Alankomaat (Waiting for Solmu)

Have you ever been to California? I have, although I’m not an avid traveler, but I have family there. I am one of those people who travel to see relatives or friends rather than to discover new places. Odd huh? Traveling for pleasure is a relatively new thing though, but the connection between journeying abroad and making friends or meeting new people is indeed very old. In literature and in our personal or family history, the stories of people – who became friends or lovers – and (far away) places, are a recurrent theme. “Alankomaat” is such a story. It is Nits at their most charming, most intimate and sociable at the same time, looking at their own lives and their world of sweet Dutchness, projected through the eyes of others, other minds, hearts and tongues, making a connection with the world around them, their music in a very hospitable mood. Pop ballads centering around family, friends and trips abroad, adding elements of other musical traditions along with them. And this time there’s also a Californian connection through the character of Mrs Robinson…

Watching “The Graduate”, I couldn’t help being moved to tears by the seamless correspondence between the images on screen – the scenery of the Californian streets, houses and landscapes – and the soundtrack mostly by Simon and Garfunkel. It is difficult to explain how one can feel this perfect symbiosis between a place and a musical theme, you have to know how the air feels in a particular country or region, how it smells, the pace of its surroundings, the humidity and the weight of the skies, the force or the weakness of the light, the way the people there move, the oddness and particularities of their behaviour through our eyes, the smell of the food, the colours of the earth, the trees, the grandeur of the highways and buildings, what the rooms in houses are like (or in hotels), the sort of gardens that border them, the smell, taste and feel of the water…, away from home you can experience and really live what difference, otherness feels like, and then afterwards never really being able to explain it; but when I think of California, I can still “feel” it. The movie “The Graduate”, brought that feeling back, in a very powerful way, it was like being there again, almost for real, and the music played a very big part in this awkward, but very pleasant, physical remembrance. It brought back a physical awareness of what it is like to be somewhere (else), it makes something unfamiliar feel kind of familiar, the strangest sensation really, vivid and moving. 

The further away you live from the Netherlands, the more Nits music can make you relive the air of the Low Countries, I guess. If you have never been there, it makes you curious to experience for yourself this intimate Dutchness which is so very peculiar, distinctive; Nits music is a translucent reflection of the Dutch skies in the ever present water, of a city of both everydayness and excellence and exception, it has the open spirit of endless, flat, green landscapes, the coolness and clarity of a wind-swept countryside or a narrow street that ends in the mirroring light of a canal, it resounds the patience of a well-established member of an old continent, the elegance of creation of an artistically free and prosperous nation, the frivolous rigour of an open society. It reverberates a whole tradition of cultural history in the light-hearted way of dashing, high-class pop songs. I remember thinking one day while walking around in the neighbourhood of Amsterdam where I lived, how unimaginably close the music of Nits fits the streets and views of this remarkable city; when walking down the road where I lived – towards the water with the picturesque bridge, the ducks, the green grass alongside it as if you were in small countryside village -, I played the music in my head and knew that they belonged together. Dwelling through the world, we make our home…

Nits just know how to make things personal, without giving in to the clichés of the deeply troubled soul; their music is a glimpse behind the scenes of an intimate family life, a familiar city life, of a world of meaningful, “friendly” connections; their rhetoric is one of memories of people and places, of objects, images we have lived in for as long as we can remember. Music sticks to the air, its ethereal character forms a ghostly combination with it. Music glides through the air; it is how we are able to breathe in the atmosphere of a place and translate it, by listening. At one point Dustin Hoffman is driving in an open car up to Berkeley across the Oakland Bay Bridge to look for his young girlfriend, accompanied by the traditional English ballad “Are you going to Scarborough Fair”, in the Simon & Garfunkel version. The movement of the red car, steel and metal, the scent of delicate, fresh herbs – parsley, sage, rosemary and thyme -, all together, meeting through the warm Californian air. It lends the scene a poignancy and honesty it could never achieve without the music. Music binds images formed by all of our senses into a particular atmospheric mood; music moves with you, invisibly, through the mysterious combination of air and light that your life is made up of. 

When I listen to “Alankomaat”, it makes me want to watch old, classic Hollywood movies with gentlemen like Fred Astaire and Humphrey Bogart and dames like Lauren Bacall and Bette Davis, with people dressed up in tuxedos and elegant evening gowns. The album houses a sort of old, cultured ambiance, it takes the form of a refined chamber pop which displays our cultural heritage – of a mostly old Europe, in subdued, sepia music colours of the past – in the same way as those American movies (in black and white) were open theatres of uptown American social and cultural life. “Alankomaat” bears the stamp of a whole array of creative and artistic expressions, but it is also streetwise, it loves wandering around in old towns and takes in everything it encounters; it is an emblem of polished and poised musical thinking rooted in a fertile soil of literature, cinema, theatre, painting, sculpture, architecture and various music traditions, maybe not by explicitly referring to them, but you can feel that they are present in the way Nits make music, in the subtle depth and rich colours of their songs, the creativity in the musical structures, their pensive nature, their attention to detail, their intricate expressiveness and perhaps above all, in the way the musicians use their hands and fingers, almost like plastic artists do. Under Henk’s fingers the keys of the piano become softly malleable into beautiful melodic forms. Rob and Henk are masters of touch, their fingers and hands grooming the music to perfection. The sound is “soigné”, and well thought out, never rushed, but balanced. And Arwen and Titia fitted perfectly in this tender scheme; they added a delicately perfumed reserve through their soft voices, a graceful charm of blondness and an impeccable musical savoir-faire.

It is a chic album befitting marble and alabaster concert halls and champagne-foyers decorated with twinkling chandeliers. This album hosts some of their most European sounding songs which unfold on the streets of some of its grandest cities (I think of “Soul Man” and “Hold me Geneva”), drenched in a rich cultural history; it all sounds so poshly civilised, if you know what I mean. The whole album sounds a bit stately, majestic even, just as the town of Geneva really.  And the darkness of decay and melancholy of a somewhat tired continent, as a threatening sky, always looming over the music landscape. The “House of Jacob” depicts a cosy family home with the grandeur suitable to a palace or a castle; “Changing Room” describes the inner distress felt in a waiting room with this same sense of sophistication. And yet, everything still feels so sweetly intimate… “Alankomaat” is about the beauty and intimacy of small, individual lives amidst the splendour and impressiveness of an old, established society. And the preciousness of both. Just listen to Henk’s poetry – of a man and his house – built on the foundations of an inner world filled with memories. Or to the magnificent “Soul Man”, with Henk as the candid, spontaneous raconteur of the story of his friend Seppo, with the city of Helsinki as one of the main protagonists.

“You’re like this leaf that’s falling down”… Europe in a never-ending autumn…

Joke Roelandt, October 2019