\"In 2007 Jozef Van Wissem recorded Stations of the Cross, a CD of solo lute performances, in airports. During the centuries when his preferred instrument was popular, cathedrals were the noblest things men built. Now our most impressive buildings are devoted to travel and commerce; what better place to ponder eternity than in a terminal lounge? Nobody Living Can Make Me Turn Back is another expression of Van Wissem’s effort to tend his centuries-deep mystical awareness amid the trappings of modernity.
On the back of the album he stands garbed in robes next to a backlit cross, and inside you’ll find a quote from the writings of Henry Ruso, a beatified German monk who lived in the 14th century. The video for album opener “Virium Illarum” looks like something out of the plague years. But the tune’s production scrambles centuries. Van Wissem’s made a lot of nakedly acoustic music whose main concession to modernity was the way it merged the palindromic structures of vintage lute music with modern minimalist discipline. The artificial reverb on “Virium Illarum” drags his Latin chanting into the present, and the ceremonial beats are so electronically distorted that one fears that a subwoofer was mortally harmed in order to make them. And on “Your Days Gone Like a Shadow” a lute subjected to surf guitar amplification lurks behind the wheeling layers of voice and acoustic strings. These manifestations of modernity cast a reflective light on the tracks where Van Wissem returns to his classic methodology, tracing melodies forward and backward like lutenists have done for centuries.\"
