The American percussionist and sound artist who built his instruments from industrial metal and made the struck, resonant object the centre of the work · the founding percussion language of the genre, and a theory of sound to go with it.
Z'EV is the genre's percussionist, and the Bureau files him at Tier I as a founding figure: the artist who gave industrial music something close to a percussion language of its own, built from metal and theorised as a physics of sound. Stefan Joel Weisser, born in Los Angeles in 1951, took the name Z'EV from Hebrew and number symbolism and made it the signature of one of the most influential bodies of work in the whole post-industrial field.
His grounding was unusually deep. At the California Institute of the Arts around 1969–70 he studied world-music traditions, Ewe drumming from Ghana, Balinese rhythm, wrote sound poetry, and moved through the Fluxus circle. What he built on that grounding was entirely his own: percussion instruments assembled from industrial materials, stainless steel, titanium, PVC, sheet metal and chains, played not as a kit but as a set of resonant objects to be struck, dragged and swung.
The performances became the template. From the mid-1970s into the early 1980s his solo concerts (room-shaking, athletic, shirtless or in protective gear) saw him fling metallic assemblages through the air, rattle heavy chains and whirl long strips of sheet metal whose edges sometimes bloodied his hands. He called the mode wild style, a term borrowed from graffiti, and it is one of the founding templates for industrial performance, the body and the metal as the whole event.
Underneath the violence of the performance lay a theory. Z'EV described his work as catacoustic, concerned with reflected sound, with attack and resonance and the behaviour of sound in space, and he bound that physics to the body, to the properties of materials, and to mysticism, his text-and-sound work shaped by Kabbalah and by African, Afro-Caribbean and Indonesian rhythm. He said he did not consider most of his performances to be music as such; they were something more elemental.
His reach ran across the whole field. He released through Fetish, Cold Spring, Touch and Soleilmoon among many others, collaborated with Genesis P-Orridge and with The Hafler Trio, and worked with dancers, poets and performance artists worldwide. The self-built metal percussion he pioneered is upstream of Einstürzende Neubauten's scrap-metal language and the percussion side of the rhythmic-noise tradition.
The Bureau files Z'EV at Artists · Tier I as a founding figure of industrial percussion: the sound artist who built his instruments from industrial metal, made the struck and resonant object the centre of the work, and gave the genre a percussion language and a theory of sound that the field has drawn on ever since. He remained active, across more than seventy albums, until his death in 2017.