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l It’s April already... We just got back from a short visit to Greece, to play two shows, in Athens and Thessaloniki, and to meet old and new friends there. It was fun to be back after so very long, the first time was 17 years ago! A lot has changed, partly because of last year’s Olympics, of course, as they cleaned up the city to look good. The Acropolis is still in ruins, though. And so are people’s wages... Late last year we celebrated our 25th anniversary with some big events, about which you can read more inside. We also released our new double-album Turn, plus the Beautiful Frenzy dvd (which contains the original film plus a lot of old live-footage, and more), and we’re getting ready with finishing the preparations for, finally, the release of the singles-compilation. The release is planned for September, via Ex Records (nl), Vicious Circle (f), and Touch And Go (usa). Anyway, we’re back in France
again, the other side of France that is, since we played here on that side
in February. As if nothing has changed. But, hm, something did... because
Rozemarie decided after the February tour to leave the band.. She already
had some doubts for a while, if this band/life was what she really wanted,
and although a lot of exciting and wonderful things have happened in the
past two years she felt not totally happy, the traveling took a lot of her
energy away, resulting in stubborn illnessess after the tours. So that was
quite a bummer, for both her and us, we think. We didn’t want to cancel any
of the scheduled concerts, though, so we looked for replacements to fill in
for the time-being. We found a few, pretty quick, and we dare to say they’re
pretty good ones, too. for the Greece gigs and one in Utrecht we played with
Colin (ex-Dog Faced Hermans) on bass, and that went totally well. It was
great to see him play bass again, after all this time since DFH stopped in
1995. For the tour in France and the concerts in Russia, at the end of April
(our first visit there since 1990!), in Moscow and St. Petersburg, we will
be joined by our good friend Massimo of Zu from Rome. With him we will also
be playing at the 20th anniversary of the Schlachthof in Wels, Austria, and
during the Festival in Moers, Germany (both in May). On request of the Moers
Festival we’re organizing one more special Ex Convoy Event, with a lot of
the artists from the previous Convoy Tour, including Silent Block, Zea,
Anne-James Chaton, Hisako Horikawa, Zu, ICP, and from Ethiopia Mohammed
Jimmy Mohammed Trio and Getatchew Mekurya. We’re really looking forward to
all this and we are sure it’s gonna be fantastic! In November 2004 we had a two-day festival in
Amsterdam’s Paradiso and the release of the beautiful frenzy dvd, followed
by the Convoy Tour with almost 40 artists in one big bus visiting various
venues in 5 French towns, ending the week in Brussels for a final festival
day with the same convoy plus more extra guests.
It's early February, and we're off for our
first tour of 2005, which will bring us in France, Switzerland, Germany,
and Belgium. Ten shows in eleven days, and we're totally looking forward
to it. Although it's true, the last tour of 2004 will be hard to beat. It
was the icing on the cake, so to speak, of the whole past year. First we
did an amazing tour in September with Han Bennink on the West coast of the
US, coinciding with the release of our new double-album Turn, then in
October we had a month of final preparations for the 25th Anniversary
event, and in November we had a two-day festival in Amsterdam's Paradiso
and the release of the Beautiful Frenzy DVD, followed by a Convoy Tour
with almost 40 artists in one big bus visiting various venues in 5 French
towns, ending the week in Brussels for a final festival day with the same
convoy plus more extra guests.
We had a totally amazing week. We had invited a whole bunch of artists from all over the world... friends, colleagues, and others whose work we admired. In Amsterdam we had two nights of a non-stop programme, and the atmosphere was fantastic. So many things happening all the time, and everybody cheerful: artists, workers, audience. And that was just the beginning, then we went to France, in this big bus, with 40 people on board. The party continued, catastrophies there were none. That was the amazing part of this event. Almost everything went absolutely smoothly and everybody had a really good time. Of course, there were a couple of obstacles to overcome, the main one basically being the fact that we kind of underestimated the balance between average speed of the bus and certain distances between cities, which resulted a couple of times of packing up and loading straight after a concert and get in the bus go go go to the next city in order to arrive in time to set up everything timely for the next show. A lack of decent sleep was the direct result for many of us, but since the overall adventure was going so well, and everybody was having such a good time, no one bothered to complain, and in every town we came the people of the venues made us feel so very welcome, and everywhere the audiences were also enjoying themselves so very much... That's what in the end struck us most, the total dedication with which all the people involved helped make this week-long event so fantastically wonderful. It was all totally inspiring and we all felt really proud afterwards, and totally tired too. When we got back home we then slept for oh we don't know how long, but in 25 years time they can wake us up and say let's do it again and we're absolutely sure we then all wanna do it once again for sure!
What Some Wrote About Turn
Pitchfork:
(...) For 25 years, the Dutch band have nipped at the fringe of post-punk,
steering stridently clear of corporate-owned record labels and lighting up
the left side of the political spectrum with more than a dozen albums
proudly splattered with anarcho-syndicalist and anti-consumerist
sentiment. But they're not just shouting about trade unionism, materialist
greed, and the inherent contradictions of modern free-market societies;
they can bring the noise, too, and their polemics come wrapped in a
blistering package of smoldering art-punk informed by free jazz and global
folk. On their latest album, Turn, they elevate their craft to near
perfection over the course of two wild, unpredictable, and unforgettable
discs.
The bulk of the songs that comprise Turn hew
to The Ex's peculiar brand of crushing, dense post-punk, but the music can
veer on a dime into spoken satire, Eritrean freedom songs, and savage
improvisation. Steve Albini returns to the boards for them on this album,
and nobody captures The Ex better than he does--the sound is dry and
caustic, allergic to reverb, as heavy as Shellac, and relentlessly
intense. The band's setup is extremely basic--guitar, standup bass, and
drums--but they wring a lot out of it, particularly the bass. The
instrument is amplified and then scraped, beaten, sawed, and distorted,
alternately used to create an annihilating low-end and to emulate
electronic effects or panicked voices. The drums are mixed high for
maximum damage and principle vocalist GW Sok--who doesn't sing so much as
rant--winds up somewhere near the middle of it all, a voice caught in a hellstorm of overdriven guitar, unable to control his surroundings but
forced to comment on them through a sense of duty.
The band uses the two-disc format to offer the
listener a break + 90 straight minutes of caustic, melody-averse art punk
is a lot to take in-and they intentionally place the album's most
violent, punishing, exhilarating track, 'Theme from Konono', at the
beginning of disc two, right next to 'Huriyet', which is both a cover of
an Eritrean protest song from their fight for independence from Ethiopia
and the most beautifully melodic song on the record (...).
About the only bands from punk's original era that are still as bracing and original as The Ex are Wire and The Fall. What's truly amazing about Turn is how colossal, how ingenious, how vital it sounds. Just about any of the current post-punk crop sound downright milquetoast when put up against The Ex's vibrant assault and well-considered commentary (...). rating: 8.8 -Joe Tangari
Bandoppler: Keeping up
with the Ex is hard...their existence is restless, perhaps due
to its origins as squatter's rights activists in the dawn of early
post-punk. That's right, kids-- sometimes punk isn't just about music,
sometimes it's about things like housing, too, and how we treat other
human beings.
Like the Mekons, ancient and wise through various musical incarnations but with a certain core of players, releasing oodles of experiments and collaborations and attacks on the complacent mob-think of popular culture, the Ex have maintained consistent aesthetic quality for over fifteen records. But if you'd never heard them before, the buyer-friendly double CD Turn would be a damn fine place to start...and unlike the often straight-ahead rock or drunken song-craft of the Mekons, the Ex keep working with avant-garde forms they were forged on, blending the overflowing mix with songs that stick after some shocked initial plays (...). There are recipes here, inside jokes, poetry, tribal drumming ‹ it's art by collective, and it never ends up in narcissistic jams, rather cresting and exploding in more identities into the swirl, traces of PiL, Kleenex, Poison Girls, and other pivotal anti-pop bands popping into mind as the flavors combine. (...) Then musical past, present, and future combine, taking this twin album out of the realm of doppleganger and fusing its vision into one purely engaged moment--a moment a true lover of experimental rock should not miss this year. rating: 9.5 -Chris Estey
The Ex & Alex d'Electrique
It's definitive, this Summer we're doing the
music/theatre project together with the amazing theatre-company Alex
d'Electrique. Both Ex and Alex started out around the same time in the
late 70s. Rehearsals will take place end of May and all of June, the
première will be end of June, and the shows will be on one location in
Amsterdam five to six days a week till July the 24th. Later in the year,
around October, we'll take the programme on the road through Holland for a
week or two.
Singles. Period.
The Ex's long-promised singles-compilation...
it's finally getting there. Arriving at snailspeed (no surprise of course,
since some time ago we had a snail-species named after us!) so much is
true, but nevertheless: 23 songs from the period 1980-1990, a full-hour of
music, which includes Human car, Rock'n'roll-stoel, Stupid Americans,
Weapons for El Salvador, Gonna rob the spermbank, Lied der Steinklopfer,
Keep on hoppin' and the Rara rap.
Hopefully it'll be out at the end of June, but
otherwise definitely available in August. Out on Touch And Go (usa), Ex
Records (Holland), and Vicious Circle (France).
Shortcuts
The extended version of Beautiful Frenzy (the
film plus lots of old live-footage and more) is now available via Moskwood
Media on dvd. +++ In May we'll play at the Schlachthof jubilee in Wels,
Austria, where Katherina will join Jon Langford for the KatJon Band... +++
We are invited to play Greece in March, Spain in May, hopefully we can do
both, but nothing's confirmed yet. +++ All Terp Records and Unsound
releases are now available via our Shop page at www.theex.nl. For more
information and for ordering of cd's, you can e-mail us at
mailorder@theex.nl...+++ In the autumn we'll be doing a big tour of Germany. Last year we
already did a smaller one, that was fun. So it feels good to go back there
again. +++ A new Ex Records catalogue is also on its way... +++ In
April/May Andy joins Cor Fuhler's Corkestra for a tour of the lowlands...
+++ Tsehaytu Beraki's double-album Selam is no less thana hit. On Sunday
6th of March she can be seen on Dutch tv in the vpro programme Vrije
Geluiden. +++ Meanwhile, the Konono live-album Lubuaku is getting a lot of
airplay on usa college radio. They should go and tour there, that's for
sure! +++
Andy, Terrie, Sok, Katherina, Rozemarie, Grrrt, and Arrrd say goodbye. A News Letter 14-update will be available around the Summer of 2005.
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