On the occasion of Henk Hofstede’s birthday I wrote this little story.

The Boy in the Tree

When a boy wants a peaceful view of the world at large, what does he do? When he wants a little adventure and to see things differently, what does he do? When he wants some time to himself to dream and feel – while the other boys are playing football – what does he do? When he wants to see and share the bigger picture from his tiny place in the world, what does he do? When he just wants to escape, observe and doesn’t want to be seen, what does he do? When he wants to be closer to the moon …

He climbs a tree .

The world is big country. When you are small, like a playground of cowboys and indians. The world is an adventure, a place to love and dream. The boy in the tree tells about himself by describing his world and the things he loves. The inward gaze of most pop musicians who are on a trip of soul searching and introspection in a personal dialogue with themselves or a loved one, is opened up so graciously by this boy sitting in his tree, spanning a wide panorama of a whole world. This is a man with the eyes of a child looking at the world from a tree. A romantic dreamer who creates a world through the desire of making music and reproducing a world of forms and colours through the ethereal paradigm of music. A music as refreshing as the wind in the trees.

At the time of the release of the album Giant Normal Dwarf, I was living in a flat as a student, high up in an appartement block that was situated on a hill just outside of Louvain. My desk was facing the window so what I saw from my chair was mostly sky and when I looked down I saw a row of tiny houses each with their garden, all looking very much alike. I observed the people who appeared in the gardens from time to time, some of them became quite familiar to me, I could see their lives being lived down below. All the while listening to this strange, wonderful little thing that was called Giant Normal Dwarf.

The whistling beginning with its galloping rhythm immediately set the scene of a few friends going on a little adventure in some imaginary world. So far removed from what was going on in my student books. I was drawn to this Giant Normal Dwarf world where the immensity and infinity of it all were pictured in the sweetest language of words and sounds. The endless rivers, the giant moon, water in all its forms so abundant and omnipresent, the encompassing darkness of the night with the song of a nightbird dancing through a never ending sky, and through hills and mountains – where nighttime progresses with the solemnity of the sarabande by Handel – trees reaching for the infinity of the skies, their fruits plenty and succulent, the immeasurable, mysterious sounds of nature, the many peculiarities of the material world, a place with an endless supply of beauty waiting to be awakened out of a sweet slumber, a colourful universe of fish to wade through, the wind that takes you with it from here to there, a world of reality and imagination that find each other in music, the carousel of time, our little world contrasting with this beautiful vastness of time and place, colours and forms. 

Just like Handel, Hofstede knows how to give shape to a feeling of profoundness by seemingly simple means. There’s a spirituality of nature in many of the Giant Normal Dwarf songs, at times masked in surrealist portraits of an animistic world. The musical materialism of Nits on this album is certainly endowed with a subtle sense of spirituality in the way of the Dutch rationalist philosopher Baruch de Spinoza. In “Moon Moon” e.g. there’s a sweet solemnity present as if in worship of the moon, “Fountain Man” could be an ode to Water, the dive on a Sunday in “Around The Fish” sounds like a slow, ritualistic or ceremonial act and when Henk Hofstede sings “All I hear is the wind in the leaves”, the music flies off from the tree like some mysterious spirit.

This music just knew how to translate my sense of smallness in an enormous world of wonder, beauty, but also sadness and transience, in a diminutive vocabulary of knees and shoulders, elbows and eyebrows. Sitting in the tree the boy watches how time goes by. Empiricism, materialism, “empathicalism”, the boy philosophises and composes with coloured pencils and a camera.

From my chair I looked at the houses down below and the university library’s carillon would toll every 15 minutes, a sure sign that time was passing, but how I loved the sound of its bells – despite it all. The music in all its splendour takes with it a piece of time never to be relived again, I heard that in the sound of the carillon – carried by the wind -, which oddly enough sounded to me like the most uplifting and pleasurable noise, it held sunshine in its ringing, not unlike these sweet stepping sounds of the imaginative characters that populate Giant Normal Dwarf and disappear in the infinite shoeblack. It’s a universal theme that Nits would develop into their own trademark: the tininess of a human being in the vastness of the universe. Their work shaped this thread in the most concrete way possible in music: a dress and a pair of shoes, we need them to get by in this big country that is the world. In the case of Nits, their tender way of focussing on the concrete details of an existence only emphasises the magnitude of the whole and the awareness of a profound melancholy of what is small, all too ephemeral, but beautiful. 

The music in its clearly defined lines, soft limpidity and with its fantasy sounds seems to be derived from the three musicians’ concrete anchoring in their world, it follows the traces of the paths their feet have taken, it bears the imprint of the things their hands have touched, their eyes have seen, their minds have remembered. Their music is like the sequence of photographic stills taken by the camera of memory and imagination. A combination that made the music of Nits stand out as a remarkable and personal piece of phenomenology, the recreation of a Lebenswelt in music. Their music is a sensible intuition of their world.

Much later on the boy would return to the big country, retracing the footsteps of the artist wearing a Gaucho hat and an OK brooch. He brought with him the humble gift of a glimmering Nits snowflake, to compensate for all the vastness. The boy in the tree made it to the Ghost Ranch on his journey. This vastness has always been an essential part of the Nits sound – the patience of vastness and immensity, like those immense rocks in the New Mexico valleys – along with the finest details of the little pink flower. Those two songs – “Boy In A Tree” and “The Ghost Ranch” – are amongst the finest expressions of the Nits universe.

“Boy In A Tree” ends with the sound of the bells of a bygone past. Now, so many years later, the sound of these Nits bells reminds me of the time I spent in the company of the library’s carillon during my student days. A time of youngness and endless possibilities, of carefreeness. The carillon still chimes. In its baroque theme. And whenever I go back to Louvain, what I look forward to most of all, is hearing the sounds of those bells again. And I know: Henk Hofstede is climbing the tree… again …

Joke Roelandt, September 2023