There are records that seem to be born "in spite of" the world, and others that come into being because the world is the way it is: brittle, frayed, short of breath. IT DEEL IV belongs to the latter species. It doesn’t comment on current affairs with slogans or manifestos, but with something older and more dangerous: listening. In an age of permanent noise, that alone feels faintly subversive.

This fourth and final chapter of IT DEEL, the long-term residency project initiated by brothers Jan and Romke Kleefstra, arrives less as a full stop than as a natural exhale. A door left ajar. Since 2021, the project has staged a yearly dialogue between Frisian poetry, landscape and invited musicians; here the circle tightens and breathes together with Joana Guerra and Maria do Mar, two artists who never tiptoe, yet know how to move across silence without breaking it.

Recorded in the Thomas Church in Katlijk, the album wears its location like a second skin. This is not reverberation as postcard beauty; it’s a space that listens while being listened to. Guerra’s cello and do Mar’s violin avoid ornamental lyricism, working instead like exposed nerves, scraping across bow, wood, air and friction. The music often seems on the verge of becoming noise, then pulls back - not out of politeness, but out of necessity.

Jan Kleefstra’s poetry, spoken or half-embedded rather than declaimed, sits at the core without ever asserting dominance. Frisian here is not an exotic flourish; it’s raw material. It sounds like damp soil under fingernails, like words that don’t ask to be understood so much as "inhabited". Themes of human–non-human entanglement and our estrangement from living systems are not explained or underlined; they’re simply placed there, like objects found in a field after rain.

Romke Kleefstra, drawing on decades of work across ambient, drone, post-rock and free improvisation, acts as an almost invisible director. The structures are sparse, sometimes skeletal, but never rigid. Pieces such as "Pear Wurden Mar" or "As De Ljoft Meisjongt" unfold slowly, with a patience that today borders on the indecent. Shorter tracks feel like sonic marginalia: crooked haikus, breaths taken mid-thought.

With IT DEEL IV, the project settles into a form of active stillness. This is not a record about nature in any illustrative sense, but one that tries to place the human back inside the landscape, stripped of privilege. In a moment obsessed with visibility and instant reaction, this LP opts for duration, attention, and a slower gait. Its message is simple and unsparing: we are not separate from what we are dismantling.
This is not comfort music. It is companion music. And right now, that feels like something quietly essential.