
JOZEF VAN WISSEM
The Night Dwells In The Day (Incunabulum)
The Night Dwells In The Day is the second album in under 12 months by Jozef Van Wissem, distinctive Dutch folk artist and friend of the auteur: on 2023’s American Landscapes, his prowess on the lute was heard alongside the guitar playing of film director Jim Jarmusch. This time, Van Wissem’s only collaborator is Hilary Woods, millennial Irish indie musician turned drone-rock experimentalist, and her vocals on The Call Of The Deathbird lend suitable gothic pallor across nine tense, chilly minutes.
Of the album’s instrumental pieces, Van Wissem’s lute often provides a glassy clarity, as on In Exile Here We Wander, but an underpinning drone is also germane to the sound of Slowly The Rays Of Daylight Fade. Vocals, in a stern spoke-rapped style that bears trace influence of a band like Einsturzende Neubauten, return on closing number The Day Of The Lord, joined by a metronomic backbeat and gauzy ambient sound design; it’s all rather intense, and sometimes borderline hammy, but worth losing oneself in.
words NOEL GARDNER