On the Occasion of Nits’ Concert at the AB in Brussels, December 15th, 2019.

“O Europe! O Ton of Honey!” (Sylvia Plath)

As you can see from the many lovely posts already made on the concert at Brussels’ cherished music temple, “Ancienne Belgique”, we really had a party last Sunday afternoon. Nits love playing in Brussels, especially at the AB, and the “Brusseleirs” love Nits too. As always there was a jovial, big-hearted atmosphere of generously sugared waffles, cheers and chocolate, bravos and beer, – and imported from Ostend -, some freshly made sandwiches with crevettes (I saw Rob eat one after the show, the boundless enthusiasm for their music, the big applause he got after a truly magnificent “A Touch of Henry Moore” had clearly made him hungry…). Earlier on in the show Robert Jan had also been most cordially greeted with hurrays and whistles after his brilliant rendering of “The House” and Henk too was in tremendous form throughout.

In the little video of “Machine Machine” that I recorded during the concert (posted as a comment), you can see him sitting behind his instrument, and well, doing his thing. It’s wonderful to see him play and sing and act in such a confident, relaxed and liberated way; you can sense that this new music he composed (together with Rob and Robert Jan) truly originated from the hands and the soul of this artist full of genius, ingenuity and savoir-faire. Nothing seems forced in any way. It’s just him. Henk being himself. I adored watching him last Sunday. His music changes with the years as he does too, but in such a marvellously unexpected way. Rob later on confirmed my feelings and told me that this was really the sort of music that they had wanted and strived to make and had hoped that would come at some point in their career. And that is exactly what it all sounds like: it’s the natural output of genius (sorry for using this word so often, but there’s simply no other word for it), of talent and lifelong craftsmanship; it’s playful and direct, yet very intricate and detailed, it is handiwork from true masters in the art of music… It’s indubitably so that the first half of the album sounds rather empty and forlorn – though burgeoning with buds and sprouts of musical marvels – as if the music got lost in an endless desert of beauty, but songs like “Machine Machine”, – buzzing from its beginning with confusion and excitement -, sound more like a complex labyrinth of sounds with some very cosy nooks and crannies hidden away in some of its corners: “Look at the honey shelves for Winter Trees”; they are always such a lovely discovery, these little warm places of sounds to nestle in to, sheltered from the whole world, à l’abri de tout… “Machine Machine” is swarming with so many different musical sequences and phrasings, all the stages in between the living trees – the numbered wooden shelves, the books and sheets of paper – and “The Winter Trees” of Sylvia, the bees and honey, sweetness and disorientation, estrangement, iron trees, words in books, words of dreams…

How to create, out of a chaos of impressions, experiences and dreams. Easy-peasy for Nits… You can see Henk gesticulating behind the keyboards, his arms and legs moving like the puppet in the hands of the marionettist called Music. Nits are like the puppeteers of rhythms and samples, of sounds that like no other band they know how to invent, performing little dramas of sounds of music (a special mention here for Robert Jan who really conjures up the sweetest and most haunting sounds out of his keyboards of wonder). The sounds they come up with are so lifelike, imaginative, tactile, strange, evoking a whole world of endless possibilities and associations. The theatricality in their music is as present as ever, maybe even more so: who knew that music could be such a natural, intuitive actor? Henk seems to impersonate a skilful artist who with just a few spontaneous lines here and there, just a few well-chosen brush strokes and dabs of colour, – without too much thinking -, sketches the outlines of what will turn out to be a masterpiece. Rob and Robert Jan colour them in with inevitable rhythms of how things are and move and with samples of a reality of all times, a judiciality coming from somewhere beyond and above, and still, all of this with the candour of simplicity. When I hear the opening of the song “Music Box With Ballerina”, performed live or (Un)Happy Hologram, I think to myself: what is this?, it’s like music, theatre, cinema, mystery, a fairytale, mime, poetry, art history, comedy, tragedy, photography, circus… all in one. Nits think of all the possible meanings music can have, all the multi-layered connections it hides in its ungraspable form; within the music itself, they create metaphors of music, like in the sublime, rhythmically fragmented construction of “A Touch of Henry Moore”, by comparing it to sculpture, or to painting in other songs; from acrobatics to contemplation, they know how to translate the whole “scala” of artistic or cultural expressions into their omniform language of music. Rank-Nits-Xerox photocopying our world of colour, screens of blue Apples, but listen to the sweet, honeyed sounds of the machines… Digital mechanics sounding as true as the wind in Nits’ beloved trees.

And when the concert is over… you know it wasn’t just music that you witnessed… Strolling through the familiar streets back to the car, the Christmas market – close to “La Bourse de Bruxelles” and “La Monnaie”, to the boutiques where they sell Dries Van Noten and Tintin souvenirs, and the music café-bar L’Archiduc” -, suddenly looked like a world where winter is snow, … snow falling in a snow globe… And I dance quick quick slow in the clair de lune…

Joke Roelandt, December 2019