You might struggle to conjure a more esoteric scenario for an album than the one that underpins An Attempt to Draw Aside the Veil, the fourth record of largely instrumental duets from experimental lutist Jozef van Wissem and textural guitarist and filmmaker Jim Jarmusch. On this hazy suite of seven pieces, the pair ruminates on the apocalyptic visions of religious poet and painter William Blake and the divisive ideas of foundational occultist Helena Blavatsky. Named for a particularly wondrous Blake passage, the finale, “When the Sun Rises Do You Not See a Round Disc of Fire,” fades toward silence as a robotic voice reads a paragraph from Godfrey Higgins’ 19th-century tome Anacalypsis. The sun (“in early times… believed to be the creator… the first object of adoration”) is the grand thread running through world religions, the clipped monologue offers, words pushed against one another as if racing to share this forgotten wisdom. This all plays out, mind you, alongside an electric guitar that treats riffs like mere suggestions and a Renaissance instrument manipulated here until it becomes a mirage.
Against most odds, An Attempt to Draw Aside the Veil, the duo’s first album in seven years, is a remarkably conversational work, playing out as an alternately heated and convivial exchange between two rapacious minds and thoughtful players. Until that concluding excerpt, the philosophical underpinnings of An Attempt linger in the background, less required reading than
atmospheric context. With the lute and acoustic guitar intertwined into impossibly knotted patterns, “The Unclouded Day” suggests a slow walk through a verdant garden on a cloudy day, two old friends sharing their respective beliefs and enthusiasms—their senses of right and wrong, maybe, or abiding aesthetic preferences. During “The Two Paths,” Jarmusch and van Wissem perform a musical tug of war, Jarmusch’s compressed growl of electric feedback pulling against van Wissem’s pensive lute line, and vice versa. By the end, you sense that they’ve had an impact on each other, with the lute prancing beyond the melody just as the guitar hum starts to refine its amoeboid creep. The distinct sides draw toward one another, the rare debate that prompts reconsideration.
Key to this surprising esprit is just how offhand these recordings sound, as if we’re listening in on their composition in real time. Both Jarmusch and van Wissem play multiple instruments here—bare-bones drums, ghostly electronics, haunting synthesizers—but these pieces feel like lightly edited first takes, as frank as the conversations they suggest. Opener “Concerning the White Horse” is a spectacularly impressionistic version of latter-day Earth. Jarmusch replaces the sharp edges of Dylan Carlson’s blues with the color fade of a Mark Rothko sunrise, while Van Wissem’s bass drum swaps Adrienne Davies’ peerless finesse for a primal insistence. The piece scans like an idea they captured as they teased it out. Even that literary finale moves like an untempered tide of phosphorescence, guitars and electronics funneled into one wide, radiant smear. With theatrical readings by Tilda Swinton and multiple tracks that floated beyond the 10-minute mark, their Sacred Bones debut, 2012’s The Mystery of Heaven, often felt fussy; they have smartly foregrounded the energy of their dialogue.
Separately, as a duo, or with other outfits, claims of novelty have perpetually dogged van Wissem and Jarmusch. One, after all, is a prolific lute player who composes in palindromes and upends classical mores, a veritable plucking punchline; the other is an insistently independent auteur who, at times, has seemed interested in a sort of subdued Southern Lord cosplay. But after their extended absence, the pair has found a more fitting framework, singular in feeling but fluid in execution. An Attempt to Draw Aside the Veil allows us within that realm, an accessible wonder spun from obscure considerations.
