To get into Jozef 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. He sets the listener into a private world, looking out through a glass darkly, such is the intense quality of the music. Brevity, simplicity, directness is the key. (Quietus) Van Wissem is ‘both an avant-garde composer and a baroque lutenist, and thus no stranger to dichotomy,’ (New York Times). He has been ‘pushing the lute’s agenda out of the academy and into more accessible circles’ (Pitchfork). He’s performed over 1200 solo lute concerts in churches and at concert venues around the world, including prestigious rock festivals like ATP and Primavera Sound, playing his all black, one-of-a- kind baroque lute custom build 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. He was commissioned to compose a sound piece for Hans Holbein’s painting ‘The Ambassadors” (1533) by the National Gallery. In December 2017 he was invited to perform the madrigal depicted in Caravaggio’s painting ‘the Lute Player ‘(1596) at the Hermitage museum. His new record, features this Renaissance work, entitled “ You Know That I Love You”. The record’s title ” We Adore You, You Have No Name” comes ” from the Secret of Secrets book, a description of worship of the nameless all-inclusive God.””

Emil Amos, world renowned as drummer of the illustrious experimental rock groups Om and Grails, has an increasingly prolific, though relatively unknown, solo career under the moniker Holy Sons. Home recording over 1000 songs since the project’s inception in 1992, Amos has spent the better part of the last two decades honing his song writing and production skills over a wide swath of genres in a mission to capture his internal world sonically.
 
Only a handful of shows have ever been played under the name (including opening stints for Quasi, Devendra Banhart, Will Oldham, J Mascis, Daniel Johnston, and a show at a community center in Dharmasala, India) and none of the records have been traditionally promoted, developing a dedicated underground fan-base through word of mouth alone.
 
Survivalist Tales! is Holy Sons’ 9th record, and represents the apex of Emil Amos’ obsession to push stylistic genres to their breaking point while wrenching psyche-anthems out of the darkest frontiers of self-confrontation. The songs are a seemingly impossible blend of nightmarish Blade Runner-esque moog music with the darkest side of 70’s easy-listening psyche and feature some of the most unabashedly soaring choruses Amos has ever put to tape.
 
Combining avant-sound collage with lyrics culled from the hard-won truths of self-exploration, Survivalist Tales! builds a beautiful imagining of future music. For the first time ever Amos is poised to present the project publicly; this upcoming tour can legitimately be described as Holy Sons’ first tour.