DE WITTE KUNST ‘De Witte Kunst’
This may not be your cup of tea, making you all warm and fuzzy inside. The Dutch duo De Witte Kunst will puzzle your senses and leave you with more questions than you had before.
The self-titled EP is a half-hour-long David Lynch-like contemplation about the world that quickly transforms from mundane to surreal. The album opens with the mesmerizing instrumental ‘Intro’ that lulls your mind through ups and downs until you completely lose grip of the familiar. Otherworldly synth sounds mastered by Lyckle de Jong foreshadow the bizarreness you are about to encounter, which is enhanced by the dissonant and rusty-sounding thump that breaks the dream-like idyll. The longest song of the album (as well as my personal favorite), ‘De Hand’, could be the business card track of De Witte Kunst. The eccentric narrator Koen van Bommel steps into a different world that is kept as a secret behind the closed curtains. The dissonance between mundane and delusion is reflected in Koen asking Who is the man in the mirror? Who is the man with the grocery bag? All the narrator went for was a short stroll, but instead, it turned into a hell you’ve been dragged into by the hand as well.
As the album progresses, the duo thoroughly embraces the synthpop aesthetics with philosophical, yet absurdist lyrics. While Koen sings of life in a simulation (‘Virtuele Wereld’) and inconsiderable actions of people (‘Bij Nader Inzien’), Lyckle provides a simple yet plentiful accompaniment with a Roland E30 synthesizer that dates back to the 1980s. The combination of Koen’s over-pronounced narration and passé vocabulary, together with built-in backing tracks in Lyckle’s synthesizer and the robotic-sounding drum machine, turns them into a tongue-in-cheek act of wedding or party musicians. The image gets even more warped when you see the duo perform in both real and virtual worlds. As Koen marked in their interview for 3voor12, the confusion in people is noticeable as they look puzzled at each other and ask: “Should I think of it as good? Or is it stupid?”
It’s been a year already since I listened to this album for the first time, but the questions continue piling up as the curiosity endures. De Witte Kunst is an enigma that requires you to come back for another listen, which will maintain your intrigue with previously overlooked caprice.
