The Things-World of Nits

From a radio to a table and chair on a little balcony in the snow

(Inspired by the beautiful artwork accompanying the release of their new single “The Ghost Ranch”)

It’s easy to see how Nits go about their daily business of making music. The artwork of Nits always kind of offered a peek into their creative processes. A radio, a saw, a big drum, a lamp above a table, a piece of soap, houses, a feather, buttons, rooms with views, abstract paintings, postal stamps, trees, a rowing boat… familiar things taken from rooms and spaces that are filled with the objects of our lives. For Nits it has always been a small step to imagine the sounds of living amongst them, the sounds lying there for the taking in the various views opened up by windows or by being in a particular place. The music of Nits most often seems to bask or at least originate inside some sort of a still – as if it were a static photograph – a hush or a whisper, before things really get going. Songs that fly out of the scene of a single shot or a painting or an image on the eye’s retina and develop from there. A series of stills which fabulate the most colourful storybook you could ever see. It’s one of these almost inexplicable characteristics which makes their music stand out. Its quietness and focus, transparence and unclutteredness. Nits show restraint and equanimity in their work. And lots of patience, a gentle awareness. Music born out of a view of silence; it is descriptive like clouds are. Things of colour that glide through the music. 

I often wondered about this: what is their secret, what gives their work its openness and unveiled character, its genuineness, its natural charm and candour, its thoughtfulness? 

Looking through the pages of a book on Georgia O’Keeffe, I came across an oil painting of hers with the title “Ladder to the Moon”. The painting is stunning in its simplicity, form and colour, its stillness, which one way or another opens up a myriad of possibilities of movement. Looking at it, I felt it grasped the essence of the music and way of being of Nits.

The artwork of the forthcoming album Neon eyes exceptional at the very least, awash with beauty; it shows once more this intense manner of being-in-a-world of colours and forms, naive and spontaneous, uncomplicated, and filled with a tender sense of fantasy. The music simply follows suit. They achieved this before, this unprecedented coinciding of music and visuals, in their masterpiece Giant Normal Dwarf. The manipulating of physical matter and its processes, its shapes and forms, its materials, states, phases and sizes. A processing of fantasy that is literally handmade. The craft of the Nits artist, using matter in a unique way, always staying in touch with the basics of what life is about in its day-to-day appearance, setting one foot out of bed in the morning and then the other, still in a dreamlike state, exploring the world as if it were new to him every day of his life.

There’s patience in the physical world that surrounds us, the artist is one who knows how to be patient too. It’s as if Nits realise that somehow music is something surreal, it belongs to this world and yet it is so much freer than anything else we know; its field of associations endless. This element of surrealism was clearly an essential part of the gorgeous artwork on Giant Normal Dwarf. As if the eyes and ears assembled together necessarily give rise to associations between concrete objects and abstract ideas resulting in the strangest of visual representations and some of the most original sounding songs. When the earth looks at the moon the most beautiful things are born.

The three songs we heard so far from the album Neon, are like a trip through the fantasy-reality of life. Climbing up this ladder that connects our life as it is, with the imagined associations Nits carefully laid down in their musical reveries. Beromünster, Sunday Painter and The Ghost Ranch are all constructed along the dotted lines of signals coming through from a different time or a different place. They celebrate the creativity of humankind in a material world of radio waves, stones, rocks, bronzes or canvases. Nits play with a sweet sense of the passing of time in these three pieces where people from far away places or bygone times are being (re)united. The songs display a soft, but determined feel of the progressing of time; as it is, Nits are always a charming way to move forward, discerning guides on our path; their kind hearts embrace the whirlwind of life with confidence, courage and tenderness. In these newborn music pieces I divine and intuit a mysterious dance of union with it all, with the whole of our world. They are soothing and playful to comfort the child that remains in all of us.

The things we played with … and still do…

Joke Roelandt, September 2022