Ice Princess or the Intuition of the Music Moment

When I listen to this song of marvels and watch the video, I really feel that something quite extraordinary is happening here. Something literally out of the ordinary, in music. This is so wonderful and I cannot begin to say why… The music plays with our sense of reality and the curiousness of our imagination, it is full of holes – like in Alice’s wonder world -of empty spaces and empty moments in time where fantasy, memory and anticipation can abundantly creep through, the music seems to hamper and interfere with our straightforward experience of space and time, and logic. Nits almost never close off or block all doors and windows with noise or sound, no they always allow for the air to flow freely through their music, – don’t you feel that too? – there’s always room for a chimerical breeze, for something more in their music. They want to let in something else, something different; the music holds an open invitation to add whatever you feel like.

It all sounds like a physical experiment in musical storytelling, a tale which is far more free and complete, notated in music, than it would be in mere words. It speaks about the different materials that make up our world and about the borders of our little idiosyncratic worlds, about what may lie beyond what is made of wood and water. Where the sound of a trumpet equals the sound of an elephant. Almost the whole album “Giant Normal Dwarf” is filled with this sort of strangely open, floating songs in a very particular time-space frame, and all sorts of chemical and physical processes, referred to in the lyrics, contribute to its singular nature. The music relates how reality so easily falters into the realm of imagination and dreamlike experiences. “House of the Sleeping Beauties” and “The Infinite Shoeblack” especially, travel through the same mysterious time-space continuum of universes hidden in the cavity of a tree or in drainpipes underneath the earth.

I suspect “Ice Princess” also reflects on the nature of music itself, speaking from the point of view of a small trombone and its little world of sound and vision; how music plays and interacts with our physical world and as if by magic reveals deeper inner worlds of sensibilities that were hiding in the vacuum of the musical instruments’ hollow spaces. Just a small breath of air, the wind of nature suffices to open up a confined, tiny world. I have no idea what it tells about music, but it is nothing short of fabulous… Smoke, fire, ice, elephants, the moon, trees…, music encompasses all those elements in its mystery. “When you are a small trombone, you think the world is all inside your little home”… yes, and maybe it is…

Joke Roelandt, October 2019