The Haptic Sensuality of Wool

Today, all alone in the house, I decided to really listen to some music, filling the living room, – through the long tall black loudspeakers – with the clear, gracious sounds of a Nits album. For this summer’s day I chose “Wool” and its wise balancing between Eros and Thanatos. Wool is soft to the touch. I play it loud with all the doors in the house opened so I can hear it in every room. It’s still soft. Our couturiers of haptic music chose this natural material that keeps us warm and cosy as a title for their most sensual of records. It’s the one that stays closest to our skin, that seems to enter our pores and makes us shiver.

”Wool” is slow, the instruments are humming, spinning delicately interwoven threads of music, a dance of bumblebees fluttering around seductive flowers, an embroidery of honey in the making, knowing that summer will soon be over. The eternal opposites of life reunited in a blanket of slow sensuality. In this patient phenomenology of life and love our senses are once again finely tickled. And you feel that this time the eyes are not at the forefront of the whole music ritual that enfolds: the music seems filled with all sorts of tastes, bitter and sweet, smells of seduction and death, textures of wool, and featherlike, that caress the skin. Everything we see outside us tends to become an object, exterior to our blue eyes; with sounds, smells, tastes and touch it’s different, it’s as if you can take them in, making them a part of you. In “Wool” Nits take their time to wet our appetite for every pleasure life offers, in a somewhat chaste and cautious way. The “Wool” songs are indeed little symphonies of the senses; they pair the intimacy of all our senses with a patient music of longing, wishing, remembering, seducing. The music moves on a rhythm that wants to provide us with a time to feel.

The mood is set, straight from the start of the album, with the beautiful words of the wise and sensitive ivory boy: ” you’re keeping my senses awake”… Hanging on to life expressed as an intimacy with our material world through the senses. The melancholy of an attachment to a world that we feel so intimately connected to. As always elements of nature, – wind, rain, ice and fire, trees, lakes – but also fairly anodyne objects, the figurants in our everyday lives, – the goldfish in his bowl, paper straws, oranges and honey – are populating the Nits world, hesitating between the liveliness of Eros, his hunger and thirst for life, and the sombreness, the inescapability of Thanatos, a music poetry hovering between playful fertility and barren dryness, the cyclic nature of beauty.

The little details always prominent in Henk Hofstede’s lyrics are always connected to the big, cosmic whole and in this way the frontman of Nits keeps on showing us that when you bother with the small, everyday things in life in a loving, “erotic” way, you always arrive at the essence of life itself… Something to think about. Eros turns every man into a poet, Plato said. In “Wool”, the sonorous world that Nits create, contains all tonalities in-between the appetite for life and the threat of death. Sensuality and seduction, “Wool” is like a vital, sensuous reality written in the mystery of sound. I read somewhere that women in Kirgistan make blankets and tapestries of boiled wool and they infuse the threads with love and joy; with every movement they make to create the carpet, they instil it with their good intentions and their love, their soul. I think Henk and Nits had something quite similar in mind when composing this woollen album. With Nits wool becomes a fabric of the soul…

I chose the video of “Angel of Happy Hour”, their most sensual song on “Wool” and maybe of their whole repertoire. It’s so sweetly, gently, soulfully erotic. There’s such a beautiful echo of longing in Henk’s voice and the lyrical lines here…

Have a happy summer…!

Joke Roelandt, July 2019