<![CDATA[<a href="https://www.youtube.com/v/QS0H-k8sOLk" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" class="bbc_link bbc_flash_disabled new_win">https://www.youtube.com/v/QS0H-k8sOLk</a>]]>THE EX: 1936, The Spanish Revolution (7" 1986)"They Shall Not Pass"
"El Tren Blindado"
"Ay Carmela"
"People Again"
The Spanish Revolution was released in 1986 with two 7΄΄ records (containing four songs), accompanied by a 144 pages book. The songs are punk reworking of folk Spanish anarchist fight songs, and the book, containing mostly b&w photographs and short texts (in Dutch and English), epics the story of the short lived (1936-1939) success of large-scale anarchy in Spain.
http://01fragments.blogspot.co.uk/2008/06/ex-1936-spanish-revolution-1986.html
Wiki: 1936, The Spanish Revolution is an album of songs and archival photographs related to the Spanish Civil War, recorded and assembled by Dutch anarchist punk band The Ex. The band released it in 1986, the 50th anniversary of the Spanish Revolution, on their own label as a square 7" (17.5cm) soft-cover book with two 45 rpm records. A 5" (12.5cm) hardcover edition was republished by AK press in 1997, replacing the records with a pair of 3" CDs.
In wanting to highlight the original values and spirit of the revolution rather than the conflict and eventual defeat of anarchist forces, The Ex compiled 144 pages of previously unpublished photographs taken by journalists aligned with the revolutionary forces, along with several short essays about the revolution. Text appears in both English and Spanish.
For the double-single, The Ex recorded two Spanish language songs with music and lyrics originally sung by 1930s Spanish revolutionary forces and supporters. On the flip side of each single was an English langiuage song about the revolution. The 1997 CD reissue split the songs up similarly as 2 mini-CDs.
1936 was the first of The Ex's releases to gain some notoriety outside of the Netherlands, selling enough copies to reach No. 6 on the UK Indie Chart. AllMusic called the book a "powerful and enlightening visual document that casts a fresh light on a major historical event little understood in the United States," and said that The Ex's music "find them inviting the spirit of the revolution as if it occurred five minutes ago, not 50 years past."
The book focuses on the CNT (Confederatión National del Trabajo) [National Labor Confederation] and FAI (Federatión Anarquista Ibérica) [Iberian Anarchist Federation] action during the years of the Spanish Civil War, two organizations that formed the hard core of anarchist movement in Spain at that time. This action is presented in several fields, fields that also form the book’s structure; what is shortly depicted are these: the origins and the beginning of the revolution, the collectivization in the economic and the social field, the effect that revolution had in culture, the developments in the front and the impact that international relations and the tension ( and more often conflicts ) among communist - socialists and anarchists had to these developments, and finally the causes and the chronicle of the revolution’s failure.
The Ex does not pretend to have accomplished a historical or scientific task, and they make this clear soon enough. They also deny any claim of objectivity: “…Thus [ the foto collection] it is a compilation: neither chronological nor objective, but one-sided, partial and subjective. Only from the anarchist’s side…” Instead, they point out their aim, which has a double character: firstly, to show “…how much pleasure, imagination, devotion and energy the Spanish anarchists put in their effort to destroy once and for all the damned class of boots, ties and crucifixes…”, the fact that this attempt to revolution “…saw an explosion of creativity which only takes place when you’re finally able to conceive of something and follow through on it –to arrange your own life without hate and greed, without competition and oppression…” and finally how this effort “…was immediately attacted, terrorized and destroyed by the state and the bourgeoisie…”.
Secondly, their aim is targeting to diagnose the similarities between the Spanish experiment and the present: “…For us the Spanish revolution is not just an event or incident, not just a chapter in a history book. It’s an attempt similar to what we are doing now: trying to get rid of this imposed shit system…”. With that, the conclusion comes by the Ex as an afterword: for them, the anarchist experiment of the 30’s shows that “…it certainly is possible to bring an anarchist society into practice…”.
http://01fragments.blogspot.co.uk/2008/06/ex-1936-spanish-revolution-1986.html
“I wanted nothing and don’t want anything to do with order, rank orders and commands. I am as I am, a peasant who learned to read in prison, who experienced pain and death closeby, who was an anarchist without knowing it, and today, now that I know, I am even more anarchist than yesterday, when I killed to be free” from Nosotros – anarchist daily – march 1937 (in 1936 booklet).
The squats of the 80’s must had been a remarkably fertile place of exciting experiments, especially for such in the cultural field; any argument to this would eventually had to cope (and) with the case of The Ex.
The band was formed in 1979, a time when the punk explosion is in its peak, and its birthplace is the Dutch (more precisely those of Amsterdam) squats. The Ex started as a lo-fi anarcho-punk, moving gradually, through the decades, to post-punk/no wave experimental work, lately absorbing a wide range of influences, often from non Western (Hungarian and Turkish folk songs and recently African music- including music from Congo, Ethiopia and Eritrea) and non rock sources, and marked by collaborations such as with the avant-garde cellist Tom Cora in the early 90’s and with members of Sonic Youth, Dutch improvisers ICP and UK anarchist band Chumbawamba.
Their work, 1936, The Spanish Revolution, is a result of addiction, devotion, admiration, love and, I would dare to say, continuousness; it is probably the rare and privileged moment in which the aesthetic view, the political thesis and the practice of everyday action towards the world are merged into a unique peek point; a point that shines equally as an accomplishment and as a paradigm.
http://01fragments.blogspot.co.uk/2008/06/ex-1936-spanish-revolution-1986.html
