The Fun of Objects

The 29th shape is the egg painted blue

Easter Sunday the 20th of April 2025, 8 am. As the hunt for chocolate Easter eggs is opened in gardens, on terraces and in homes, I found my own special Easter egg hidden away carefully by Nits in their TING song “Soap Bubble Box”. It’s an egg painted blue, neatly put into one of the soap bubble sets created by the New York artist Joseph Cornell. It is a pale blue egg delicately positioned in a glass and accompanied by a map of the moon and a clay pipe. Joseph Cornell put together little collections of discarded objects that he found along his walks through New York or at local antiques shops. Nits took the playfulness of his art and translated it into an even more playful piece of music. The bouncing joy emanating from the sprightly percussive temperament of the song sounds as if they were chasing a rebounding ball or soap bubbles all over the place. And what fun they had: “dolle pret” – the words my mum wrote a long time ago underneath a picture of me as a child playing with a ball. Nits seem to really enjoy Cornell’s fascination with these various objects, a sensibility they certainly share with the artist. But Joseph Cornell was a lonely man and kind of sought the company of these things that he assembled so lovingly into works of art.

One cannot help but feel though that these boxes were put together by the artist in order to make sense of the bigger questions of life that puzzled him in his never ending pursuit of spiritual meaning in this vast and strange cosmological world that fascinated him. In a way they were his philosophical toys. This lightness in approaching life and world and their deeper aspects was something he also had in common with the musicians of Nits. Furthermore the way these objects are put together allows the artist to keep the connection alive with his inner child, in the ongoing delight that the encounter with all these objects entails. Sounds familiar? Look at the balloons and the giant soap bubbles in the video Nits made … these are Nits toys expressing how they feel about life … and music.

In fact Joseph Cornell was hugely influenced by the surrealist movement of his time and he became one of the pioneers of their techniques of montage, assemblage, collage and the juxtaposition of objects that did not really belong together. Of course throughout their work Nits also had these surrealist traits from time to time and even their later way of “composing” songs would not be so far removed from this idea of collage and assemblage, where they (re)constructed songs out of various pieces of the different recordings they made during their improvisations. Their recent trilogy of albums boasts some truly magnificently unconventional song formations that I adore. Once again Nits chipped away at the mould of pop music, determined to fit in their “out-of-the-box” registered improvisations.

But “Soap Bubble Box” itself is a piece of one tightly directed bundle of musical ebullience. Except for one instant perhaps: in a most tender moment in the song, Nits portray Joseph Cornell during his walks through New York – “He is walking very slow – Through Manhattan in the snow”, a small parenthesis which furtively touches on the sadness of Cornell’s loneliness … before he pursues, once more, his quest for forgotten things. I love this moment in the music and the poetry and I gather it in my own little soap bubble box of fleeting favourite Nits scenes, together with the short spell where the girl – “your sister” – in brown shoes is walking down the street as it begins to snow, in the icily landscaped song of the “Two Skaters”. I’m sure Joseph would enjoy her company very much. A lovely pairing of two Nits characters walking through the snow. The stillness of the snow falling, so often seems to be associated with loneliness in the lyrics of Henk Hofstede. “My heart is lonely … like a snowflake” Robert Jan and Henk sing in “The Ghost Ranch”. These musical moments of Nits snow are some of the finest that they created. And the characters that walk through them come alive in these most enchanting scenes of tender beauty.

But let’s not despair on this most joyous day and set of happily again with Cornell and Nits blowing soap bubbles into the spring air and continue our path in the search of little treasures along our daily routes.

Happy Easter everyone!

Joke Roelandt, April 2025