Composer-lute player Jozef van Wissem is renowned for his unusual approach of the renaissance and baroque lute. He cuts and pastes classical pieces, reverses melodies, adds electronics and processed field recordings made at airport lounges and train stations. The unusual wedlock of composition and improvisation creates an unheard amalgam of contemporary folk and late renaissance music. He has accomplished the strange feat of bridging the idiom of seventeenth century lute literature and twenty-first century composition. Although van Wissem uses subtle electronic sound manipulation, he has largely stayed faithful to the particular timbre, resonance and playing technique of the lute. van Wissem first came to be noticed a few years ago because of his radical conceptual approach to renaissance lute music: he deconstructed existing compositions, for instance by playing them backwards. He also composes his own pieces for lute, using palindromes and mirrored structures. his music therefore does not have a traditional linear progression, nor leads to a climax, it rather stays on the same level of intensity. His music is quiet and not so much demands concentrated listening, as it will bring the listener in a state of concentrated listening. van Wissem runs the incunabulum record label, and performs extensively around the world. He has worked with Tetuzi Akiyama, Maurizio Bianchi, Smegma, Gregg Kowalski and James Blackshaw. With Blackshaw he has formed brethren of the free spirit (important records) his latest solo records entitled “it is all that is made” and ” ex patris were released by important records. He has lectured a.o. at Wesleyan University, Mills College and Cambridge University on ‘the liberation of the lute”. van Wissem has received numerous commissions and grants, most recently from National Gallery, London van Wissem performs around 80 lute concerts per year. He lives in New York and Amsterdam.
Che Chen is a sound and visual artist based in Brooklyn, New York. As a solo performer, Che uses stringed, wind, reed and percussion instruments, tape machines, film projectors and other objects in works that explore his interests in perceptual phenomena and folk and ritual musics from around the world. Che’s current performances utilize acoustic sound sources and tape machines placed in various locations around the performance area in order to explore the phenomena of difference tones (closely tuned pitches that result in beating patterns), phase relationships, repetition, the spacialisation of sound and the relationship between “audience” and “performer”.
He also plays in a duo with multi-instrumentalist, Robbie Lee, in Jozef Van Wissem’s “Heresy of the Free Spirit”–a trio that plays arrangements of Van Wissem’s lute pieces as well as free improvisations–and in True Primes, his duo with singer/percussionist, Rolyn Hu. He is also the editor of OSOS, a private press artists’ magazine inspired by Wallace Berman’s Semina, Aspen Journal and the Fluxus design work of George Maciunas. OSOS # 3, which will be a double LP and magazine in a box, will be out in September 2010.