Hear Me Out 4 — The Ex & Brass Unbound

📅 Sunday, 8 November 2026
🕗 Meetup: 20:00
🎶 Concert starts: 20:30
📍 BIMHUIS, Amsterdam

Some bands survive for forty years by learning how to reproduce the thing people already love about them.

The Ex have spent almost fifty years doing pretty much the opposite.

For Hear Me Out 4, we return to BIMHUIS for one of the great institutions of the Dutch underground — this time expanded into a ten-piece ensemble with Brass Unbound, bringing together some formidable names from European and international improvised music.

The Ex: forward in all directions

The Ex started in 1979, emerging from the Dutch punk and squatter scene with a fiercely independent, DIY approach that has never really disappeared.

What has disappeared, a long time ago, is any particularly useful way of defining their music.

Punk, post-punk, noise, improvised music, African music, experimental rock, free jazz: over the decades The Ex have absorbed all of these without ever settling comfortably inside any of them.

Their principle has essentially remained the same: independence, curiosity and risk over predictability.

More than 2,000 concerts and dozens of releases later, they have collaborated with musicians ranging from Tom Cora and Thurston Moore to Ethiopian saxophone legend Getatchew Mekuria, while developing one of the most unmistakable live languages in European independent music.

And then add six horns

For this concert, The Ex revive Brass Unbound, a project that originally developed out of their collaboration with Getatchew Mekuria.

The current line-up brings the four members of The Ex together with six extraordinary improvisers:

Ken Vandermark — tenor & baritone sax
Mats Gustafsson — tenor & baritone sax
Roy Paci — trumpet
Hanne De Backer — baritone sax
Signe Emmeluth — alto sax
Guro Kvåle — trombone

That means ten musicians on stage, with three guitars, drums and an entire wall of brass and reeds.

Mats Gustafsson alone is one of the defining figures of contemporary European free improvisation; Ken Vandermark has been central to the Chicago improvised-music scene for decades; and Italian trumpeter Roy Paci has moved throughout his career between jazz, improvisation, Mediterranean music and much more.

But the attraction here is not simply the individual CVs.

It is what happens when that much musical personality gets dropped inside the rhythmic, stubbornly independent machinery of The Ex.

A Dutch institution that refuses to behave like one

This is also exactly the kind of local concert I want Hear Me Out to include.

Not “local” because it is small.

Local because The Ex are part of the musical history of the Netherlands, while having spent nearly five decades building networks and collaborations that extend far beyond it.

And despite that history, this is very explicitly not a nostalgia show or a greatest-hits exercise. BIMHUIS describes the revived Brass Unbound project as ten musicians deliberately seeking risk rather than cliché or retrospection.

Which, after almost fifty years, may be the most punk thing they could still do.

Tickets

The concert starts at 20:30.

Current regular prices are:
€21 standing
€25 seated

including the BIMHUIS service fee.

And good news if you have We Are Public: the concert is currently included with the membership, so you can reserve through WAP.

As always with Hear Me Out, everyone arranges their own concert ticket or membership reservation. RSVP’ing on Meetup does not reserve admission to the concert.

We’ll meet at BIMHUIS at 20:00 and go in together.

About Hear Me Out

Hear Me Out is Art Food & Fun’s curated concert series.

No attempt to cover everything, no commitment to one genre, and not much point in recommending the concerts you were probably going to find anyway.

Instead: artists, scenes and musical worlds worth discovering — especially those living a little outside the obvious routes.

Sometimes the recommendation is complicated.

Sometimes it is simply:
you should probably hear this.