Once Upon a Time in the North

Here’s the story… 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…

Rob Kloet often calls “Omsk” one of his favourite albums, if not his most favourite one. It is, of course, an album where the percussion and drums are prevalent and at the foreground of the music, punctuating and structuring the melody, like the interpunction and metrum rhythmize a phrase in prose or poetry. And as Chris Evans remarked in one of his comments here on the Nitsfan fb-page, something seemed to have changed in their way of approaching music on their way to Omsk. The lyrics are full of references to different forms of art and creation as if they were trying to define their own new musical identity as grown-up artists in their own right. It feels like their idiosyncratic introduction to craftsmanship, to what it means to be an artist and more importantly, on how to become an artist. I don’t think they skipped a single art form… if we are generous… Opening of course very fittingly with “A Touch of Henry Moore”, with the creativity of the hammer, as in sculpture, the beating of the hammer, – the outer heart -, percussion being the hammer’s musical counterpart, to make music with a hammer (with a wink at Nietzsche…who called himself the philosopher with the hammer). Nits starting out from matter, as they always do, from the touching of matter which provokes the artist into creating something unique. In “A Touch of Henry Moore” Nits seem to be listening to what the touching of matter has to tell us, it summons up their musical energy; it awakens their creativity, it unleashes their imaginative energy, a dreamlike energy reflected in the ghostly, ethereal voice of Michiel Peeters waking up the spirits out of his melancholy grounded in a reality that is just what it is and which he desperately wants to be different, more fantasy like, more ungraspable…more like music itself. Nits are always close to the tools of their trade, their musical instruments, a world of a fantastic array and variety of tools; you only have to take a look at all the different “instruments”, sometimes mere utensils, they have come up with over the years, most of all Rob perhaps, his percussive fantasies even including a red cooking pot in “An Eating House”. It only illustrates how close they are to this world of sensitive matter which they use over and over again in their wondrous “music of the senses”. The rhythm of Omsk is sometimes just as simple as the rhythmic wonder of the seasons, of nature, in ” Springtime coming soon”, or of the snow falling in between the bundles of light in the photographic and cinematic “Jardin d’Hiver”. The cold eye of stark lines in a dark and grey world of buildings and concrete replaced by the warm eye of poetry, magic, imagination and musical adventure, – the end of “The Cold Eye”, – after the voice has faded – , unfolding in a deep abyss of sadness about unrealised possibilities. The vermillion pencil was traded in for drumsticks right there and then. They decided that all their artistic sensibilities were going to be part of their music at the crossroads of music and art.The shadow of a doubt seems to have disappeared for good…In Omsk Nits discovered their art and never looked back since. I don’t know if this story is true, I sure believe in it, as they did. Well, just maybe…

Joke Roelandt, February 2018