Biography
Terrie Hessels is a Dutch guitarist and founding member of The Ex — one of the most extraordinary and enduring bands in the history of experimental music. Since The Ex’s formation in Amsterdam in 1979, Hessels has been at the center of a musical project that has consistently refused to stand still: from the raw political punk of their early records to free improvisation, Ethiopian music collaborations, and their current work as one of Europe’s most adventurous experimental collectives, The Ex has maintained an artistic integrity that few bands of any generation have matched.
Hessels’s guitar playing is as distinctive as the band he co-founded: angular, rhythmically inventive, and deeply informed by both the DIY ethos of punk and the structural freedom of free improvisation. He plays without the conventional rock vocabulary — no blues licks, no pentatonic scales, no standard chord progressions — developing instead a personal approach that treats the electric guitar as a rhythmic and textural instrument whose expressive possibilities lie outside the established traditions of the instrument.
As the founder of TERP Records, Hessels has created a label that functions as both an archival platform for The Ex’s extensive catalog and a document of his collaborations and solo work. The label’s recent releases — including If Your Mirror Breaks (2025), The Ex’s latest album, and Let’s Go with Han Bennink and Brodie West — demonstrate a musician and label still operating at full creative intensity after more than four decades.
His connection to the Catalytic Sound cooperative places him within a transatlantic network that connects Amsterdam’s experimental scene to Chicago, Oslo, and New York. This network mirrors The Ex’s own history of transatlantic collaboration — with musicians including Ken Vandermark, Ab Baars, and Paal Nilssen-Love, all of whom have appeared in the extended Ex orbit over the years.
Hessels’s career is a demonstration of what radical creative independence looks like when it is sustained over four decades without compromise: a body of work that covers enormous musical territory while maintaining a completely consistent set of artistic commitments. TERP Records is the documentary evidence; The Ex is the argument in action.
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