Z'EV

We think: Every household should own at least one record by the great Z'EV, who died way too early.

Jewel case with artwork and photography by Jon Wozencroft and Tereza Stehlikova
In 1967 Z’EV took a tape music class at the UCLA night school. The leader of the course was Joseph Byrd who was the founder and theoretician of the first electronic rock band; the united states of america. So while it’s almost 40 years now that he has been involved in the production of electro-acoustic music, “Headphone Musics” marks the first release of a product exclusively featuring this form of music. All of the source material is drawn from the collection of cassette tapes Z’EV has amassed over the last 30 years – sounds and soundscapes he has either recorded himself or witnessed, or tapes that have been given to him by various peoples on his travels or been received by him through the mail from fans etc. Technically he remains a bit orthodox in that basically he still plies the old tools of the tape manipulation trade in the current digital sphere. What this means is that he concentrates on editing, phase relationships, time dilation, and inherent and 3rd harmonic distortion as his only means of processing the information he is transforming. There is no looping involved, although #2 features a recording he made in 1984 using his controlled-skipping Lenco turntable.

AS IS AS is a live recording of a sound poem Z’EV produced and performed under the name “S. Weisser” at a Sound Poetry Festival in 1976 at the La Mamelle art space in San Francisco. It was produced using 2 reel to reel tape decks, 3 cassette decks, and 2 microphones.