Z'EV
American percussionist and sound artist (1951-2017), a pioneer of industrial music who built his own instruments from industrial metal and PVC.
Born Stefan Joel Weisser in Los Angeles on 8 February 1951, Z’EV studied drumming through the 1960s and briefly attended CalArts in 1969-70, where he took in Ewe, Balinese, and Indian percussion traditions. In the mid-1970s he was a member of the Bay Area group Cellar-M alongside Naut Humon, Will E. Jackson, and Rex Probe. By 1978 he had adopted the stage name Z’EV and developed the “wild-style” solo performance he became known for: strenuous, room-filling improvisations on instruments he built himself from stainless steel, titanium, and PVC rather than conventional percussion, drawing as much on Kabbalistic study as on the metal-percussion practice that predates and parallels Einstürzende Neubauten and Test Department. He recorded prolifically from the late 1970s onward, including Bust This! (1988), and collaborated widely — with Genesis P-Orridge and Psychic TV, Glenn Branca, Elliott Sharp, Lydia Lunch, and later Merzbow, Faust, and Chris Watson, among many others — across labels including Soleilmoon, Touch, Cold Spring, and Tzadik. He died in Chicago on 16 December 2017.
