Some thoughts on “Knot”, the new album of Nits, which is being released tomorrow and comes highly recommended.

Spirits in a Material World or the Sacredness of a Viola

Missing a Bauhaus Chair was easy. Missing a mum and dad is much harder. Familiar objects have a tendency to stick around, great artists’ works survive forever. Together they make for a bizarre experience of our world, where spirits connect and form the strangest assemblages with the concrete matter of everyday things in our small patchwork universes. Eventually Nits would need to make this record, it synthesises their musical imagination out of a sense of loss and estrangement, but they don’t let go of the world just yet. 

The very first associations I made while listening to “Knot” were with the kindred spirit you find in works of literature and painting of magical realism. The odd, unusual juxtapositions of sounds and voices remind me of those works where magical, surreal, out-of-this-world things happen, where the present is constantly intruded by ghosts or apparitions of the past, familiar dead who suddenly reappear in an anodyne scenery of everydayness, scenes of weird fabrications of the mind filled with uncanny, incongruous combinations. Like going to the garden centre with all the decorum of a stately procession… Religious references. “Knot” definitely is an album of atmospheres, almost in the literary meaning of the word, certainly as far as the music is concerned, it’s ethereal, ungraspable in rational notions, a sort of circular vapour wrapping our minds in confusion. Where the logos of time and space is broken and reassembled as the artist sees fit. “Knot” creates an atmosphere where spirits feel at ease, where people who are no longer there, but who are ever present in our minds and in our way of looking at the world, can wade through, unseen, tiptoeing, leaving the most curious of percussive impressions on their way through our memories. Every souvenir turned into an act of percussive presence, as a delicate reminder. This music of touches and sampled slides is really taking on the enigmatic, elusive shape of a sixth sense. Rob’s contribution to this album is simply divine, seraphic or earthly at will: his drums and percussion have always been much more than mere “rhythm makers”; he creates a deepened sense of reality, mystery, wonder and hope, with the big drum in a star role. Henk’s lyrics (the plastic rococo chairs – typical, concrete Hofstedian poetry of the eyes where the ordinary and the aesthetic always go hand in hand – so revelatory of the mood of this album) often start out as a depiction of a familiar reality and then the music adds some heightened awareness to it all, evoking the strangeness and incongruity one can feel at certain moments in one’s life, a bit detached from reality, but at the same time, experiencing everything very vividly. Vivid colours. Heightened senses.

Especially towards the end of the album, imagination breaks free from its unbearable straight-jacket of reality, it takes at times the form of a feverish hallucination, of a haunted mirage or delirium, then again returning to a sweet tenderness of a relived reunion. The music is pure Nits, whatever influences we might suggest, like the one of Talk Talk’s “Spirit of Eden”, “The Electric Pond “ is a sublime drowning in an unknown paradise. This song is almost Nits’ version of some Gregorian chants at a funeral, a burial ceremony where all sensorial memories of the past are laid to rest. Magnificent! The cultural references in the music as always abound. Many images passed in front of my eyes, more than with any other Nits album I must admit. From the mad look in the eyes of Oskar, the young boy from the magical-realist novel “The Tin Drum”, or a crazy, frightening harlequin in bright colours of red and green, to the dream-sequences or supernatural elements in the work of David Lynch, the tortured faces in portraits by James Ensor, the sensual movements in “Dead Rat Ball” ( “They say there’s always magic in the air, – On Broadway…” drifting through it) taking me back to a “Woolish” Marvin with a sultry female choir at the end… The dark poetry of the macabre of Edgar Allan Poe, fairground and circus images in black and white of Italian movies. And even a voodoo seance where Henk seems to pronounce a curse over a young woman, in “Music Box with Ballerina”, his voice changing all the time, reminding me at one point of a Dickensian villain, while Robert Jan is making mean, foul, wicked sounds like a dangerous madman, which continues onto the last song of the album, the music turning into some weird kind of machinery made by musicians who seem to be losing their mind, who can’t make sense of things anymore, who are in the middle of a bad dream, who want to alter reality. “Knot” sounds like a concoction of alternative realities, an entanglement of past and present, a future hallucination amidst a deformed state of the present moment which feels like a cluster of inextricable forms of experiencing our reality. And how to make sense of it all…

Missing “The Bauhaus Chair” was easy.

Joke Roelandt, November 2019