon The Face Of The Deep (track #1, reminiscent of Fahey's American primitive folk) and The Stars Fall From The Sky And The Heavens Are Rolled Up Like A Scroll (track #6) are somehow the incipit and the end of this initiatory journey, while the epilogue of this experience can be found in the 3 minutes of Sola Fide (track #7, the piece for The Ambassords) which develops as a reprise of It Is All That Is Made (track #2). I don't want to give wildcat esoteric interpretations, but there are elements that suggest nothing in these works has been left to chance by the composer.

If a superficial listening doesn't seem to reveal anything new in respect to his old works, focusing accurately on the tracks' structures and on their dispositions in the album make it clear that this is another step in a research process that is still in progress. Sounds become richer, harmonies wider, and structures enhanced: add an uncommon talent and inspiration, plus an extraordinary attention for the quality of sound, and what you get is 'out of time' Music intending to induce mystical trance.