Celebrating the 100 year anniversary of Nosferatu The Cube is pleased to welcome Jozef Van Wissem to play his live score to the horror classic that started it all.

According to The Quietus "Jozef Van Wissem is possibly the most-known lute player in the Western world. To get into his 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. He sets the listener into a private world, looking out through a glass darkly, such is the intense quality of music. Brevity, simplicity, directness is the key".

In 2019 Jozef Van Wissem was commissioned by the Cinémathèque Française in Paris to compose a soundtrack to the restored version of Nosferatu (1922). For this silent film the director F. W. Murnau  hired a real vampire, Max Schreck, to act in the movie. In real life his grave was robbed in 2015 and his head was stolen.

Jozef performed the score for the first time at the sold out Cinémathèque in front of an ecstatic audience of 500 people. When he was writing the score he has found a Dutch 7" record on the streets of Rotterdam with sounds of extinct birds. These sounds were enhanced through the use of electronics and added to the mix.

The score starts out minimally on Jozef's signature slide Baroque lute with repeating 3 notes bass patterns, later mixing with eerie electronically manipulated bird sounds, and then the 12-strings electric guitar in alternate tuning is introduced. When the final Act 5 kicks in, the score surprisingly erupts in slow, bizarre death metal.

In the Vampire movie there’s a note saying: "The Call Of The Death Bird". Jozef Van Wissem thought that would be an apt contemporary title for my soundtrack. 2xLP release is forthcoming.

Jozef Van Wissem is ‘both an avant-garde composer and a baroque lutenist, and thus no stranger to dichotomy’ (New York Times). Jozef performed over 1200 solo lute concerts in churches, cathedrals and at concert venues all over the world, and prestigious rock festivals like ATP and Primavera Sound, playing his all black, one-of-a-kind baroque lute custom-built for him. The titles of his works  often have a Christian-mystical appeal. Van Wissem moved to New York in 1993 and studied lute with Pat O'Brien. In 2013 he won the Cannes Soundtrack Award for best score at the Cannes Film Festival for Only Lovers Left Alive. Van Wissem has released four records with the film director Jim Jarmusch.

https://jozefvanwissem.bandcamp.com/album/new-lute-music-for-film

Doors 7.30. Film just after 8.