This Is My Blood finds Jozef van Wissem deepening his long project of dragging the lute out of its historical frame and into the present, this time with a gaze fixed on deserted, contemporary landscapes. The album is literally framed by two “cinematic hypnotist slide lute” pieces, improvised for Maquina, a psychedelic road‑movie shot in the Colorado desert by filmmaker Joaquim Pujol.

Rather than moving through tidy song forms, these bookending tracks feel like mirages: scorched, hallucinatory reveries that “seem to shimmer in the heat of abandoned horizons rather than unfold in time,” as the press material puts it. Long, bent notes, slowly evolving figures and smeared overtones turn the slide‑treated lute into a kind of broken lap‑steel choir; the music hovers over the image of emptied highways and eroded rock, registering both beauty and desolation. The pieces in between maintain that slow, hypnotic pull and explicitly invite a return to long‑form listening. Born from improvisations for Maquina, the album’s material “stretches toward a renewed patience for duration, where repetition becomes ritual and listening turns devotional.” Van Wissem leans into minimalist structures - cycling ostinatos, incremental variations, subtle dynamic swells - not to lull the listener but to open a space where small changes take on immense weight. The “ecstatic second piece” referenced in the notes pushes this approach furthest, its gradually intensifying patterns working like a desert liturgy, conjuring a sense of ascent without ever abandoning the instrument’s austere core.

Throughout, darkness is “not theatrical but intimate”: instead of gothic flourish, we get a slow circling around grief, erosion and “the quiet violence of memory,” the sense that loss is knitted into each motif. Amid this largely instrumental landscape stands a single vocal track, “Remission.” After so much wordless playing, the entry of van Wissem’s voice feels like a deliberate breach: a lone “vocal incantation” that briefly punctures the album’s wordless meditation. As on earlier records, his lyrics draw on a “mythical Christian” lexicon of love, faith and the afterlife, delivered in a mantra‑like, repetitive style that makes them feel less like narrative than like prayer or spell. Here, the title Remission carries multiple charges at once - spiritual absolution, reprieve from suffering, the medical language of illness and recovery - deepening the album’s engagement with personal loss and fragile hope. The song doesn’t resolve the surrounding darkness so much as name it, then let it echo back into the instrumental pieces.