“The Lute is Eternal,” proclaims the text that concludes the ten-minute video to Jozef van Wissem’s 2023 single “The Call of the Deathbird.” The Dutch composer’s gruff vocals appear throughout the short film, shot in the vast Soviet mausoleum outside Warsaw, but his singing (and the relatively angelic voice of Hillary Woods) directs the listener back to the intricate, meditative sounds of his main ax. The strings of his Renaissance-vintage instrument stand in for the silenced voices of all the people who died in the city during World War II, as well as the more than 20,000 World War II soldiers buried in the mausoleum. Van Wissem lived in Warsaw during COVID lockdown, and it’s easy to connect the empty spaces depicted in the video to the eerie quiet of the pandemic’s early days.
The deathbirds to which van Wissem refers are actually extinct birds, whose voices he sampled from a record and electronically modified. He first used them on his 2022 soundtrack for F.W. Murnau’s silent film Nosferatu, where you can also hear him playing programmed rhythms and distorted electric guitar. Van Wissem is returning to Chicago for the first time in five years to perform that soundtrack live at the Music Box Theatre during a screening of Murnau’s film, which precedes by three weeks the debut of Robert Eggers’s new version of Nosferatu.
Jozef Van Wissem Van Wissem provides a live score for F.W. Murnau’s 1922 silent film Nosferatu. Wed 12/4, 7 PM, Music Box Theatre, 3733 N. Southport, $15–$18, all ages