Z'EV
Z'EV (Stefan Joel Weisser, February 8, 1951 - December 16, 2017) was an American poet, percussionist, and sound artist. After studying various world music traditions at CalArts, he began creating his own percussion sounds out of industrial materials for a variety of record labels. He is regarded as a pioneer of industrial music.
Z'EV was a strong presence in the New York City downtown music scene in the 1980s and 1990s, performing with Elliott Sharp, Glenn Branca, and doing solo performances at The Kitchen, The Knitting Factory, Danceteria, and other venues where experimental music flourished.
In 1983, critic Roy Sablosky wrote: "Z'EV doesn't just break the rules, he changes them." Journalist Louis Morra wrote in 1983: "Z'EV is a consummate example of contemporary performance art, as well as modern composition and theater." and, "Z'EV realizes many of modernist art's ultimate goals: primitivism, improvisation, multi-media/conjunction of art forms, the artist as direct creator."
His work with text and sound was influenced by Kabbalah, as well as African, Afro-Caribbean and Indonesian music and culture. He studied Ewe music, Balinese gamelan, and Indian tala.
From 1959-65 he studied drumming with Arnie Frank, then Chuck Flores and then Art Anton at Drum City in Van Nuys, California.
In 1963 he abandoned Judaism and began his lifelong relationship with world religions and esoteric systems.
From 1966-9 he formed a band with Carl Stone and James Stewart, performing jazz rock. After auditioning for Frank Zappa's Bizarre Records, the band ceased activities and both he and Carl went on to attend CalArts.
After studying at CalArts from 1969-70 with poets Emmett Williams and Michael S. Bell and writer/critic Sue-Ellen Case, he began producing works using the name S. Weisser, primarily concentrating on visual and sound poetries.
In 1975, he was included in the "Second Generation" show at the Museum of Conceptual Art in San Francisco. He also became a member of Cellar-M, a musical project of Naut Humon. He would continue to work with Humon on various projects, such as Rhythm & Noise, until 1988.
In 1976 he moved from Los Angeles to the Bay Area. A primary reason for this move was his association with the San Francisco alternative exhibition space La Mamelle, run by Carl Loeffler and Nancy Evans.
In 1977 he presented his first solo percussion performance at La Mamelle under the project title 'Sound of Wind and Limb'.
In 1978 he began developing an idiosyncratic performance technique utilizing self-developed instruments formed from industrial materials such as stainless steel, titanium, and PVC plastics. Initially these instruments were assemblages of these materials, used with a movement-based performance style that was a form of marionette, although with the performer visible. He has since come to refer to this performance mode as 'wild-style', a term originally related to graffiti. Critic John Buckley described his performances in this era:
The instruments are collections of objects ... strung together with ropes and swung at varying speeds and directions to produce a fairly astonishing range of pitches and timbres. And the moves the guy goes through to manipulate these instruments are, for grace and athleticism, strong stuff. Z'EV is also interesting for the close correlation of visual and musical aspects, since the physical vibrations of the objects you see are the same as those picked up by the ears as sound. Also, since the rhythms of the work are dictated by the performer's every and any movement, an inevitable integrity unifies the act.
At this time he first began to perform outside of the Fine Art context initially at the Mabuhay Gardens in San Francisco. In the fall of 1978 he began performing under the name Z'EV, which comes from the Hebrew name his parents gave him at birth (Sh'aul Z'ev bn Yakov bn Moshe bn Sha'ul).
In November and December 1980, Z'EV opened a series of UK and European concerts in the first headlining tour of the British group Bauhaus.
On that tour and his first solo tour of Europe immediately afterwards, Z'EV introduced intense metal based percussion musics to the UK and Europe. Critic Jason Pettigrew (current editor-in-chief of Alternative Press magazine) attests to Z'EV's pioneering use of metal found object as percussion, writing: "Consider your music collection. Neubauten? Test Department? Z'EV's been there first.'
While but one of the progenitors of the "industrial movement", he was also fairly responsible, along with Neil Megson, for delivering the 'tribal' impulse and esthetic into the Western/European cultural milieu developing between the years 1978-1984.
In 1981, 'Shake Rattle & Roll', a VHS video documenting his first wild-style performance on the East coast (produced by video artist Jon Child), was released by Fetish Records in the UK and was the first 'music' / art video to be commercially released.
After 1984, he concentrated on performing in a more traditional mallet-percussion style, albeit with highly idiosyncratic and "extended" mallet percussion techniques and his self-made or adapted instruments.
Both performance modes, (wild-style and mallet percussion), have been described as cacophonous when considered in traditional Western musical terms, because of the dense elemental acoustic phenomena Z'EV's instruments produce. In point of fact, Z'EV doesn't actually consider the results as "music" per se, but more as orchestrations of highly rhythmic acoustic phenomena.
Z'EV did not consider his performances as solos, but rather as the unique inter-reactions between himself and his instruments; the particular physical space of the performance; the particular time and geographic location of the performance; and the energies of the audience.
From 1986-90 he was a Guest Teacher in Composition and Improvisation at the Theater School for New Dance Development in Amsterdam, the Netherlands. Together with dancer Ria Higler he mentored a year group through their entire four-year course of study. The German dancer Thomas Lehmen is perhaps the most currently active of his students.
In 1990 he began working with Amsterdam house musician, DJ Dano. Their work, also in conjunction with Austrian media artist Konrad Becker, was instrumental in the emergence of the genres known as gabber and hardcore.
His recordings have been released by labels such as C.I.P., Cold Spring, Die Stadt, Soleilmoon, Tzadik Records, Subterranean and Touch.
Published works
Wheels On Fire #'s 1 And 2
Based on Shakespeare's King Lear, #1 is a monologue version written for Gylan Kain and #2 is a Quartet version using Gloucester [as a woman], her two sons Edmund and Edgar and Regan, one of Lear's daughters.
Published in 'Ratio:3 volume 2 Trans:Mediators' by Temple Press, 1992.
Rhythmajik, Practical Uses of Number, Rhythm and Sound
This is a book on numerology and music published in 1992 by Temple Press, Brighton, UK, ISBN 978-1-871744-40-8. In a blurb provided for the first edition, Murray Hope wrote: "In RHYTHMAJIK, Z'EV presents an original approach to the energies released via the rhythmic process, including the healing potential of correctly structured rhythms, and their possible value as access codes to those frequencies unbound by the space-time continuum."
Face the Wound
Is a musical work inspired by opera and includes a vocal narrative. Face the Wound was released on CD by Soleilmoon in 2001.
The Sapphire Nature
Consists of translations of the mystical text known as the 'Sefer Yetzirah' or 'Book of Formation.' Published in PDF format on the CD 'The Sapphire Nature' was released May 2002 by Tzadik.
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