Driving Through Europe. Dedicated to the German Cook of Schnecken Im Speckhemd

The eleventh shape is Rob Kloet’s red cooking pot

On the sound of the accordion a restaurant is introducing itself … as an “eating house”: “Once I was a famous restaurant between Utrecht and Salzburg  – I wore silver and linen”. A  beautifully melodic presentation by this eatery, … but as it will turn out, deliberately misleading the customer… It could be the opening sentence of a storybook for children or the premise of a cartoon. We are in the middle of a land called The Dutch Mountains. It is a land with a queen and princes, a land where parents raise their children between the open air of the water and (frozen) rivers and a football field, and books, comics and tv. Where children have nightmares and are comforted by bedtime stories, where they have their tonsils removed, their eyes checked, where they dream of mountains that aren’t there, where – some years later – they visualise a music of childhood past so candid and warm, it must be without a doubt one of the most beautiful albums dedicated to a child’s world in the most personal language of both music and lyrics. 

With two eyes wide open, Nits wrote this album of childhood in their fatherland, not in Dutch, but in a language most Europeans might understand and which is by coincidence also the mother tongue of pop, and in a music that is already deeply impregnated by the different sounds of European aunts and uncles. Mother is coming up the stairs and tells the story of a manatee. Memories of childhood, mums and dads, aunts and uncles, sisters, brothers, nephews … the story of a young family told in pop’s language by birth. I did not know that these little stories could be told in such a unique, effervescent instance of pop music. But Nits did it! The album sounds old-fashioned and innovative at the same time. Because it managed to combine old, familiar and very personal, but universal stories in an equally personal and universal language of a mixture of pop with traditional folk music and classical elements added to it. That was the recipe also used in the song “An Eating House”. Somewhere in Nits’ kitchen, the cooking pot united tastes and ingredients from an old and a new world, idiosyncrasy and universality were blended to perfection to the rhythm of Rob Kloet’s red cooking pot. Rob has always been the practical type… And he has known for the longest time how to guide our awareness of moments passing, with utter delicacy.
It’s an old formula that many a classical composer has used: combining a paradigmatic language of the genre with melodies or elements from folkloristic traditions of music and dance. And it’s refreshing and exhilarating, like herbs and spices being thrown into the mix. The whole album “In The Dutch Mountains” is full of this regional, European cuisine. And the song “An Eating House” has this quintessential way about it of a tradition of European cooking that is in a perfect alignment with music and storytelling. Eating and feasting in celebration go hand in hand, like in the albums of Asterix and Obelix, where the biggest cooking pot is always on hand to prepare one of Obelix favourite dishes “sanglier, everzwijn, wild boar”, … but the bard is not so well loved in le pays de Gaule …

But then of course we are in an animistic world where eating houses can speak and get hungry too just like humans do. For a short moment you could feel like you were in the middle of a Michael Haneke movie, where a family is on the road not knowing which misfortune is about to befall them. The frantic noise of kitchen utensils or cutlery and the roaring sound of hunger seeming somewhat ominous. But this is a children’s world and the occurrence of man-eating characters in fairytales is not exceptional at all. There is the wicked witch in Hansel and Gretel, the wolf in the story of Little Red Riding Hood, and the giant in the adventures of Tom Thumb … We all grew up with these stories and Nits wrote a few of their own. And they even do the voices: “I am an eaTing house…”
It is a world where music is a way of life and has entered almost any aspect of daily living: from the kitchen to the bedroom, the football pitch to the mailbox, the laundry room to the doctor’s cabinet or the library and chicken coop. Nits live in a musical world with musical objects. Every character in it has musical potential – yes chickens too. World becomes a musical fantasy. The eating house is such an adorable musical invention of Nits and they act it out very well too: prudent Joke at the wheel of the car, Robert Jan with his accordion paving the way, Rob calling everyone at the table while the big drum just plays itself – instruments in a fairytale world can really do that – and Henk just being the masterful story teller that he is, as an omniscient narrator.

A story of a little restaurant that longs to be a skyscraper or a castle and wants to eat anything coming its way in order to achieve his dream… it is funny and a little scary like most of these old tales are and in that sense the song fits into a whole field of literary expression that is centuries old. This good old casserole of Rob – I wonder if it survived the fire – lends this song the attribute that connects it to a whole set of cooking pots through countless stories and fictitious narrations of all kinds. It brought the song into the concreteness of an everyday world and established once more this Nits equation where music equals fantasy. Music and world are united in the imagination, a magical stew as only Nits can prepare them…
Utrecht and Salzburg, silver and linen … what a sumptuous and elegant world once more. The song certainly worth a few Michelin stars. Amidst all the fun and fantasy, Nits still exhume class and style, once more, and an impeccable savoir-faire in the continuation of all sorts of historic and traditional European modes of expression, lowbrow and highbrow, with seriousness and lightheartedness in a perfect balance of good taste. 
In The Dutch Mountains is a wonderful tale of what childhood feels like, I mean the exploration of a new world in all its newly discovered and inherited facets, with Europe and beyond as a “family setting”.

Joke Roelandt, June 2024