The Ex performs at Vancouver venue with new material and political edge
The Dutch experimental band brings decades of anarchist-influenced music to the stage, with conductor Ashley Trimble leading a show dedicated to late music director John Arsenault.
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The Ex, the legendary Dutch experimental and political rock band, will perform in Vancouver with new material rooted in decades of anarchist ideology and musical innovation.
The band's catalogue spans from their 1983 album Dignity of Labour—themed around industrial workers and recorded in the ruins of a Van Gelder paper factory—to recent work including 2010's Catch My Shoe, whose title references journalist Muntadhar al-Zaidi's shoe-throwing protest against former U.S. President George W. Bush during a 2008 press conference in Baghdad. Al-Zaidi became a folk hero in Iraq, with a statue of his shoe erected in Tikrit. The Ex's album celebrates "all the shoe-throwers in the world, and especially to the people who build statues for shoes."
The band's musical palette has expanded through collaborations with avant-gardists including Tom Cora, Sonic Youth, and Ethiopian saxophonist Getatchew Mekuria. Current lead vocalist Arnold de Boer, who replaced original vocalist Sok, will front the Vancouver show.
Catch My Shoe was the fourth and final Ex album produced by the late recording engineer Steve Albini at his Chicago studio, Electrical Audio. De Boer described the sessions as transformative: the band played all songs live in-studio, with Albini using 25 microphones on drums alone, recording to tape and occasionally cutting and splicing takes to perfect a single version. De Boer wrote in a 2024 remembrance after Albini's death that the experience felt "endless—in the sense of unfettered, unhampered."
Details on Vancouver date and ticketing to be announced.