NEON or The Philosophy of Birth

When you drive 50 km east from Liverpool, you arrive in Pendlebury, a small industrial town where the painter L.S. Lowry lived and worked. I have no idea whether The Beatles meant anything to him in his later life, probably not, since he died in 1976, but music played quite an important role in his life, considering his mother played the piano and had wanted to become a concert pianist, and while painting, it was said he often listened to operas by Donizetti and Bellini. I know he loved football though, he regularly attended matches of Manchester City… and he painted several football related scenes, like Going to the Match, his own J.O.S. Days…

Much like Nits, Lowry was an Einzelgänger in his artistic creations. He started painting industrial scenes with factories and smoke and people rushing home from the mills where they worked. These were unusual scenes; even Lowry used to ask himself why nobody before had had the idea, the will or the inclination to draw the portrait of a working class society, with its unloved buildings of manufacturing and its masses of people. But Lowry simply grew to love these grim surroundings where he lived alone with his mother. He turned the dislike and rejection of this world his mother hated, into an almost unconditional “amor mundi”, a love for the world he lived in; For Lowry this world became a new sort of beginning.

Nits’ being in the realm of music shows the same unique way of envisaging and relating to a world. They don’t lose themselves in criticism or negativity, instead they always choose to see the beautiful in what surrounds them. Even on their latest album – Neon – the wonder of a new beginning is still the driving force in their creations. Their music feels like newly born with every album. Nits’ philosophy of music is one of eternal birth. The title alone of their latest album holds the most obvious etymological reference to the new – neon in Greek meaning “something new”. Something newly discovered, it almost reads like a description of the music of Neon: Nits are, once again, on their own uncharted path of exploration of their unique possibilities, more and more trusting and relying on their own instincts.

Even if the idea of mortality and transience is present in their lyrics, the focus of their music itself doesn’t care to linger on the notion of impermanence, rather it shifts to the dynamics of an eternally new beginning. For Nits, Being equals Birth, an always renewable potential they have for living. In the philosophy of Nits, man and woman are a beginning, they possess the ability to look at the world with new eyes, they can begin in freedom, envisaging a new world. With all their senses Nits threw themselves in the discovery of a world – always new to them – and they notated all its appearances with an unwavering optimism for life. Their music is the continuous tale of the wonder of beginning. It is an always renewed conversation with the world in a lyrical act of freedom and spontaneity. Neon in its prime unusualness is the epitome of Nits’ musical thinking under a natal star. The resilience with which they are now embracing a new future only confirms their ability to always begin anew.

There are the songs – Sunday Painter, Spoken, Lina Bo Bardi, The Ghost Ranch -, like tributes to artists who, until their death, continued their work of art, tirelessly, believing in what they gave to the world, believing in their vision, even if it was totally different from the works of their predecessors or contemporaries. They work on their art, they are compelled to do it. Lowry up in the small attic – with one window into the world – of his two-up-two-down working class house, Lina Bo Bardi in her glass house surrounded by Brazilian forest trees, Georgia O’Keeffe in her panoramic adobe hacienda in the desert of New Mexico and Nits in their humble old gymnasium building on the outskirts of Amsterdam, each one of them in their particular corner of the world, with their personal origin and history, their memories, their own intimate place in the world. They all believed in their own vision of the world, which, ultimately, reveals itself as a vision of beauty. The love of their world as the only constant in the work.

The phenomenological nature of the work of Nits beautifully transcends the loss of the individual in an indifferent world of numbers, hypes and mass media and culminates in a fresh philosophy of natality where a person can begin at any one time his or her own journey of creativity. Nits have always rejected the idea of being enslaved to the world of the masses even without ever expressing the notion of a rejection or a withdrawal. Their musical identity and existence simply came to be in a pure act of beginning afresh, … not unlike Lowry’s and O’Keeffe’s white canvas.

“Life holds so much promise in the beginning. A Whiteness.”

Joke Roelandt, February 2023