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Z'EV (born Stefan Joel Weisser, 1951) is an American percussionist, sound artist and poet. After studying various world music traditions at California Institute for the Arts he began creating his own percussion sounds out of industrial materials. He is regarded as a pioneer of industrial music.
His work with text and sound has been influenced by Kabbalah, as well as African, Afro-Caribbean and Indonesian music and culture. He has studied Ewe (Ghana) music, Balinese gamelan, and Indian tala. After studying at CalArts from 1969-70 he began producing works using the name S. Weisser, primarily concentrating on visual and sound poetries.
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. He has since come to refer to this performance mode as 'wild-style', a term originally related to graffiti. In 1978 he began performing under the name Z'EV, which comes from the Jewish name his parents gave him at birth.
In the end of the year 1980, Z'EV opened a series of UK and European concerts. On that tour Z'EV introduced intense metal based percussion musics using found objects to the UK and Europe. 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. Since 1984, he has been concentrating 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
Z'EV does 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 audience. His recordings have been released by labels such as C.I.P., Cold Spring, Die Stadt, Soleilmoon, Tzadik Records, Subterranean and Touch.