Romancing The World (Nits Design Part Two)

The one attribute that sets the music of Nits apart from most of its pop counterparts must well be the peripatetic nature of the way they move between different worlds of experience and between different realms of the world of artistic creation. Theirs is an intrepid voyage through landscapes of memories, reality, fiction and fantasies, through the world of a European soul, of an artistic soul that is almost universal, yet is thoroughly determined by a well-defined European heritage which has – just as the European glance – always one eye opened to the rest of the world out there. The music of Nits records a world as it once was, still is for a moment, for the future, as in a movie of sound and words. It has these strong ties with the eye of a camera, be it in still photographs or moving images of a film that captures what is, focusing on seemingly trivial details, transposing the real world into an innocent fantasy film that records the thoughts, wishes, longings and memories of an eternal dreamer, who imagines the world in pictures, colours and forms that are all adorned with a personal, intimate sense of meaning. The images procured through the music and lyrics of Nits are never vain, they have stood the test of a personal acquaintance and were found to be meaningful. They were distilled, perhaps first at random, for their own sake, but then later on as the music performed its magic on them, they became an essential part of a life, a Nits life…

This collage of image-impressions is what makes up the essence of the NITS design. Looking at all those gorgeous covers – and artwork – of the many albums, it isn’t hard to see that Nits are different from the rest. These designs of an eclectic eye that effortlessly picks up all the ingenuous poetry of the world it encounters, give away the secret of their sound works, as an intimate dialogue with a figurative and material world (of art). I don’t exclude that the Nits sound was born out of a tremendous longing to communicate through music with the manifold, intricate universe of art as it bares itself in a great variety of artistic works.

This dialogue Nits started – in my ears – has only intensified with the years. Their music became a setting for the story of lives lived for real in a world where the ideas and the beauty of art prevail. Nits with their sublime mash-it-up instinct brought art into their music, along with everyday tales where non-art objects coexist with a vision of “idealised” beauty, which is – in true Nits spirit – more often than not, endowed with a love for simplicity, minimalism, purity and candour.

Nits are the ultimate makers, fabricators of a work called “A World-Inside-Music”. Yet, they work in a small, tender way, with a reductive approach, that led to a magnificent outcome. And I mean this, like literally building a world – as in their song Bricklayer, or Saint-Louis Avenue or Boy in a Tree – not in the sense that e.g. a classical composer does world building through a symphony. The lyrics provide real visual images, they speak of things-in-the-world we all recognise, everything is familiar, yet it all acquires that particular aura of light and uniqueness which only the greatest of painters can bestow on a “trivial” object. Like Johannes Vermeer would paint a Bauhaus Chair … if the time and place were right.

Of all the artists they referred to in their songs, I feel their musical spirit is closest to the work of Joseph Cornell and L.S. Lowry, but that’s just a personal suggestion. Looking around, collecting images and then recreating them in an innocent and pure idea of a world seen through the lens of sweet imagination.

Their music is often described as melancholic. Nits’ melancholy is a very peculiar one: it creates images of nostalgia that don’t really exist. It’s the nostalgia of fantasy, it is coloured in. The nostalgia of In The Dutch Mountains is not real, it is idealised through pictures and images in a romantic picturesque world. It’s their very special Nits filter at work. Like the camera does, the music of Nits has the patience of recording the fleeting nature of emotions and impressions, it puts them in the nicest possible frame of sound and word. Their nostalgia is picture-perfect! The music captures the moment, like nothing else can, it progresses toward its ending. We can see the images, but we can never stop the frame. We want to hold on to the moment, but we can’t. That’s the beauty of music, it cannot be stopped. That’s why it’s the medium par excellence of Melancholy…

If music could stand still.

Joke Roelandt, June 2023