An almost 48 minute long solo guitar improvisation. In one piece. Terrie goes to many edges and corners. A fascinating travel through soundscapes and moods. Like an abstract film in his head.

Terrie Ex has played thousands of concerts and can be heard on dozens of albums. With The Ex, of course, the band he helped found in 1979. But also with so many others. Duo albums, the most direct and intense form of connection, are plentiful. With Ab Baars, Jaap Blonk, Kaja Draksler, Han Bennink, Ken Vandermark, Paal Nilssen-Love, and other fine artists. Ex also regularly plays solo live. Ten, twenty minutes, usually. Longer gets tedious, he says. Short exercises in radical confusion, willful abstraction. But a solo album wasn't there yet. Perhaps he found it a bit too exciting. Now, his solo debut is finally here: Flaps!, released at the age of 71.

He took that title, just like his entire musical philosophy, from life. His daughter Lena couldn't pronounce "Papa" when she was little. It became "flaps," and that stuck. And just as The Ex so often sang about what was happening around them (much more than about their inner world), so too, for the guitarist, life and music are completely intertwined. He chose the guitar because someone had to. It became a left-handed Guild, because Peter Hammill had one too. Almost half a century later, it's still his only guitar. Once black, now brown. The finish is gone. Sanded away. Sweated away. Rust and bloodstains have left their mark. Deep grooves in the rough wood. So much scraping against the ground with that headstock that it only holds five strings. The instrument is abused, broken, and destroyed. The guitar was also stolen once, but just as quickly abandoned in a bush, the owner will tell you with a broad grin.

Lifelong The Ex fan Steve Albini summed up how the man and his guitar became one: “Terrie’s guitar is a fucking sculpture, the way it’s just been completely conformed to the way he plays. Little pieces have fallen off and he just adapts. ‘I don’t need that part, that’s fine.’ Like, … ‘Oh, it’s broken, well, I’ll hammer some nails in it … ah, it’s good for now.’” No one treats their instrument so casually, and yet few have such an intensely personal connection to it. He started out in a genre where freedom and rigidity went hand in hand, transforming the ragged, rhythmic punk guitar into a sound generator, a database of unheard sounds. In his treatment of it, he looks around, stirring and sweeping the floor, the strings sliding over pillars, amplifiers, rims, drum and microphone stands. And then there are the objects: drumsticks and skins, knives, coffee cups, glasses, tongs. An occasional plectrum. Or teeth and breath.

Again: the instrument played its part, sometimes resembling a contact microphone, greatly magnifying a simple touch, like a gentle tap on the floor or a nail scraping across the surface: “(…) that effect came when my pickup came loose at one point, and as a quick fix, I screwed it down with a sturdy screw between the pickup and the wood. I hadn't anticipated that contact microphone result, but it was really fun, lovely to play with. A discovery. So I just left it as is.” That almost childlike wonder, that fascination with sound, is also central to Flaps!.

There are no riffs, licks, or melodies anywhere to be found. Not even the screeching bursts of noise, sudden eruptions, or disturbing decibel levels you sometimes hear in his performances with others. Instead, the guitarist improvises for nearly 48 minutes with the instrument, the space, and nearby objects. The manic repetitiveness of many Ex songs returns in a preference for rhythmic ideas that pop up here and there, but there are far too few to speak of a groove or danceability. It's more like a musical OCD, testing things out and verifying a few times whether they can be repeated. And then on. The guitar scrapes, lurches, and crackles. It bounces, wails, hums, rustles, twists into awkward positions, makes triple jumps, ends up in dead-end streets, retraces its steps, sways back and forth, echoes, and… is caressed and prodded by fingers, silenced by the palm of the hand, seduced by objects. You can only guess which ones.

Everything that makes music music for so many is missing. And yet, if you let go of your expectations, you'll hear a musician who, with imagination, evident self-knowledge, and a deep connection with his instrument, tells a spontaneous story full of discoveries, surprises, and even tenderness. Because behind that apparent casualness and randomness lies a philosophy as simple as it is profound: making music, like life, is one big lesson in improvisation. Approach it with the right mindset, and you'll always learn something. About sound, the world around you, about yourself. Even at 71.

— Translation of Guy Peters' review for enola.be. Original Dutch is at https://www.enola.be/2026/01/05/terrie-ex-flaps/.