Z'EV

Z'EV: Heart Beating In Motion

The word is out: Z'EV is back. For the uninitiated, Z'EV is an American born, London based avant-noise percussionist and composer. The 56 year old musician has returned to his home shores after too long an absence for The Ex-Patriot Tour USA 2007. Z'EV is often credited as being one of the founders of the modern noise and industrial music/art movement founded in 1978. He's influenced a whole realm of industrial bands like Einsturzende Neubauten and Foetus, and collaborated with people like Psychic TV, Glenn Branca, Genesis P.Orridge, KK.Null and Stephen O'Malley.

Z'EV is a striking figure, dressed all in black, with a completely bald head and sharply chiseled features. He stands out in a crowd just with his presence. You can sense the intensity he has for what he does. But he's also a very soft spoken and well read person. He has done extensive studies of various sacred and mystical texts, especially the Kabbalah, and written books featuring ideas from these texts as applied to music and life.

On tour, Z'EV is playing mostly his own self made metal instruments. He has 2 five foot long titanium tubes that come from a nuclear submarine missile cooling system that are played with sticks, creating various notes and haunting rhythms. There's also a large sheet of stainless steel that has bent edges, creating different tuned playing surfaces. This is played with either superball friction mallets or struck with rubber headed mallets.

In the middle of his set up is a 28" bass drum, played with maracas or used as a sound resonator for a sort of industrial Gong he made out of a circular metal table base. While holding this disc through a center hole with one hand, he can play the edge or face for different tones, as well as place the edge against the drum's head to create various bass tones and resonance. Finally, he has a stainless steel box suspended from a stand, The box is open on the bottom and has various holes and slots on the top and sides. It can be played with sticks or mallets, and also bowed with various objects through the slots and holes. This is not your average percussion!

His non-stop performance starts with the tubes center stage, then moves clockwise from one instrument to the next, going around his set up in a circle before arriving back at the tubes. The effect is one of rhythmic trance, carrying the listener to other realms. I caught up with Z'EV at his show in Milwaukee, Wisconsin.

It's good to see you back on tour. It's been a while.

This is the 7th of 42 dates covering 35 states. I haven't toured the States since 1986. That's 21 years. I met Scott Nydegger (of Sikhara) in Paris in April of 2006. He sent me 2-15 day itineraries and I said, "Let's go for a monster tour."

What was the impetus for this tour?

From 1994 to 2003 I hardly did anything. In 1997 I did a 10 city tour of Japan, but that's it. In 1994 I was in Los Angeles to record and two days after I got there we had a major earthquake. That disrupted the project. Then my mom got cancer and I stopped things to take care of her. She died in 1997. After that, I wasn't interested in work. It seemed arbitrary and I was pissed off-grieving over my mother's death.

I did the Japan tour, then Henry Rollins commissioned a piece to follow up a piece John Zorn had started that I had to stop when I was trying to care for my mom. I had to stop and do one or the other-it was real fucked up energy. So in '99 I finished the piece.

Zorn then tried to get me some shows and commissioned a piece, trying to entice me back to playing. I appreciate it. It took me 2 years to do the Zorn piece. I was thinking, "Do I really want to get back into it?"

In 2000 I got a job care taking a cabin in Southwest Massachusetts. Then I got some other jobs, like the night man at a funny farm. This is the place where the term funny farm came from. It was run by the Baptists and after World War I they took care of shell shocked soldiers. You know, country boys were the best shots, so they ended up on the front lines where they were thrown into the trenches and all the bombings. They came from the quiet peaceful farms and it was quite a shock.

In 2001-03 I worked at the Colburn school, which was a residency for abused kids/ I ended up as the house manager for 17-18 year old boys. I was helping them with life and career choices. So I suggested they join the Navy or Marines, because they could learn a trade-they weren't going to be pilots- and when they came out they'd have the G.I. Bill and could get an education. It was a good deal. Then Bush declared this new endless war.

I looked around and said, "This isn't really what I want to do with my life." It was like, just do anything, get in and get out of this. Then this '80s French experimental rock band gave me an offer to do a festival. I took it as a sign. I was going nowhere, so I went for it. While I was out of the music business from '95-'02 more happened in those years than since the invention of the player piano up 'til then. Things moved real fast. It was all very different 10 years later-all the bookers and promoters I had worked with were gone. I had to restart and needed a strategy to revive my career. So I contacted a lot of 30-40 year old musicians to collaborate. These were people who knew me, who I had influenced. They could help get my name out there again.

It was also simple economics. The bottom line is if I can get 100 people buying CDs then I can do enough work. From the recording costs, if I do 40 shows like this tour, and 4-5 people buy CDs at each show, that forms a fan base.

How's the tour going so far?

I'm lovin' it! My chops will really be on after 40 shows. It's been 7 days and I already got all my skills back. I never practiced all that time, but I also never lost it completely.

The level of drumming in the past 20 years has just exploded with people like Terry Bozzio. Drums have come along the most of any instrument. Maybe bass is up there too. You have to get down all that finger pop bass stuff or you're left behind. I had to look at what I wanted to do musically. Being dyslexic, I can't be ambidextrous. I'm aware that I can't go there and would be a mediocre drum set drummer.

You wrote a book and came up with a type of extended idea that you call Rhythmajik. How does that fit into what you are doing?

There's discipline in Rhythmajik. I'm focusing my attention when I'm playing. I don't see what I'm doing. It's all about acoustic phenomena. Rhythmajik is about learning and then you forget it. You have to have it (skills), as it will allow you to focus your attention and intention, to recognize energy. I try to have a good time. It's not different than the '70s. When people hear the sounds I make-they might not know what it is, or what to call it-but you remember what you hear. It's like smells-"what's that smell?" You don't know the name of it, but recognize it. These type of memories put people back in touch with the elemental energies. Modern urban people are out of touch. Tribal people get it. You need to recognize things.

We have 20,000 years of cymbals and drums! You read all these things on ancient history and they talk about flutes and soft music, but the original mother goddess was about cymbals and loud noise. You know, mother nature is a hard ass bitch! Things are born and die, it's tough. I'm an animist plain and simple.

And now you're back out there making some noise.

This tour has been good. 10-20 people at a gig is cool. Young people aren't getting into it. But the older people who may know me have jobs, so getting them to come out on a Tuesday night in Toledo is tough. If I make gas money, that's fine. There's a few big shows that should make good money, and if everything else covers, I'll be fine. This big a tour should start a buzz-press, myspace, people tell other people. It gets a buzz going to where the Walker Center for the Arts New Music Fest (in Minneapolis), which doesn't think about me, thinks about Z'EV. Then I get back on the A list and get flown in to do a concert. Being off the scene for 10 years is a big time. If I could get 2 or 3 good shows in the States a year I'd be happy. Then I could work in America on some pocket tours. So I'm making connections on this tour. Like there's this percussionist, Moe! Staiano from San Francisco. He's a big fan of mine and is doing some shows with me in the Pacific Northwest. I don't know how it will work playing with another percussionist, especially if he's playing time and meter, and I'm not. It will be interesting. I'm also doing the Boise (Idaho) New Music Festival.

How would you describe your approach to percussion?

I don't work with time and meter, I work with duration. It's a time sense. At one gig I played for what I thought was 10 minutes, I looked at the clock, and no time had passed. So I always have a clock on stage to know how long to play. Last night I played at a club with a PA and the cheap clock I had blew out. It used a quartz crystal and the vibrations just were too much for it. I need to get a wind up clock. I prefer to play acoustically and only use a PA to fill out the sound.

After the interview, we went to the bar next door so Z'EV could have dinner before the show. We continued to talk about a wide range of scientific and esoteric subjects, including his forthcoming book, Eardrumming.

I've been working on it, compiling all this information and then I read some stuff about the heart and realized I've been working from my head. So I'm revising it from a heart perspective. There's been a lot of recent discoveries with the heart, like that it's separate from the brain and works on its own. They've even discovered neurons in the heart, and like tiny brains that control it. And we always think about the brain and the head being the main part, but it's the heart that's the center. They've even measured the heart's energy field and it's like this [Z'EV extends his hands out from his body indicating a large circle]. So everything comes from the heart and I've started rethinking all this.

Z'EV on the web: Myspace

Releases:

Af/Uit (7") Kremlin 1981

Production And Decay Of Spacial Relations (LP) Backlash 1981

Salts Of Heavy Metals (12") Lust/Unlust Music 1981

Untitled (Flexi, 7") Vinyl Records (2) 1981

Elemental Music (LP) Subterranean Records 1982

Wipe Out (7") Fetish Records 1982

50 Gates (Cass, C60) Staalplaat 1984

Berlin Atonal Vol. 1 (LP) Atonal Records 1984

The Invisible Man / The Old Sweat (LP) Coercion 1984

My Favorite Things (LP) Subterranean Records 1985

Schönste Muziek (LP) Dossier 1986

Bust This! (LP) Dossier 1988

Ghost Stories (CD) Soleilmoon Recordings 1990

Opus 3 (CD) Staalplaat ,Helmholtz Theater 1990

Opus 3.1 (CD) Soleilmoon Recordings 1990

1968-1990: One Foot In The Grave (2xCD) Touch 1991

Heads & Tales (CD) Avant 1996

Chemical Dependance (12") Fukem 1997

An Uns Momento (CD) Crippled Intellect Productions 1998

Face The Wound (CD) Soleilmoon Recordings 2001

Direction Ov Travel (CD) Cold Spring 2002

Live 05.14.93 (CD, Mini) Crippled Intellect Productions 2002

Headphone Musics 1-6 (CD) Touch 2004

N.A.M.E. Gallery, Chicago, Illinois 03.01.86 (10") Crippled Intellect Productions 2004

Tinnitus Vu (CD, Maxi, Ltd) Touch 2004

Tocsin -6 Thru +2 (CD) Die Stadt 2004

Untitled (2x7") Die Stadt 2004

Artificial Life (CD) Crippled Intellect Productions 2005

Number One (CD) Touch 2005

Rhythmajik (CD) SmallVoices 2005

Untitled (File, MP3) Touch 2005

Untitled (2x7") Die Stadt 2005

Untitled (2x7", Ltd, Cle + 2xCD) Die Stadt 2005

#1 (CD) Ars Benevola Mater 2006

Buzzin' Fly / Dormant Spores (CD, Album, Dig) Black Rose Recordings 2006

Production And Decay Of Spacial Relations vs. Reproduction And Decay Of Spatial Relations (+ That Was The Year That Was What It Was) (CD + CD, Ltd, 500) Die Stadt ,Die Stadt 2006

Symphony #2 - Elementalities (CD) Blossoming Noise 2006

Untitled (CD) Die Stadt 2006

Untitled (2xCDr, Ltd) Die Stadt 2006

Metaphonics (CDr, Ltd) Eter 2007