51 Shapes of Nits: The 50th shape is the suitcase

Dwelling in Transit  

“In a suitcase in the attic – I found a photograph” are the last lines of the ANGST song “Radio Orange”. The suitcase enters the world of Nits songs on a few occasions. In them Nits carry items of past – as in the lines quoted above – present and even future – “pick up the suitcase of dreams” in the song “Moon Moon” – into their lyrical world. Nits live in a material world and in an ever moving world of musical ideas; this all expresses itself in a recurring and dominant motif: the theme of travel. Trains, cars, boats, bicycles and planes are typical Nits vehicles that concretise the ontology of movement that defines the work of Nits. The travels of Nits are rarely presented as tourism or some form of escapism. Instead their voyages function as an existential condition. 
Nits always work with the perspective of a horizon in sight, a place to journey toward. The openness that characterises the phenomenological perception of the nature of humankind is also theirs. Human existence is set apart by this openness; we constantly project ourselves into a future that is still uncertain and is waiting to be shaped by us. Our existence is always underway – like a car on the road, a favourite image of Nits. Nits love to remember and imagine all these different shapes of being. Their tours through Europe and beyond lay down a map of ever changing perceptions of cities and streets, of people and cultural artefacts and all along this path of discovery the self develops itself in tune with the journey it is undertaking. All those cities and buildings offer vast archives of being where Nits relish to wander about with no particular purpose or destination in mind. Nits only observe and their music if nothing else, seems to express this observation. Their patience and perseverance during the physical and musical explorations they undertake are nothing short of an exceptional form of phenomenology of attention. Their work centers around the subtle textures of existence – and therefore also music – itself. Their sensibility is experiential: to travel through Europe in the music of Nits, is not simply to move between locations, it is to encounter different configurations of memory, architecture, language, mood and atmosphere. Nits always look out for the singularity of a particular place. Their music, like a river, makes its way through the landscape formed by the dialectics of nearness and distance.

In the song “Hands of the Watch”, the protagonist is waiting in a station in Rome sitting on a suitcase while the hands of the watch keep turning around without mercy. This very concrete and lifelike, even ordinary situation becomes a metaphor of a traveler through life, carrying with him all that he gathered throughout his life in a suitcase waiting for the next destination on his path. It symbolises the uncertainty, the indecisions, the lack of a determinate agency, the doubts we all face. Against the waiting Nits always offer their unfaltering sense of patience. And their unwavering, heightened sense of meaningful dwelling: their music always invites us to dwell more carefully in this world. Our journeys in different places are often an encounter with history through the old – or even ancient – cities and towns that we visit. A history of cultural landscapes unfolds itself through the meandering songs of Nits. Geography and memory are closely entwined. Buildings and streets, houses that harbour a past, memories, stories that we can revisit and make part of our ongoing present as it turns into our past. The memory and history that lie in all the places we wander through is not turned into nostalgia in the musical contemplations of Nits, rather they are presented as a living dimension of the present. It is as if their music trains our perception anew, time and time again.
And songs become acts of preservation.

Nits songs often revolve around environments. They encourage lingering. In their work Nits explore how we inhabit places, encounter things and people and how we discover meaning within everyday life. The attention they pay to these fundamental aspects of our existence, to these conditions of human life can almost be called radical.Their music recreates the structures and shapes through which experience becomes meaningful. Nits don’t really dramatise the complexity of existence, instead they attend carefully to what is there, to what was and to what could be possible. The simplicity of their approach is as fruitful as it is radical! 
A street, a house, a train, a photograph, a face, an artwork, a jacket for the rain, a chair … they all carry a history with them, and they all contain stories. Where people of different eras and regions can mingle in a fragile coexistence of presence and absence… In fact … just like the music of Nits does in its delicate dialogue with the silence it meets, greets and embraces.

Their trademark songs “Adieu Sweet Bahnhof”, “The Train”, “Cars & Cars”, “Bike in Head”, “Port of Amsterdam” … – to name just a few – are all situated in places of transition, spaces of transit, where you move around in the world and cross what I’d like to call “thresholds”, points of entry, departure or transition, metaphors of places where you are open to change, to new beginnings, to transformation. Many of the songs of Nits take shape between different stages of a life: from childhood to adulthood, young adults, sisters and brothers into mothers and fathers into grandmothers and grandfathers … the natural flow of life. The Nits world dwells and thrives in those instances of transit, of continuous flow and change. 
Against the usual confessional nature of pop music, Nits pose a much deeper layer of fundamental traits of our being. Without being sentimental, they ground our deepest emotions – “Love is a suitcase filled with danger” – in the way we are anchored in the world, which makes for a far more complete picture of the human condition. 
How is it possible that Nits have portrayed such an innocent, “simple” picture of the world, yet have succeeded in shaping a philosophically coherent and essential image of it in music and words without hardly anyone noticing!?

Joke Roelandt, June 2026