Enormous Door is an album by Dutch post-punk band The Ex and Brass Unbound, a quartet of horn players hailing from four different countries. The album was released in 2013 on The Ex's own label, comprising reworked versions of previously released songs and alongside entirely new material.
Amidst these collaborations with The Ex, a new international collective of horn players gradually formed and by 2010 adopted the name "Brass Unbound" after Johan van der Keuken's 1993 film of the same name.[3] In his film, Van der Keuken follows the development of the European brass band tradition in the former Dutch colonies to include traditional marching bands to more hybridized forms of brass music that combine European instruments with Ghanaian rhythms.[4] Independent of concerts with Getatchew Mekurya, Brass Unbound began touring as a live act with The Ex in 2010. For these concerts, the ensemble wrote and improvised new material, as well as reworkings of songs from The Ex's catalog.[5]
Songs
Released in 2013, Enormous Door catalogues The Ex's material with Brass Unbound. The songs "Bicycle Illusion" from their first album with vocalist Arnold de Boer and "Our Leaky Homes" from a 2011 single rearrange their songs to make space for horn parts.[5] A popular love song by Ethiopian singer Mahmoud Ahmed that had long been in The Ex's live set with Getatchew Mekurya is sung by drummer Katherina Bornefeld.[1] And The Ex's tribute to Congolese street band Konono Nº1, which first appeared on the Ex's 2004 album as "Theme from Konono", resurfaces as "Theme from Konono Nº2" on Enormous Door.[5]
The Quietus placed Enormous Door on its list of the top albums of 2013.[10]Pitchfork's Douglass Wolk called Enormous Door "an acrobatic, ferocious record, a welcome burst of electric noise and squealing horns from a group whose power and flexibility keep growing with time."[5]
^van der Keuken, Johan (1993). "Brass Unbound"(Film). IDFA (in Dutch). Amsterdam: The International Documentary Film Festival Amsterdam. Retrieved 16 October 2018.
