Jozef Van Wissem

Jozef Van Wissem is ‘both an avant-garde composer and a baroque lutenist, and thus no stranger to dichotomy,’ (New York Times). He has been ‘pushing the lute’s agenda out of the academy and into more accessible circles’ (Pitchfork).  The titles of his works often have a Christian-mystical appeal. His work is featured in the Sims Medieval Video game, as well as in Irma Vep (2022) . In 2013 he  won the Cannes Soundtrack Award for best score at the Cannes Film Festival for "Only Lovers Left Alive". In 2022 he released the neo- classical solo lute record " Behold I Make All Things New" and the soundtrack to Nosferatu . “The soundtrack goes from silence to noise over the course of 90 minutes, culminating in “dense, slow death metal.” (NewYork Times) His work for cinema, from "Nosferatu" to "Irma Vep", has consistently demonstrated his ability to treat music as architecture rather than accompaniment, allowing silence, resonance and repetition to shape emotional space with remarkable precision. In 2025 he toured and released "The Day The Angels Cried" in duo with Jim Jarmusch. In 2026 he released "This Is My Blood " ( Incunabulum Records) which "opens and closes with hallucinatory lute reveries, music that seems to shimmer in the heat of abandoned horizons rather than unfold in time" His latest collaborative project is with Jim Jarmusch, releasing November 6th via Sacred Bones Records – the double album project Bocca di Lupo and Mouth of the Wolf.