The Ex

 

Example Album: Dignity Of Labour

Location: Netherlands

Years Active: 1979-present

Style: Post-punk, anarcho-punk, metal percussion, machine samples

    The Ex are an anarcho-punk and experimental music group from the Netherlands. Their sound is pretty diverse, especially with the backdrop of their entire discography. Early on, they played a very rhythmic, cold, bass-heavy style of post-punk, with a focus on anarchist lyrical themes. However in 1983, they put out Dignity Of Labour, an album which takes their early post-punk sound and mixes it with elements of scrap metal percussion, power tools, and recordings of bus engines, printing press machines, and more. The outcome is an extremely political and frostbitten kind of post-punk industrial sound. 

    The Ex continued to experiment with metal percussion noises on the wildly diverse record Blueprints For A Blackout, but aside from these two releases I am unaware of whether The Ex played with the sound ever again.

    An interesting fact is that in the 80's, they played a show with Test Dept. at a local squat in the Netherlands. I'm not sure the time frame of this; whether it was before or after this show that they started experimenting with industrial noises.