On the occasion of Nits’ fortieth birthday

Weiter Geht Es Nicht…

Worshippers of – among many other things – rivers, I then wrote. In one of the last lines of the last song of their latest album, Henk effortlessly sums up the whole idea behind Nits’ lyricism and the nature of their musical identity: “The river is a synthesizer”. The syntax of their musical compositions has always been characterised by unpredictable, unexpected meanderings in a world of musical wonder. And this thoughtful song “Zündapp nach Oberheim” defines Nits’ musical persona so clearly and evidently, unambiguously as a loving oneness of our natural and material world with the elusive and ephemeral reality of music as created by the musical instrument. “Angst”, this ultimate existentialist Stimmung of man emphasises the short-lived, transient nature of all things; the ephemerality of music exemplifies this evidence like no other art form can; music is like a sand sculpture washed away by the sea as soon as it was built. Music will always accompany us throughout our personal history like the river flowing with us through time. Nowadays it is rather fashionable to think that our most precious way of being and our deepest truths lie in a spiritual or immaterialist attitude towards life, thereby forgetting that all that comes from the mind and spirit originates from matter..

Weiter Geht Es Nicht…

” Still my favourite band after all those years: Nits: they are different to the core, Einzelgänger, the perfect antidote to all that’s fake and hip, musical aesthetes of pop, worshippers of tables and chairs, shoes, mountains, rivers, cars, boats, canoes, bikes, trains, trees, nights and days, houses, dreams, wind and rain, moon and stars, pencils and buttons, umbrellas, pelicans and penguins, Tintoretto and Henry Moore, strawberries and orchards, and all things blue… What more does one need?

They seem to succeed effortlessly in turning the abstract, furtive and fleeting matter of music into concrete, instrumentally and vocally rendered little tableaux that evoke the world as we see it with our eyes, feel it with our hands and feet, dream it in our hearts… In a subtly phenomenological way they picture perfectly what it means to be-in-the-world, surrounded by big things and small, natural things and artistic objects, – nothing too close or familiar to be noticed by them -, amongst giants and dwarfs, seeing, feeling, remembering, imagining, their musical wanderlust reflecting an inquisitive mind and an insatiable appetite for the kinetics of an always receding horizon; all this as the playful soundtrack of a thoroughly lived in, idiosyncratic time. In their minute attention to musical detail and through the patient and thoughtful unfolding of their songs, we can hear the forms being shaped, the elusive presence of the music watercolouring our moods. A tangible world laid out at our fingertips, in front of our feet, with nothing in between but these paintbrush notes. A music of floating cloud like shapes and changing colours. Listening to “The Eiffel Tower” you get one of the prettiest views you’ll ever hear. No small feat for such tiny creatures…”

Joke Roelandt, November 2017