Die Befindliche Holländische Berge A Vision of Beauty in Pop Music

House of the Sleeping Beauties

It is Friday evening and I am sitting in the soft twilight at the kitchen table listening to this real beauty Nits made, named “angst”, a little Dutch masterpiece filled with fragments and scenes reminiscing on some momentous days in time. In the clair-obscur of the soft summer darkness and the fluorescent light of my laptop, I am instantly transported to those “Dutch Mountains”, to this quintessential, small “Hollandish” pictural world, a visual narrative of Dutchness in the midst of the wide historic universe. With nuanced tinctures and touches and a meticulousness that reminds me of the Dutch Masters of a golden age gone by. Nits were, of course, “thrown” in those “Dutch Mountains”, their birthplace is indelible and ever present in their music like a breeding ground of tender, succulent grass. Nits are Dutch, European and cosmopolitan, yes, exactly as it should be.

The essence of their musicianship is however not defined by this worldly, storytelling character; their musical thinking is not geographically oriented like a travel guide that takes you on an exploration through a kinetic melody of approaching and always receding horizons. Their insatiable appetite for a musical Wanderlust springs from an inquisitive, seeking mind and from a philosophical, musing attitude towards life.

Nits were all along the ugly duckling, the odd ones out in the world of pop bands. They are aesthetes in the egocentric, bustling, moralising or – at the other extreme – scolding or bad- mouthing, often superficial and by love games obsessed enclave of pop. More than this futile concern with all sorts of identity crises or personal love intrigues, Nits’ quest has always revolved around a certain sensibility that is much broader than any particular vision on society as a whole or any – albeit – balanced shuffling between nationality and cosmopolitanism.

At the origin of their music making lies this very fundamental, philosophical, or more precisely, phenomenological attitude, a sensitivity that stems from the nature of their creativity. Their creativity itself is of a phenomenological nature. Phenomenologists like to think about their world starting from their very own, concrete, daily perception and experience of all things surrounding them; they start out from what is closest, and from thereon explore the rest of the world with the same closeness of mind and heart. Nits share this same manner of approach: they let go of all previously conceived notions, traditions and prejudices and start afresh from what they first encounter when they step out into their own “little universe”, into a world full of “sleeping beauties”. In a mainly European, fairytale world of moving trains and boats, cars and planes, and walking feet, they make their way as kind observers. In a subtly phenomenological way they picture perfectly what it means to be-in-the-world, surrounded by big things and small, natural things and artistic objects – nothing too close or familiar to be noticed by them – amongst giants and dwarfs, seeing, feeling, remembering, imagining; all this as the playful soundtrack of a thoroughly lived in, idiosyncratic time. This observant, innocently fresh way of looking at the world has always struck me as very typical of Nits, and not only of their lyrics.

Tables and Chairs

This lyrical closeness to our immediate lifeworld can also be felt in the way they make their music. Their musicianship is formed by this seamless affiliation with our day-to-day lifeworld: they make music in a very direct, sensory, even sensual, sometimes intimistic way, in a patient way that gives the listener room and time to think and feel, to look and move around in this world they created, to pay attention, to imagine, to admire… In my view Nits often show a preference to start out from concrete objects, from the “tables and chairs” that constitute our lifeworld. The world into which they seduce us is a very personal, closeby, natural, empathic world made up of everyday things and experiences. Unlike so many other musicians they feel this completely natural connection, this typically human relation between ourselves and the things that surround us. I sense it as the subtle secret of simplicity whereby a seemingly perfect correspondence is brought about, a symbiosis almost, between our lifeworld and our emotional world, between our concrete, physical “Befindlichkeit” and, nearly entirely coinciding with it, our emotional state of being. I discovered this very suitable word in Martin Heidegger’s phenomenological texts where he introduces the word “Befindlichkeit” in its double meaning of being in a certain place (physically) and at the same time being in a certain mood or having certain feelings. Nits combine these two acceptions of the word in the easiest and most natural way. There is a limpidity to many of the songs that is almost heartbreaking in its transparency and uncomplicated candour, in its unparalleled truthfulness blending impromptu wording with lucid melodies evoking an uncluttered and charming view of our material and physical world which falls beautifully into place in compositions like “Blue Things”, “One Eye Open”, “Giant, Normal Dwarf” and “Walking with Maria”. Nits always shape our lifeworld in a very concrete way, in a manner that is almost “dinglich”. You can almost see how the light falls on the “Bauhaus Chair” and how it feels to touch the chair or to sit in it … They show a lighthearted, tender sense of beauty in the way they put music and words together, like a painter who carefully chooses his brushes and colours. They tempt us to mind matter, they infuse the tangible world they create with feelings and meaning. They seem to succeed effortlessly in turning the abstract, furtive and fleeting matter of music into concrete, instrumentally and vocally rendered little tableaux that evoke the world as we see it with our eyes, feel it with our hands and feet, dream it in our hearts… There is an enormously vivid imaginative force present in the music, which is powered by this incredible mobility and agility so typical of the Nits-sound and by the often very inventive use of instruments and sounds (you can almost hear the forms being shaped …). This sense of movement is so characteristic of Nits: you hear it in the lyrics with their innumerable references to the way in which we move around in our world, the walking, swimming, travelling …, but also in the music itself that sometimes swarms out to all sides. The music of Nits is not only figurative in the sense of pictorial or sculptural, imitating the forms and shapes of the things around us through very delicately constructed layers of music, it is even more essentially “befindlich”, and it houses a sweet nostalgia of the object.

All this sounds like the perfect illustration of what in phenomenology is called the principle of intentionality: as human beings we have a very natural bond with the things that surround us, we need them to survive, they constitute our lifeworld, they literally form and shape our world, our lives. They help us to give meaning to our lives. We are focused on them and have well- defined intentions with them. Matter matters to Nits. Materialism (in its philosophical meaning) is no longer an offensive word in their language: all those things, as trivial and ordinary as they may seem to us, are important, the “tables and chairs”, “the clothes-line in the attic”, the “tornado of shirts and towels”… In their texts Nits regain an old, but often lost, respect for material things which is also apparent in the way they choose and handle their instruments.

A Touch of Henry Moore

Nits have a way of transcending some hardy, but poor contradictions like the one that opposes what is foreign to what is indigenous and the one that contrasts what is material with what is spiritual; the latter two belong together and Nits know that. And their geography is not one of borders, but of landscapes and rivers, streets, buildings and houses. When I listen to Nits I never get the impression that they want to force a particular, very specific view of the world on us, of how they think this world should be; what I hear is how you can translate a world into images, how you can approach and touch the world and the things that constitute it, not what the outcome of all this should be. Not a precisely dictated view, but how a view is formed, made of concrete images and real sensibilities. Listening to the songs of Nits you can be charmed by the homely Dutchness that wades all over their mountains, rivers and streets, but I think it is more the way in which they portray their beloved and so familiar home ground and the world that stretches far beyond, through honest, fantasy like, sometimes surreal, heart-rending, moving images that turns them into the musical aesthetes of pop that they are. The perfect antidote to all that is fake and hip, Nits are worshippers of tables and chairs, shoes, mountains, cars, boats, canoes, bikes, trains, trees, days and nights, houses, dreams, wind and rain, moon and stars, pencils and buttons, umbrellas, pelicans and penguins, Tintoretto and Henry Moore, strawberries and orchards, chocolate rivers and espresso girls, …and all things blue … In an endearingly lived-in closeness to our natural and material world they have elevated ordinary objects in their own way to some sort of artistic objects and brought them to the centre of our attention

Not many musicians bestow on me this peculiar feeling that the instruments they play, become almost literally the extension of the hands and feet by which they move around in the Lebenswelt and with which they make their way through various day-to-day impressions, experiences, encounters with people and things, hands and feet that have thoroughly explored this lifeworld and never let go of it. For Nits making music is essentially communicating with the lifeworld and internalising it, letting it become one with our own inner world, our feelings and moods, like only this most abstract, fleeting form of matter, music, can do. We get the impression that these musicians don’t want to let go of their musical “Heimat”, which over the years they got so well acquainted and familiar with, of those Dutch Mountains, which over time took on the identity of a landscape far more European and “wordly-wise” than the words suggest …

Music as a simple craftsmanship, for Nits, starts from matter, the touching of matter, the delicate handling of their instruments, “the tools of their trade”, music becoming a matter of handiwork. This touching of matter provokes the artist into creating something unique. Nits seem to be listening to what all this earthly material has to tell them; it summons up their musical energy, it unleashes their imaginative energy, a dreamlike energy, a melancholy of the world that rises up from the transiency of all things material and which infuses their music. Nits forge all these sense impressions into the imaginative, dreamy, elusive energy that is music. And the world in its turn wraps itself in fantasy, light, water and poetry. Their wondrous music of the senses is nothing less than an intimate portrayal of man’s everyday existence in all its unseemly details, with a proper playfulness and an unmistakable, palpable truthfulness.

The Milkman

Only LOVE, every pop musician’s number one obsession seems to be missing in this sensual creativity of forms and shapes that is Nits’ music. Their world is more one of Ice Princesses than of Roxannes and often resembles a “childlike”, ingenuous, innocent, pre-LOVE world without all the well-known complications of that other world … Instead it offers the sweetness of a love that embraces all things, everything and everyone, and does not know of heartbreak and evil. We can be seduced by Henk Hofstede and his companions, but then in the more refined “Fire in my Head” kind of way. It is the love of a world in its entirety, a love that is not individualised yet, not restricted, not exclusive, not a “free” love either. It is a very remarkable and exceptional vision of love, maybe even unique in the world of pop music and it could explain the absence of an erotic sexuality in the Nits world and the lack of any obvious sex appeal adorning the three musicians. It is one of those idiosyncrasies that sets Nits apart from the mainstream of the pop music culture and maybe also one of the reasons why their audiences remain somewhat on the smaller side. Their music is more often sensual and has almost never a sexual undertone. It goes together with the more subtle, veiled nature of their music, with more of a cerebral, introvert character to it, rather than being of a physical, outgoing and extrovert nature. In a way it echoes the views on love of the Dutch-born philosopher Baruch Spinoza who describes love as the enjoyment of a thing (or a person) and the union with it. That is the feeling I get wandering around in the world of Nits, this happy embracing of our surroundings. It is like walking around in a world and seeing things, experiencing things that make us happy and make us fall in love with a whole world. With Nits, love is in the symbiotic relationship they form with nature, with their surrounding world full of objects, people, art, socks and buttons, and all sorts of so-called “trivialities”, and with music of course.

The only downside of this love being melancholy … so essential, so omnipresent in the Nits oeuvre as love itself … One who looks for beauty and love, all too often finds melancholy on his or her path. A big part of the Nits repertoire seems to be born under the constellation of autumn, most of all perhaps the album “Ting”, which bathes in beautiful, deep autumnal colours of brown, copper, bronze, gold and dark greens and reds. And the cosmic poetry of elements of nature like water, trees, fire and clouds, together with the typically Dutch lyricism of homey cosiness and conviviality – like on the photo which Henk proudly shows us during their latest tour “angst”, of the snug living room of his grandparents – celebrate oh so sweetly their charming view of life. This photograph on a poster format becomes nothing less than a meta- picture that reflects on the nature of the musical art of Nits

In “Ting” especially, you can feel how this melancholy that emanates and rises up out of the things around us and out of a natural splendour full of trees, water, ducks, swans, birds…takes us with it in that same movement, always dormant, slumbering in our consciousness. It renders so perfectly this profound sense of melancholy that comes over us and the things that surround us. The music reveals itself as a sort of gentle awakening to all the beauty that is enclosed in our world. When we take in the things around us, it is never in the way of a pure perception; we are always more or less affected, moved by the things we perceive. When we encounter our world, we always find ourselves in a specific mood, albeit that of indifference. We belong to our world. Nits have perfectly understood that the moods we are so exposed to, originate from our attachment and closeness to the things that surround us, people, things and nature alike. The elusive presence of their music for ever watercolouring our moods…

Zündapp nach Oberheim

Coincidence or not? In the last song of their latest album, “Zündapp nach Oberheim”, Henk sums up the whole idea behind Nits’ lyricism and the nature of their musical identity most elegantly in a simple effortlessly flowing musical phrase: “The river is a synthesizer”. It is their philosophy of music in a nutshell. The syntax of their musical compositions has always been characterised by unpredictable, unexpected meanderings in a world of musical wonder. And this thoughtful song – as a rhythmic field of our imagination, planted with colourful European words, and intimately connected to the earth, to the ground beneath our feet – at the end of a truly original musical odyssey, defines Nits’ musical persona so clearly and evidently, unambiguously as a loving oneness of our natural and material world with the elusive and ephemeral reality of music as created by the musical instrument. “Angst”, this ultimate existentialist Stimmung of man emphasises the short-lived, transient nature of all things; the ephemerality of music exemplifies this evidence like no other art form can. Music is like a sand sculpture washed away by the sea as soon as it was built. But music will always accompany us throughout our personal history like the river flowing with us through time, never staying the same. Nowadays it is rather fashionable to think that our most precious way of being and our deepest truths lie in a spiritual or immaterialist attitude towards life, thereby forgetting that all that comes from the mind and spirit originates from matter … Nits know that. “Weiter geht es nicht”…

Cow with Spleen

Yes, Nits have travelled quite a bit in their time and they endured a lot of comparisons, the one with The Beatles being most common. Henk’s voice has been compared to numerous other great singers, to his illustrious examples and predecessors in pop, Nits’ music often considered a mere derivation of a Beatlesque tradition. Their musical roots are always emphasised when trying to define what Nits are about. Roots, also musical roots are important, but we have so many of them, tiny tiny roots that connect us to a myriad of people and places, ideas and images, some known to us, some unknown, some we are not even aware of. We are influenced by so many things around us. Inspiration or imitation, who can tell? But what I like so much about Nits are precisely their very personal, intimate stories; in the midst of al these cobwebs of inspiration and imitation, Nits have brought to life a very idiosyncratic little universe of sounds and images borrowed from their own personal experiences, their own individual history and look at the world. I think most great art is very personal. But we have become a society that likes to compare and associate anything and anyone with great names, famous artists. We are obsessed by references to people with name and fame. It is à la mode. But great artists cannot solely be defined by their relationship to others. Nits talk about socks and buttons; I like that a lot better. In a beautifully written review of “Les Nuits”, Richard Gonzalez wrote something very strange I thought at first sight, but then I found it a very moving idea: he wrote that the melancholy of Nits songs perhaps had its roots in some kind of disappointment Nits felt because there wasn’t a big international breakthrough after “Giant Normal Dwarf”, which he considers one of their best albums. A bit naively I thought that it was perhaps the reason why Henk nowadays so often feels the need to refer to all those famous artists and musicians. He shouldn’t have to, because he and Nits are some of the greatest artists I know, in their own right …

So I was quite relieved to see that, on their latest album “angst”, a cow made its entrance on Nits soil… It is a steadfast animal, “bodenständig” – a word phenomenologists like to use – planted in the soil, loving the green green grass of home … and no references whatsoever… No doubt, Nits are at their best when they are just being themselves, their work firmly rooted in a deeply personal, but at the same time, shared European history.

Room # 12 Coda

Once upon a time in a cute, historic northern town of busy merchants, golden painters and glittering canals, four brave and adventurous musicians decided they were not just going to be making music like everyone else … They thought about all the wonderful things they had encountered in their youthful lives and were determined that their musical creations would be filled with a reality full of fantasy, surreal dreams and forms of beauty …

Addendum : Song References in the Text

“House of the Sleeping Beauties”, Giant Normal Dwarf (1990)
“Tables and Chairs”, Work (1981)“Blue Things”, Malpensa (2012)“One Eye Open”, In the Dutch Mountains (1987)
“Giant Normal Dwarf”, Giant Normal Dwarf (1990)“The Bauhaus Chair”, Hat (1988)“the clothes-line in the attic”, quoted from “In a Play (Das Mädchen im Pelz), In the Dutch Mountains (1987)“Yellow Socks & Angst”, angst (2017)“A Touch of Henry Moore”, Omsk (1983)“Pelican and Penguin”, In the Dutch Mountains (1987)“Acres of Tintoretto”, Kilo (1983)“the tools of his (their) trade”, quoted from “Clean Shirt in Paris”, Omsk (1983)“The Milkman”, Les Nuits (2005) “Ice Princess”, Giant Normal Dwarf (1990)“Roxanne” , The Police, Outlandos D’Amour (1978) “Fire in my Head” , Ting (1992)“Zündapp nach Oberheim”, angst (2017)“Weiter geht es nicht”, quoted from “Zündapp Nach Oberheim”, angst (2017)“Cow with Spleen”, angst (2017) “Room # 12 Coda”, Hjuvi, A Rhapsody in Time (1992)

Joke Roelandt, November 2018