The Immeasurable, Uncountable Shape of the Tear – Dedicated to Paul Telman

Playtime is Paul’s Time

For Monique

“Wij zijn de Nits” … are the first spoken sounds that fill the concert hall. Immediately followed by the opening notes of Nits’s chosen first song. The musicians reveal themselves in the auditorium lights. Playtime has begun. The audience sees the musicians, sees their instruments. Lights come up and move around the stage. Someone strikes a note. Henk sings his first words. We observe the stage, thinking this is where it all comes from. But nobody is watching the person sitting in the heart of the audience behind his mixing console… The other listener in the room. Paul.

I hear the fragile sounds of “Jardin d’Hiver”. I listen intently. Nits are playing and someone I do not see is making the sounds that the musicians create audible … in the finest possible way.  I hear them, the sounds move through me, then disappear. But the listening remains, the experience is shaping my inner world. I’m moved by it. A tear suddenly takes shape. The tear is a trace … of something that is now somehow absent. The song is over.

One of the very first shapes that I introduced during this long journey of discovering the ways of Being of Nits, was the smile. It was there at the start and it is still there now after fifty-plus years. Nits wear the colour of the sun, they are bathing in a yellow light of smiles. So it’s only natural that eventually the tear would follow … towards the end.

Few are the tears that roll down the cheeks of the I-characters of the Nits songs. There are tears on a farewell letter in “Sketches of Spain”, and in Athens tears well up in the rainy city streets – accompanying those of the clouds – or later on along the road not taken … The melancholy and sadness in the world of Nits are never monumental, they never display a Wagnerian sense of grief or loss. Their melancholy is much smaller. Like a tear, it is transparent and lets through an entire, deeply felt experience. The melancholy of Nits resides in everyday ordinary scenes of rooms, streets, rivers, trees, photographs, clouds, … We take them in and the songs allow different experiences and feelings to appear. 

The songs of Nits are in fact events or episodes of perception: things that happen between the sounds and the meanings of music and language on the one hand, and our memory, body, time and place, our listening selves on the other. Music gives a perceptible form to something that cannot quite be translated into concepts and Nits are particularly good at guiding these suggestive powers of music and its lyrical language. Their songs so often refuse to tell us straightforwardly what we are supposed to feel. Instead they sketch fragments of a world that somehow nestle themselves in our consciousness. A feeling has no shape, grief has no outline, memory has no colour, longing occupies no measurable space. But then suddenly there is a tear. Suddenly something entirely interior becomes material. The body gives a fleeting form to something that otherwise could not be seen. That is very close to what music actually does, the way music proceeds and unfolds. The tear is where the invisible becomes visible. The tear brings the body to the fore. Music speaks to the body most directly as in its obvious connection to dancing in all its forms, but also through this shapeless fluid that descends from our eyes onto our cheeks.

But lately the tear has become much more prominent in the lyrical world of Nits through their latest song called “Factory of Tears”. It depicts a broken inner world shattered to pieces by loneliness and misery. Snowflakes become ashes, neighbours turn to stone in their brick houses; a dusty, cold world of industrial production where love is missed and looked for as the only source of solace. The tear becomes the trace of something or someone that is absent. The title of the song is somewhat paradoxical. A factory produces things mechanically, repeatedly, deliberately, devoid of any human emotion. A tear is singular, involuntary, bodily, intimate, natural and belongs to an innermost human experience. A Jacques Tati-like juxtaposition of opposites.

Let me make a little excursion here to “Tativille”, the glass and steel mini-city that Tati had especially built for his movie “Playtime”, of which I borrowed the title to write this piece. There’s a very curious reciprocity between Nits and Tati. While in the music of Nits visual elements are crucial and often an inspiration, in Tati’s films the “soundtrack” plays a very peculiar role in a very strange and idiosyncratic way. There’s almost no normal dialogue in the movies, but Tati likes to use the noises of concrete everyday objects of the modern world and have them take a leading role in the sound experience of the movie. These noises of the modern material world are accentuated and magnified and Tati uses them often to guide the viewer’s eyes to particular parts of the scenes in a film shot. He makes us pay attention and observe the filmic scenes through unusual sound elements. You could almost say that what Nits do with visual details or objects in their musical creations,Tati does with auditory ones in his movies, like a little symphony of everyday noises: the ear directs.

But the music of the song combines the two – the factory and the tear – effortlessly and through this song the tear – this tiny drop of salty water – becomes phenomenologically enormous; it shapes a whole world of loneliness and sadness on the waves of its musical companion. Tears and music can be very similar. In fact, just like music, our tears have no real shape. Yes, it is true, their only shape exists in our imagination – we can draw a tear easily on someone’s portrait – but the shape of a real tear exists only in its duration, just like music does. Its form cannot be separated from its movement. An actual tear forms, changes, moves, runs down our cheeks, catches the light, makes our eyes glisten and then disappears. The moment you try to freeze it into the familiar teardrop symbol, you have already falsified the lived phenomenon. And music works in much the same way. It cannot stand still.

The one who has spent decades making the sounds of Nits audible to others disappears out of the blue. Paul always occupied a very peculiar position in the creation of the Nits world. We hear – and see – the musicians, but we normally don’t hear or see him. His work succeeds precisely when we experience the music rather than notice the mediation that makes our experience of the music possible. He was always there between the musical event – recorded or live – and the listener. We knew we could trust him. We listened through his expert listening ear. He was present from the first improvisational or compositional recording until the final live renderings of the songs. He listened, detected, corrected, inspired, motivated, chose, directed, balanced. He decided what is close and what is distant, what emerges and what recedes, what is prominent and what is secondary, how the voices inhabit the space of music or the space of a room. At a concert thousands of people were effectively hearing Nits through his shared act of listening, which was in fact the ever present first filter through which the Nits audience perceived their songs. 

It is so poignant now to reflect on all those years gone by, all those lovely memories of sounds brought so beautifully to life by this skilled and imaginative sound engineer. The person who was almost necessarily absent from our awareness while he was there managing the Nits sound, now becomes suddenly and so overwhelmingly present through his untimely absence. All Nits recordings hold traces of Paul. His listening survives him. Every old and recent Nits recording replays something that he once heard. More than that: we hear something as he helped it to be heard!  All these recordings in De Werf and in studios like little factories where the music passes through microphones, cables, consoles, processors, computers, loudspeakers,… where recordings are being manufactured. Sound carriers that can produce tears in those who listen. As a factory that can produce tears … emotions. And who stands inside that factory? The sound engineer. Paul. 

We will be aware of his absence … on every record yet to come, at every concert yet to be played. And yet there is this strange survival of Paul’s listening inside our own. We owe him so much. 

“We brought chocolates for you. Will you share them with the rest of the band?”. For years we had this little ritual with Paul after the concerts. “Why don’t you wait till the rest of the band are here, I’m sure they would love to see you” … He was kind, generous and gentle and an incredible soundman. He will be missed in every note, in every silence, in the newly shaped relationships between sounds, their distances, balances, spaces, … in the newly shaped songs.

The sounds of the water of rivers and canals, of rain and tears are for ever mixed together in the Playtime in Nitsville Amsterdam. Playtime will never be the same again.

“Is it alright to love you – Even when you’re gone?”

With love,

Joke

Joke Roelandt, August 2026