Nardus Niemand

Hein Kröhn is a South African artist and musician from the Northern Suburbs of Cape Town. His musical roots run deep, where both his grandfathers were very capable musicians. The one could pick up almost any instrument and were part of the West Coast music scene. The other, born in Holland was a passionate organ player and made home recordings on his old AKAI reel-to-reel.

During the 90’s, Hein picked up the guitar and joined his friends in garage bands and later formed the stoner grunge band, Heiffer, who shared the stage with The Springbok Nude Girls, Lithium, Psycho Deli and a hand full of other bands.

After a 10 year musical hiatus, Hein started experimenting with electronic music and combining guitar and electronic sounds, resulting in very laid back chill music.

He then turned his focus on the mixing side of things and was sound engineer at a few church events, as well as a sound engineer at a metal 4 Africa event.

In 2015 Hein joined a friend in the Tas Vol Nardus music project, with the aim of experimenting in afrikaans music, throwing genre and style out of the window and with a ‘lets try anything and see what works….and if it doesn’t work, who cares?’ mentality, the duo….Nardus Vermaak and Nardus Niemand have since released 4 albums.

“I have decided to use the artist name of Nardus Niemand for my musical projects from now on, …it is easier to separate my personal and my musical -online presence and correspondence.”

Hein is very interested in sound creation (more so than song writing) and what psychological and physiological effect sounds (and the interaction of different sounds) as well as the impact of contrast can have on the listener.

He combines electrical and acoustical guitar with field recordings, contact mic recordings, soft synths, hardware synths and granular synthesis. His musical journey is influenced by artist like Jean-Michelle Jarre, Kyuss, Merzbow, Crawl Unit, Ben Frost, Hendrix Clint Mansell and Philip Glass, to name a few.