On the occasion of their mesmerising concert in Ede where they presented their new album “Knot”

The Parable of Blue

What struck me most was their poise, this graceful bearing which often comes with the composedness of self-confidence. While Henk tried to explain how “Knot” came to be, referring to this sort of instant composing which was the immediate result of a few sessions of free improvisation, I answered bluntly and somewhat jokingly: “het zat erin en het is eruit gekomen”, “it was there and it came out”. – “That’s exactly right”, Rob replied. It was as easy as that. Although “Knot” doesn’t sound easy, the process of creating it was straightforward and without hesitation so it seems. Some reviewers described the music as experimental, or an exploration of sounds forming into atmospheres, rather than melodies. I would tend to disagree with this view.

When you see Henk, Rob and Robert Jan playing live on stage, the thought of “Knot” being an experiment by these three gifted musicians seems very implausible. The character of the music to me has nothing of an experiment either. Quite the contrary, the music seems to follow its own dynamics, it feels premeditated, full of purpose, as if it couldn’t be any other way, it was destined to sound the way it does. It doesn’t know of randomness, nor arbitrariness, nor is it the result of a whimsical mind. It rather flows with the seriousness and inevitability of a timely process, like a miniature portrait, an intimate piece of musical creation which reflects the tendencies present in all great cultural or artistic representations. It condenses an improvisation of almost half a century’s work, as if they were telling the story of their music in the improbable language of a free, open composition. Their elbow room , the “Spielraum” they gave themselves, was one of letting be, – like The Beatles said -, in the mystery of an open space, they eventually found themselves looking in a mirror, abandoning the wilfulness of grand, enrapturing melodies for an act of surrendering to the beauty of what happens when you let go. In this way personal stories can inscribe themselves in the bigger realm of cultural history and its aesthetic sensibility. The loss and grief in the personal domain are translated into a sense of decay and decadence on the larger scale of a magnified world of cultural erosion or decline.The free expanse which the music enjoys allows it to transcend the simple facts of life through an almost mystical, spiritual experience, everyday objects turning into framed remnants of the present and the past. Yes, I feel that “Knot” has a bigger story to tell, still, the one of a tight interweaving of individual narratives with the chronicle of society as a whole.

Let me make this a bit clearer. I think the personal loss Henk Hofstede suffered with the death of his dear mother became sort of a catalyst for a deeper reflection on the irreplaceability of certain people and things in our lives. Not only the unique meaning a parent has in one’s life, but also the uniqueness of irreplaceable “objets d’art”, the rare excellence you find in the works of certain artists, or the nostalgia for everyday familiar objects that signify and mean the world to us. Nits often have this way of linking their personal world to a sensibility, encountered through the senses, with the universe of colours, forms, shapes and sounds that surrounds them. “Knot” abounds with a heartsickness for the colour blue – in its deepest shade of ultramarine -, from the paintings of diaphanous waterlilies by Monet, the bluest innocence of a headscarf coloured by Vermeer, to the tearful blue of the car on the album cover of Peter Gabriel. Another ode to Nits’ favourite colour, the one that speaks univocally of sadness and melancholy. A nostalgia for the true colours of life, beyond the sea, beyond the sky.

The meditative reflection that drifts through the first part of the album is then rather abruptly broken off by the threat or at least the intrusive presence of a world of alienating technology or machinery, set off by the appropriately titled song “Machine Machine”. A world dominated by the endless reproducibility of things and experiences, where the uniqueness of a beautiful girl with a pearl earring no longer seems to have any meaning, only some kind of value in numbers. The songs that follow all refer in one way or another to the distance from the earthly materials that slowly but surely has crept into the way in which we experience our world: electric pond, – a ceremonial burial of all our vivid, sensorial memories of the past -, a hologram that in its feigned imitation of reality can make us truly unhappy or confused. Meanness and decadence showing their ugly face through the masks of concealment, fakeness and mimicry, burlesque copies of a fleeing sense of reality. The hidden ugliness of character masquerading behind the perfect face of a young woman, the deceit of appearances…These imitations all offer but a very poor replacement for the truth of face-to-face human relations, for a breathing, pumping reality. Nits seem to want to portray us through their music of contemplation and cerebration, and their words, the loss of reality, the impoverishment of our personal world, the gradual obliteration or disappearance of our very own idiosyncratic little world of memories of colourful episodes in our lives. Wanting to hold on to the sweet tune from the music box of childhood times, which has now turned awry and spooky, even sinister. Wanting to hold on to the tangible world of concrete and stone, which, in the end, fails to protect us from heartbreak and loss. Nits long for something permanent and concrete, so it would seem, when you wander through their wordy, architectural aesthetics of delta works and concrete houses, all in the deepest hue of blue. Don’t we all?

So they felt like letting go, giving in to some sort of “Gelassenheit”, not in the negative meaning of the word, of complying or giving up, but in its philosophical sense of equanimity and serenity. It is like a free, disinterested reflection, an openness towards mystery; it abandons willing, it is not unlike a form of waiting to see what happens when you ask the right questions, letting the answers formulate themselves, allowing the music to make its own spontaneous meanderings, as if the synthesizer were a river, remember…? And the drums, their “Bodenständigkeit” (their rootedness in the soil), being the sound of footsteps through a green meadow or a forest. “Gelassenheit” is the musician’s way of letting the music find its own way in the ever open-wide realm of possibilities. Nits want to preserve the open space of creation like the fragility of a porcelain tea cup.

Finding a form for a colour was never so easy…

Joke Roelandt, December 2019