The Ex & Brass Unbound / Zun Zun Egui / John Butcher
Tufnell Park Dome, 03/02/10

The Dome in Tufnell Park is an odd place to be when itís two thirds empty. Not actually a dome in any fashion I can appreciate, it is room with a distinctly old fashioned air to it - something like a municipal drill hall operating in tandem with the village scout hall of it’s downstairs neighbour the Boston Music Room, where Billy Childish is still packing ‘em in one Friday night in most months, and long may he continue to do so. Where the downstairs is a generally rather comforting place to lurk though, the larger open space of the ‘Dome’ can’t help but add a certain low level malignancy to the atmosphere. A big, draughty hall essentially - the kind of place you’d imagine as the setting for a scary punk gig circa 1980, where they brought in extra muscle on the door but skinheads threatened to beat everybody up anyway, enraged by subconscious memories of primary school gym lessons, as The Lurkers or somebody stood on stage wondering why they bothered. Or such is the desultory picture that the history books and Billy Bragg songs paint for halls such as this anyway. Obviously I have no idea, I wasn’t there. Maybe the Tuffnell Park Dome was a shining beacon of happiness and hope during the Thatcher years. But I doubt it.

Anyway, no such anachronistic shenanigans are on display tonight, making me give thanks that I’m lucky enough to live in an age in which I’m extremely unlikely to get punched whilst attempting to watch men play guitars. And in a round-about sort of way, maybe it is the inclusive and forward-thinking spirit of bands like The Ex that I have to thank to thank for that..? Kinda? A bit? I don’t know whether or not they played in the UK when they were getting started as an anarcho/squatter affiliated buncha punks back in the ‘80s, but I guess if they did they might have experienced grim scenes of infamy such as those imagined above. Now though, all is relaxed, all is cordial, and all the world is one beneath a plastic cup full of Guinness as one of those Sublime Frequencies Asian radio pop CDs plays over the PA - jolly, magical tunes from Thailand or Korea or someplace, probably knocked out as filler for a domestic market where there weren’t enough Beatles records to go around, and now rediscovered by us over-saturated nth generation indie kids for whom THOUSANDS of Beatles records are only a few clicks away, appreciated on a whole new level cos it sounds so weird and cool and different, and , like, cos it’s wonderful how forty years of tape hiss and radio distortion make it all sound like one big, distant drone from an ancient party in another room where people long dead are having loads of fun.

This implied sense of respectful, fourth-world open-mindedness continues to prevail as John Butcher walks onstage alone, and is greeted not only with a complete lack of mockery or dismissal, but even a general lack of *talking* from this relatively rockist crowd in a relatively cavernous rock venue, as he presents a somewhat academic set of “hey guys, listen to these funny sounds I’ve learned how to make” style electro-acoustic improv. I don’t know about you, but I always find solo performances in a jazz/improv vein a bit of a hard sell. Regardless of how abstracted or abrasive things get, it’s always the aspect of ensemble playing that opens it up for me, the basic drama of musicians ricocheting around each other. I’m pretty sure I must have even seen John Butcher in that context in the past and enjoyed it, but when there’s just one guy up there on his own blurting noises into the void, it all gets a bit, well, y’know. More like watching a talented player doing his daily exercises in public than something we can really engage with.

That said, I’ve got nothing better to do at this point in the evening than sip my ale and pay attention, and some of the noises Mr. Butcher makes are very curious and nice. I especially appreciate his preference for playing short, distinct pieces rather than the twenty minute blowouts favoured by many of his peers, and to my mind this helps make his music a lot more approachable. He does some good stuff on his sax with some kinda didgeridoo style circular breathing creating a bit of a drone, although I’m less enamored with the results when he picks up a… shit, my horn recognition skills aren’t what they used to be - was it a soprano sax? Or a kind of clarinet? One of those smaller, straight ones anyway… and plays a sorta high-pitched birdcall medley. Too much treble, man! He also does a good bit where he angles the horn on his bigger sax around the mic to create a kind of rumbling, pedal-aided feedback that he manipulates into a sorta slow rhythm by clicking back and forth on the... what do you call the bits you push in and out on a saxophone? Valves? (honestly, you wouldn’t get this kind of crap from Nat Hentoff would you? And to think, I could probably draw the guitars of the last ten rock bands I saw from memory…) - it sounds terrific anyway, which is the point.

A point should be well-remembered by Zun Zun Egui, who are on next. Almost as soon as they got on stage and started tuning up, my internal alarm bells were ringing. “MUSOS”, I hissed, crushing my beer mug in my hand and destroying the feel-good vibes of the gig for all within earshot. Ok, obviously I didn’t do that, but you get the picture. I won’t begrudge it to ya if you like Zun Zun Egui, I’m sure they’re pretty great if you’re into what they’re doing, but stuck as I am at the moment on a uniform diet of three chord pop, mechanical 4/4 rhythms and repetitious noise, they are Not. My. Thing. At. All. Or, let’s put it this way: I suppose I currently like the idea that musicians should treat every note as it were a close friend, and I’m very much the kind of person who prefers to maintain a small, clearly defined group of close friends, so that significant time and rewarding engagement may be dedicated to each. Zun Zun Egui on the other hand are veritable social harlots, rushing around the octaves like party-mad bastards, but ultimately not making a great impression on any of the, er, tones they encounter along the way. Too many notes! Not that I have a kneejerk distrust of musicianship or anything you understand, it’s just that… I guess if all those notes are there, I want to hear them channeled into something monolithic and awesome, not just, y’know, played, and there are only fleeting glimpses of potential Frippian grandeur within this set. Of course, they’re too smart to ever sink on stage into the kind of morbid practice room ‘funk’ I was worried might manifest itself, but behind closed doors I dread to think what these guys get up to. They have that sort of self-absorbed “no we won’t stop playing, we’re so fucking good” swagger that makes me run for the hills.

Zun Zun Egui’s most distinctive feature is the singer/guitaristís habit of communicating via a startling Tropicalia-style affirmative yelping that he uses to try to incite dancing and excitement, apparently steadfast in the belief that he is playing the most powerful and sexy music imaginable and that we are callow, inhibited FOOLS for remaining still. I don’t wish to sound demeaning, cos I’ve gotta give it to the guy, he performs this role extremely well. But the intensity of his appeals can’t help but seem somewhat alarming in the context of lugubrious prog-rock in North London on a Wednesday evening, and it’s likely that if he were exhibiting similar enthusiasm from within the crowd, there’d probably be a ten foot gap opening around him in all directions and a doorman looking on wearily. The big question is of course: if this music was presented to me as some kind of dusty French or Brazilian early ‘70s artifact and reissued on 180gm vinyl on Finders-Keepers or something, would I think it was awesome? No comment.

Gee, that was a lot of words wasted on knocking down a perfectly well-meaning band - sorry. Best move straight on what we’re all here to see: perennial Dutch art-punk godheads The Ex, here accompanied by Brass Unbound, their own hand-picked quartet of European horn colossi. And holy shit, have they ever got a show in store for you.



Watching the above promo video for this tour earlier the same day, I was slightly taken aback to see what hard cases the brass contingent appear to be. They look like they could all be wrestlers or rugby players or something; certainly of a different cut from the kind of lily-livered males I’m more used to seeing on stage. This got me thinking about how saxophone players are often pretty big guys, and wondering whether this has anything to do with the physical demands of playing the instrument. But best leave that unrewarding train of thought burnt out at the side of the road and cut to the chase:

The Ex & Brass Unbound was fucking breathtaking.

A total hour of power, so loaded with climatic, fiery, cacophonous beauty, it sprawled straight over across the 80 minute mark and still left me feeling like it’d only just started. Righteous, rabble-rousing music, unshackled from genre and tradition pretty much entirely, but so primal and self-explanatory it could get everyone from the most haughty jazzbo to your granddad psyched up and ready for action.

It’s always been interesting to read interviews and stuff about The Ex’s DIY tours around Africa, and without getting too starry-eyed about it, a set like this really does give the impression that they could essentially pitch up anywhere in the world with their amps and just jam it out with whoever’s around, and people would GET IT. It’s angry music sure, and there are whole centuries and continents-worth of cultural upheaval buried within it, but so full of forward motion and universal ON-ness, it’s just undeniable. So much stuff to love within this performance, and I scarcely feel able to express any of it.

I love how The Ex, despite several decades-worth of experimentation, collaboration and global cross-pollination, are still unmistakably an anarcho-punk band front and centre, grinding out barre chords on distorted guitars and barking lyrics about global warming and surveillance society like the European answer to Fugazi they essentially are, but just keeping it open enough for all the other influences and musicians to filter in around them.

I love how despite having no less than seven serious-minded men up front, all blurting, hammering and sweating away with all the gusto of a construction team, The Ex & Brass Unbound never sound macho or blustery or overbearing. Quite an achievement for a group with mr. elephantine death-rattle himself Mats Gustafsson in the line-up! Their sound is a lean, sinuous, breathing thing, full of sparks and always moving forward, propelled not by a motorik march or by syncopated funk in any way we’d conventionally understand it, but by a sort of lurching, unstoppable, ramshackle force, like a boulder crashing down a mountainside.



Much credit for this must go to drummer Katherina Bornefeld, who is simply an amazing presence, her style is sometimes as unconventional and post-punk instinctive as Palmolive on the Raincoats records, but solid and muscular enough to keep all these rampaging guitar n’ hornslingers ON MESSAGE, heading in the right direction. And when she takes the mic and sings - for an adaptation of a Hungarian folk song, and another number later in the set - it’s stunning. Her voice cuts straight through the sea of instruments, sounding like some haunting, baleful lament pulled straight off a hundred year old Eastern European folk recording. Every musician on stage gets the chance to deliver similar moment of glory though. Terrie Hessels clatters away on his battle-scarred five string guitar in a completely inimitable fashion, essentially fulfilling both the rhythm and bass roles in this bass-less three guitar line-up, whilst also finding time to throw in outbursts of amusical skronk wild enough to make my hair stand on end.

Obviously I never saw The Ex with their now departed singer G.W. Sok, but Arnold De Boer seems to make for a fine and imaginative replacement. Weirdly enough, De Boer used to essentially BE the fuzzy nerd-pop band Zea, whose album “Counting Backwards Leads To Explosions” I picked up and really liked a few years back. Seeing him fronting The Ex seems crazily unlikely – it’s like if Major Matt Mason from Schwervon became the new singer in Crass or something – but it’s great to see that he seems to have carried across some of the lo-fi toy keyboard rocking antics of his former band, furthering the idea that The Ex operate like a kind of cultural sponge, absorbing anything and everything into their central framework the name of continued awesomeness.

Roy Paci is my pick from the horn section – he’s bloody beautiful on the trumpet, playing with real guts and humour and warmth, and I’d love to see him let rip in a more traditional jazz context. Ken Vandermark on sax comes a close second though, and as for Wolter Wierbos on the trombone, well… have you ever seen a man hunched forward and violently hopping up and down whilst playing the trombone? An easy enough idea to convey on paper perhaps, but just try to picture it - imagine the physics for Christ’s sake!



I hope this doesn’t make me sound obsessive or mildly autistic, but after years of trying to write about music, I find that when I’m watching a band or listening to a record, I’ve often got a separate track of back-chat going on in the back of my brain as I come up with daft observations and descriptors I could maybe later use to write about or discuss it – don’t blame me, I don’t do it consciously, it just happens, ok? Usually this stuff is little more than an annoyance, but I always know I’m at a REALLY good gig when it goes into overdrive and my synapses start throwing out ridiculous crap that’s NEVER going to be fit to print, on the level of some kind of opium reverie.

After The Ex & Brass Unbound finished off one particularly fiery number prominently featuring Paci and Wierbos, I found myself taking a step backwards and thinking;

“Holy shit! That sounded like Ennio Morricone’s spaghetti western brass section riding into town on a fucking tank made out of Mussolini’s bones!”

Lunacy, clearly. I mean, a single skeleton, even one belonging to a big fellow like Mussolini, would never provide enough surface area to construct any kind of vehicle, let alone a tank. But if I had to swear to it in court, I’d still have to say that that is EXACTLY what the song sounded like.

All things considered, I’m afraid that Dead Moon are still the band Iíd most like to see out the apocalypse with. I’d feel more comfortable in a smaller, more self-sufficient group like theirs, I think. But when that ragtag army of nomads and punks gets together to stampede into your capitalist enclave and burn it to the ground, like a rather more affirmative version of Tom Savini and his pals in ‘Dawn Of The Dead’, well make no mistake, it’s THE EX who are gonna be belting it out from the back of a flatbed truck with a portable generator, in the spirit of general chaotic celebration.

PHEW.

*collapses*

Labels: jazz, John Butcher, live reviews, punk, The Ex, Zun Zun Egui