Super Ballet: The Ex + Y/Compound
Dance 16€
Friday 27 November · 22:00
Dutch punk institution The Ex, unbroken since 1979, return to the Aquário with their line-up consolidated in 2009, sharing the night with Y/Compound, a free-improvisation collective built on Afro-Brazilian rhythms.
Brief introduction The Ex The longest-lasting institution born from the echoes of the revolution, real and manufactured, in the year of grace 1977, alongside The Mekons, the Dutch The Ex have been fulfilling, since their formation in 79, the promises that were born and died in the fervour of punk, offering it the prefixes anarcho, post, art in a crossing as intransigent in the way of doing things as continually open to exploration. Aligned with a fiercely independent political activism, without concessions to agitprop fundamentalism, they reflect in their music a voracity and sense of discovery that transcends the militant trenches of the most narrow-minded punk and perceives the World as a sphere of influence. With Terrie Ex as a founding member present to this day, they return to the Aquário with the same line-up consolidated in 2009, with Katherina Bornefeld, Andy Moor and Arnold de Boer in a precise gear of 3 guitars, drums and voice. In the early days, still with G. W. Sok on vocals - entrenched until 2009 - deeply entangled in the ambivalent spirit between the action and the despair of the time, born from the communal experience of squats and a space of contestatory dissemination via graffiti on walls and monochrome zines, they aligned the wreckage and animic force that remained of punk in a minimal and urgent music, marked by the pulse of the bass, martial rhythms, guitar crackles and lyrical barbs between reclamatory spoken word and disgust. From there, they went on mapping other languages, welcoming post-industrial debris - Dignity of Labour, 1983 -, the overwhelming hypnosis of noise - Pokkeherrie, 1985 - or exchanges with improvisation and jazz in the expansive Joggers & Smoggers of 1989, where we find the presences of Lee Ranaldo and Thurston Moore, lots of percussion and winds. In league with those communal and open principles, they have shown a particular appetite for collaborations, having recorded in the early 90s two highly recommended albums with cellist Tom Cora, developed a fruitful relationship with ICP, the unexpected symbiosis with Tortoise and, in a pressing fascination with the culture of Northeast Africa, Moa Anbessa and Y'Anbessaw Tezeta with the late Ethiopian saxophonist Getatchew Mekurya, in a path marked by line-up changes that never, but never, compromised their founding principles and vision. Respect, 'tá? BS ~ Y/Compound "Y" - symbol of the human spirit in ascension - is the insignia of a promise. A deep desire. Y/COMPOUND is the materialisation of a free and unpredictable musical structure, grounded in Afro-Brazilian rhythms. Each musician, in dialogue with Ravenna Escaleira's tenor sax, develops from their own language an encounter - not an execution, but a joint construction...