Curiouser and Curiouser”, Alice Said.

“Curiouser and curiouser”, Alice said. As she was growing taller into a giant, and then smaller, like a dwarf. Why would this album be a favourite of so many a Nitsfan? My guess and feeling is that it expresses Henk Hofstede’s and Nits’s view on music most closely. Nits are fantasists, romantics and dreamers. They create freely with only music on their mind. Wouldn’t we want the whole world to be a little bit more like them? Music is hearing fantasy play. Music is listening to our imagination as it is played out into the air, traveling through familiar rooms, but with all the different contents and associations that our minds and hearts can intuit. In Giant Normal Dwarf, there’s something like a magical alchemy of fantasy between the words and the music. Music is, by nature, a fantasy, the most immaterial of all arts, it flies away from the instrument, flies away from the notated page; sometimes it’s like an irruption of the strangeness of an imagined world into our day-to-day existence. Music opens the door to an unknown world of our imagination where the complexity of our sensibility is expressed. As dreamers and fantasists do, Nits look at the world differently. In their hands music is like a craftsmanship of little melodic wonders and fairy tales. The album sounds like a naive but intelligent, pictorial vision of the world, floating gently on crystal clear, softly rippling, poppling water, whispered through the willows in the wind. Let’s be for ever romantically naive, innocently sweet and crazily imaginative like Nits on Giant Normal Dwarf. A tanker filled with sweet perfume, little red roses falling from heaven, an oak tree and a little flower, let’s let our wits go wool. Yes, how do we get there, – where the water is sweet, where the pebble is a mountain -, from here…?

Joke Roelandt, May 2019