Jozef van Wissem (born 22 November 1962) is a Dutch minimalist composer and lute player[1] based in Brooklyn.

It’s not interesting to a lot of people because it comes with all this baggage, this set of rules that these academics gave the instrument, that keeps it in a museum.” To that end, Van Wissem often performs in rock venues and could easily pass for a Nordic metal overlord, with thigh-high black leather boots and long, dirty-blond hair.

Van Wissem holds the instrument in front of his chest as the natural sound resonates inside the lute’s boat-like cavity.

"[9] In his review of the 2016 album When Shall This Bright Day Begin, Foster said that "To get into Van Wissem’s world is to surrender to the inevitability – and timelessness – of a strange music created at its own pace, in a manner wholly of its creator’s making.

Louderthanwar announced his upcoming tour and wrote, Jozef van Wissem is a Dutch lute player who vamps the instrument into the now.

[18] The New York Times wrote " A subtly medieval score — distinguished by the thrum of a lute and composed by Jozef van Wissem — draws out a surreal dimension.

Three years ago Van Wissem was commissioned to perform this piece at St Petersburg’s Hermitage museum which displays Caravaggio’s The Lute Player which also depicts a young man reading the notes of the same madrigal...

Later, for the encore, he plays another piece including all-the-more hypnotising lyrics “Love destroys all Evil and frees us” multiplied and intensified.” [22] In February 2021 Van Wissem premiered a new black Baroque lute on Dutch National TV.

Humo Magazine wrote, “Eight minutes of Jozef van Wissem: the Dutch lute player from New York, who presents his art as a kind of mix between a medieval monk and a Satanist Rasputin.

"In May, Jozef van Wissem, a Dutch composer and avant-garde lute player known for his collaborations with the film director Jim Jarmusch, will perform a live score at a “Nosferatu” screening at a large church in Belfast, Northern Ireland.

Beginning with a solo played on the lute, his performance will incorporate electric guitar and distorted recordings of extinct birds, graduating from subtlety to gothic horror.

In January 2024, Van Wissem issued the solo single "With Our Hands Our Hearts to Raise," and followed it with the long-player The Night Dwells in the Day two weeks later.

According to Bill Meyer in The Chicago Reader, "The Lute is Eternal” proclaims the text that concludes theten-minute video to Jozef van Wissem’s recent single, “The Call of the Deathbird.”, shot in the vast Soviet mausoleum outside Warsaw, but his singing directs the listener back to the intricate, meditative sounds of his main ax.

On The Night Dwells in the Day, the first of two albums he’s released this year, he bolsters the lute’s delicate progress through the palindromic melodic structures of his compositions using sequenced beats, subliminal electronic drones, and stern intonations.