Saturday, February 24, 2007

Z'ev - Salts Of Heavy Metals (1981) & Headphone Musics #'s 1 to 6 (1970's-80's)


Z'ev (born Stefan Weiser) straddles the nearly unbridgeable and highly volatile gulf between the art world and the music industry. Acclaimed as one of the world's best and most original percussionists, Weiser began recording in the late '60s in a handful of psych-out projects. By the late '70s, he took on the Z'ev moniker to explore the "spatial poetics" of the polyrhythmic clamor he had established with his hand-built percussive instruments. His dozens of collaborative projects expanded to include work with John Cage, Glenn Branca, The Hafler Trio, Psychic TV, and Rhythm & Noise.

"I began playing drums when 4 years old, making drum-sets at 5 or 6 and first studied drums when I was 8. My first professional show was at 12. At 13, I began to write poetry and to explore the plastic arts. These three contexts continued to develop, and in 1968 I attended California Institute of the Arts, studying ethnomusicology - in particular, African, Balinese and East Indian musics. There I came into contact with many of the Fluxus artists (most notably Emmett Williams), left ethnomusicology and started to work seriously with 'concrete' and 'performance' poetry. At that time, I'd decided to stop pursuing music as a career so that I could concentrate on poetry. During the years 1969 to 75, I considered myself exclusively as an audio/visual poet. This culminated with my inclusion in the 'Second Generation' show at The Museum of Conceptual Art in San Francisco. It was around this time that I began to play music again with the group Cellar-M. In 1979, I moved from San Francisco to New York City, working with Glenn Branca (on Symphony #2 ), Simone Forti (on Spring ), guitarist Rudolf Grey, and Tim Wright (founder of Pere Ubu), amongst others. In 1980, I toured Europe for the first time, and in 1985, became a resident of Amsterdam..." More Z'ev in his own words here


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1 comment:

Anonymous said...

yes, thanks much! Do you have his LPs on Subterranean from the early 1980s, by any chance?