THE EX

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Kevin Whitehead once described the noise made by Dutch anarchist punks The Ex as "pissing all over a wall of sound", though "punk" is far too context-specific to describe the music of a group that has pushed the envelope of the genre outwards to include traditional Eastern European and African folk music, and whose collaborations with free improvising musicians predate even Sonic Youth. The Ex's live performances, once seen, are never forgotten. Imagine two men in short pants and army boots, guitars slung impossibly low, careering round the stage like demented dodgem cars, backed by a veritable arsenal of precision-honed polyrhythms that surely can't be coming from the slim woman at the drums, while upfront, the singer, earnest and unsmiling, clasps the mic and declaims his texts with fury. And amazingly, they've been doing this for a quarter of a century. In 1979, in Wormer, outside Amsterdam, GW Sok (né Jos Kley), and Terrie Ex (né Hessels) were swept along like thousands of others on a wave of punk enthusiasm. They formed a group, flipping a coin to determine who did what. Sok ended up on vocals and Terrie got to play guitar, even though he'd never even held one before. For ID they settled on The Ex because it could be sprayed quickly on walls, and Sok wrote his lyrics in English. With a couple of friends on bass and drums, they signed up for a local punk festival and started practicing for real.

Within a tightly knit community of artists, activists and squatters, The Ex evolved a global political outlook and soon locked into an emerging network of likeminded activists. They struck up a solid friendship with The Mekons, particularly Jon Langford, who produced 1983's Tumult. The quintessential Ex sound began to take shape the following year with the arrival of bassist Luc Klaasen (who left last year) and drummer Katherina Bornefeld. Blueprints For A Blackout was a milestone in terms of its approach to song form and its instrumentation. Flirting with several styles, it opened up a whole series of avenues for potential exploration, notably an interest in improvisation that has continued ever since. 1985's Pokkeherrie , punk in its rawest form, was followed by Too Many Cowboys (1987) and Aural Guerrilla (1988).

Dog Faced Hermans guitarist Andy Moor hooked up with The Ex in 1988. The group was beginning to tap into a rich vein of folk and ethnic music that surfaced in their music in the decade to come, especially after their encounter with cellist Tom Cora in 1989. Scrabbling At The Lock with Cora remains their best-selling album (a second album with the cellist, And The Weathermen Shrug Their Shoulders , came out in 1993), introducing The Ex's work to a whole new public more familiar with the world of jazz and improvisation. Improv is just one of many paths the group has explored. Their interest in non-European culture dates back to a split 7" in 1984 with the Iraqi Kurdish group Awara. Recent years have seen numerous collaborations with Japanese dancer Hisako Hor Iikawa, Senegalese conga player Serigne, Congolese group Konono and Eritrean singer Tsehaytu Beraki. In January 2002 The Ex embarked on a trip to Ethiopia, a voyage of discovery lovingly documented on their Website (www.theex.nl), and intend to return to the region later this year.

When an opportunity presented itself to work with Steve Albini in Chicago, they seized it to produce one of their finest albums to date, Starters Alternators . A second Albini-produced album, Dizzy Spells , was recorded in France in 2000. In 1999, The Ex released their first In The Fishtank collaboration on Konkurrent with Chicago's Tortoise. Their proposed trip to Texas in 2001 was aborted when The Ex's plane turned around halfway across the Atlantic -- it was September 11.

The Ex's new bassist, Rozemarie Heggen, a classically trained New Music virtuoso, jumped at the chance of leaving a secure chair in the prestigious Nieuw Ensemble to board The Ex's tour bus last year. "I was attracted to the idea of playing with them because I knew I would be free as a bird," she confirms. "Every time somebody new joins, we start from scratch again," says Jos. "It's a completely new band!"

-- Writer and Musician Dan Warburton can be found at: www.paristransatlantic.com.

Excerpted from "Club of Chaos", originally published in The Wire, June 2003. Used by permission. (See www.thewire.co.uk)