Name: Jozef Van Wissem + Zemlya
Start: 2025-03-21T20:00:00+01:00
Location: Ankerrui 5-7, 2000 Antwerp, Belgium

JOZEF VAN WISSEM
“It's like a part of my body,” says Jozef Van Wissem of the relationship he has to his chosen instrument, the lute. “The complexity of it is what keeps me going because you can always find something new.”
Since studying the lute in New York with Patrick O'Brien in the 1990s, Van Wissem has gone on to create works equally as rooted in classical Renaissance and Baroque forms of lute music, as contemporary sounds spanning drones, electronics and field recordings. Throw in some of his formative influences from the no wave and industrial scenes, alongside a dedicated approach to minimalism and this has resulted in Wissem producing distinct and singular work whose sound is often a marriage of opposites; meditative and intense, forward thinking but with a sense of the arcane. The Quietus has called him “probably the most famous lutenist in the world”.
The genesis for his latest album began during lockdown in Warsaw, where Van Wissem splits his time between Rotterdam. “The Call of the Deathbird” was the first song he wrote from the album, one that - over a hypnotic yet beautifully fluid and plucked melody - captures scenes of deserted streets, death and the intense isolation that gripped us all. One of the relatively rare tracks that Wissem sings on - along with some stirring and enveloping guest vocals from Hilary Woods - his towering voice circles above the music much like the swooping deathbird he sings of.
ZEMLYA
The pulsing earth of Zemlya’s land brings together spherical drones, vocal layers, breathing rhythms and crashing cymbals.
In gathering, they aim to explore the inner characteristics and extended potential of their instruments, to connect clarity and distortion, find intimacy in feedback, alternate between rough noise and uplifting silence, soaking in the deeper fields of imagined landscapes.
Their self-titled debut EP was released by Bonambi on the 16th of March 2024. Fascinated by the harmonic borderlands, the coming together of ether and earth, and the blending of ambient and band dynamics; a metallic and meditative sound world arises.