Z'EV

Z'EV (born 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. 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.

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. 

While but one of the progenitors of the "industrial movement", he was also fairly responsible, along with Genesis P-Orridge, 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. 

In 1982 he worked with Glenn Branca for Branca's 'Symphony No. 2' in which Z'EV had a solo segment swinging with metal can overhead, and rattling chains and sheets of steel. 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. Z'EV was critically injured in the Cimarron train derailment which took place near Dodge City, Kansas on March 14, 2016. After this incident he continued to have health problems, but continued working. He lived for three months in the guest room of his friend Boyd Rice in southern California. Afterwards Z'EV traveled to Europe and was for two months an artist in residence at the Porto based sound lab Sonoscopia, where he built a number of percussion instruments for the organisation. He died on December 16, 2017 in Chicago from pulmonary failure. [SOURCE: WIKIPEDIA]