Z'EV INTERVIEW

found here >>
WE'RE GONNA BE TIMELESS: 03.17.07: Guest Z'EV

“Tone Generator” of S.P.K. Interviewed

Recent interview with SPK via Tone Generator...

[Read more over on: :::KILL UGLY RADIO:::]

Rhythm and Noise - Naut Humon - Z'EV

Where South San Francisco ends, desolation begins. In November 1980, flyers began appearing on neighborhood telephone poles announcing an upcoming Rhythm & Noise show. "Crisis Data Transfer," the poster promised. No location was given, but a recorded phone message provided detailed directions to "The Compound."

The Compound sits among a grim terrain of decaying housing, abandoned warehouses, electrified chain-link fences and packs of wild dogs. It was R&N's first show. Upon arrival, walkie-talkie-wielding attendants drove our cars away, leaving us to warm our hands at scattered timer fires. The scheduled showtime came and went and still we waited and shivered in the damp Bay air. Finally, a huge steel grate door was raised and we entered into billowing smoke and ten channels of surround-sound. The interior was banked with video screens of all sizes and enough sound equipment with which to construct a small village, most of it with that homemade hacker's look to it. "Vaudeo" they called it: video narratives set to live and manipulated soundscapes. The music screeched, droned, undulated, and even, on occasion, harmonized -- always with some semblance of a beat. Rhythm & Noise -- a well-named ensemble. The Compound is scarier than ever now that crack kings control the territory. The video screens are gone and the cavernous interior is jammed with hanging steel drums, hollow tubes, huge springs, wires -- wires everywhere -- and a baby grand piano. A control tower houses an intimidating array of sound equipment -- analog, digital, sampling, synthesizing, hybridizing, mixing boards, keyboards. A Mac II waits in the wings.

Naut Humon, quintessential sound traffic controller began my tour slamming his arm down on a keyboard and manipulating the sustained sound for two roller-coaster minutes. Then he layered digitalized samples into an oscillating techno swamp. Synthesizers added electronic pterodactyls to the mix. Past sessions with percussionists, singers, and other musicians were called up to lend texture and spark. Finally this work in progress, "Running on Radar," treated the ears to soundwaves come full circle: noise tamed into post-modern lyricism. Naut Humon is the thread tying R&N together through the years. Z'ev, Nik Fault, Rex Probe, Michael Belfer, Comfort Control, and Diamanda Galas have been collaborators, but Humon is Rhythm and Noise:
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"...In the early '70s Z'EV entered the picture. He was working with all these metal assemblages. He'd tune these racks of scrap until they were welded sculptures with sound functions. I'd quit Cal Arts so I could invest my money in equipment. We formed a group called Cellar M to combine live percussion with electronic manipulation. We did some good work, but dissonance wasn't hip yet." --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Q: How fully did you work out the pieces you performed with Z'ev?
A: There were definite flight plans, but they had room for spontaneous combustion.
Q: When did Rhythm & Noise emerge as a distinct entity?
A: In 1976, Nik Fault, Rex Probe, and I began a heavy period of research and development. We sold a lot of what we had and began to build most of our equipment. We started to develop The Compound, though we didn't actually perform until 1980. The punk/industrial movement was strong by that time, so we got some recognition, but people still couldn't understand it emotionally. At least not the way they could understand Led Zeppelin or whatever else they were used to listening to.
Q: You hadn't recorded anything yet?
A: Right. That's where Throbbing Gristle had an edge. They had a product. We had always avoided that. It wasn't until 1984 that the Residents convince us to record on their label Ralph Records.
Q: Is it possible to point to any roots for your music?
A: Our roots are more in timbre than in rock 'n' roll. We were definitely aware of people like Stockhausen and Xenakis. I listened to Hendrix, but the thing that was interesting was that he was adding noise to the blues and making it popular. I saw a bridge between Hendrix and Stockhausen. The challenge was to understand noise in an emotional manner.
Q: What distinctions do you make between live and recorded versions of your pieces?
A: Live performance should be different from what you experience in your living room. On the one hand, you have to create links to the past, to what is familiar, but live music should offer a sense of involvement, of immediacy, of surprise. It fascinates me how many rules you can break.
Q: You've talked about the concept of "dissonant convergence."
A: These are not necessarily contrary terms. R&N is realizing-embracing more mass harmonic structure because we are working to understand the harmonic of noise as well as the dissonance. The question is, do dissonant sounds form harmonics or a larger dissonance? You have the effect and the after-effect. Each sound becomes a memory capsule that you place in your own spectrum. It meshes with each subsequent sound. You determine its esthetic. One man's noise is another man's poison. Another question is, do you always need a beat, a rhythm, a pulse to make the relationship with the timbre, to make it speak to you or to the masses? It's hard to break out of pop shells. People don't understand things that aren't part of their existing paradigms. They want to be able to hum it, to remember it from high school days. I like how hip-hop is played through jam boxes so loud that distortion becomes part of the esthetic. In Cairo, the muezzin chants through loudspeakers so tinny and loud that noise becomes part of the prayer. And boom cars -- it's no longer, "My Cadillac is bigger than yours," now it's, "My noise is bigger than yours because I have five woofers." It's an intentional misuse of the technology. It proves that attitude depends on how you listen. You might like the music you hear while inside a club, but it might sound like noise if you live across the alley. We sound like noise to a lot of people."

[MP3]: Rhythm & Noise - Remembrance
[MP3]: Z'EV: "The Invisible Man - Selection 2-18-78"

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Description of equipment used on stage by Throbbing Gristle

Text: Peter 'Sleazy' Christopherson (of Throbbing Gristle)
Originally printed in Flowmotion 1, January 1981
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Description of equipment used on stage:

• One rack containing 3 Clarion Auto-reverse car cassette machines customised so that all of the four tracks from each tape head are available. All or the 12 resulting channels are routed to a keyboard which selects the output combination.

• One Apple II computer fitted with Mountain Hardware's Supertalker and Symtec's SSG synthesiser boards. This provides extensive facilities not available from other equipment. For example sound can be stored digitally in memory and then played back in a non-linear manner or be manipulated mathematically prior to recall. Also the computer offers virtually unlimited sequencing facilities and can enter and display any musical piece as standard musical notation; that is, one can type in the tune from the score and then type "play" and the computer will play it. All data, stored sound or lines can be stored on floppy-disc and recalled as and when needed.
  

• One Cornet (made in Taiwan).
  

• One Larry Adler professional harmonica.

All the above are routed to a Roland Jazz Chorus Combo, via Memory Man analog delay line and a Roland Waa-Waa. (As are any vocals I might do).

Sources or Sound fragments used:

These vary considerably. As far as possible I try to stay within the law both in terms of copyright and the respect of peoples privacy. However in general the use or any specific fragment is so short that these considerations are not too important and if a piece of sound seems right I will normally use it. Without wishing to be too specific (for obvious reasons, sources of sound have included: recordings of legal and illegal radio and T.V. broadcasts (mostly not in this country), interviews with people (usually interesting people who have only come to light when they were indiscreet), tapes made without peoples knowledge (methods used in this case have to remain unspecified - suffice to say I see no reason why technology used by politicians in covert Watergate-type situations should not be used in a more enlightening and hopefully enjoyable context), lastly I also used a certain amount of purely 'atmospheric' sound (cars, rain, dogs barking at night, people crying etc) most of which is recorded in situ as it happens and most of which is recorded binaurally. (The binaural system, which, we now always use to record gigs, is one in which the two stereo mics are separated in a similar way to human ears. On playback the minute phase differences that result between the signals give a considerably enhanced spatial effect when listening with headphones.)

Regarding the formation of T.G. material:

Usually T.G. Songs are formed for the first time live on stage (We very rarely rehearse other than to check the equipment) Each person working on ingredients separately - a title, a lyric, a rhythm (why can I never spell that word?), an idea for a sound etc. etc. And all these somehow come together on stage to form the song, which invariably alters in each performance until we do a definitive version on record. (After which we don't usually repeat it.)

Regarding what we are 'doing':

I don't really see what we do in terms of the conventional 'rock & roll' thing at all, although the format of a group making records is one which is immediately acceptable to many people (much more so than virtually any other, apart from film/T.V.) I don't think we are a "group" in the normal sense of the word. We are just trying to express ideas and feelings in a way that seems appropriate to times in which we live. What we decide to do at any point is as far as possible based only on instinct - what "feels right". So I have no idea what we (or I) will be doing in the future but it will be certainly be something I find interesting because there's no point doing anything boring, ever.

~Flowmotion 1, January 1981

Unheralded Industrialists - Industrial Nation #19, 2004

RANDOM SAMPLES: UNHERALDED INDUSTRIALISTS
by Todd Zachritz


Hello and welcome back. This issue, I'd like to take you on a bit of a field trip, away from the current experimental sounds and into the past. This time, I'm going to focus on the old-school industrial and experimental music--stuff that seems to have been all but forgotten and neglected in these days of futurepop and industrial/gothic metal. Sure, everyone should be more than familiar with THROBBING GRISTLE, CABARET VOLTAIRE, BOYD RICE, COIL, CHRIS & COSEY, WHITEHOUSE, CURRENT 93, NURSE WITH WOUND, TEST DEPT, and the likes. These were important artists, to be certain, but there were many more from the same period making truly bizarre and decidedly non-commercial sounds, often to a very small and insular audience. These 'missing' legends of the 'Wild Planet' scene are what I will focus on here. Step right up..

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From what basically seems to be the birthplace of what is historically termed 'industrial' music, England, came the BOURBONESE QUALK. From 1980 to 1987, members Simon Crab, Steven Tanza, and Julian Gilbert (and later guitarist Miles Miles) were to release 5 now-classic LPs, from 'Laughing Afternoon' to the self-titled 'Bourbonese Qualk'. The versatile band moved effortlessly from aggressive and noise-laced rock sounds to cinematic tribal-ethno-percussive experiments to emotive soundtracks without films. Equally as influenced by CAN as by THROBBING GRISTLE, the QUALK's electronic programming gelled with live instrumentation into a seamless mix that would herald the work of later Wax Trax!-era artists. Later releases (like the landmark 1987 release, 'My Government Is My Soul') even brought in elements of funk, dub and techno to the mix. A dark outlook permeated the group's many recordings, and politics and shock value didn't so much define the group as season it. BOURBONESE QUALK's recordings may now be difficult to find, as they were released in many formats on many obscure European labels through the years, but any of their work merits attention.

For details on their releases and free MP3s, visit http://www.bourbonesequalk.com

KONSTRUKTIVISTS formed in 1982, based around Glenn Michael Wallis, who was a roadie/touring mate of THROBBING GRISTLE and sometime member of WHITEHOUSE. KONSTRUKTIVISTS were a psychotronic group that focused on spacy electronic reverberations and more accessable beat-oriented material that was unquestionably a major influence on some of the later 'industrial dance' acts. Having recorded the now-sought-after early vinyl LPs like 1983's 'Psykho-Genetika' on underground labels like Third Mind, the group eventually went into a sort of hibernation from 1985 to 1990. Emerging in 1990 with refreshed lineup, the group released a stream of electronic CDs on labels like the UK's Jara Discs and World Serpent. These were more techno-influenced works that were met with mostly indifference, likely due to lack of promotion and publicity. KONSTRUKTIVISTS continue on today with Wallis being the sole member. A variety of CD reissues of their early work have been released, so the wonder of KONSTRUKTIVISTS can be felt all over again. http://www.klanggalerie.com/konsort/

From San Francisco, there was FACTRIX -- a group of artists including Bond Bergland, Cole Palme, and Joseph P. Jacobs who formed in 1978 from the ashes of another seminal post-punk act, MINIMAL MAN. As FACTRIX, the group released a number of subversive and 'dangerous' recordings back in the early '80s. Their incredible 'Scheintot' LP was a document of morbid, moody, and subtle experimental rock that is as eerily unsettling today as it must have been way back in 1981 when it was initially released. Their 1982 LP, 'California Babylon', was recorded live with vocal contributions from the notorious MONTE CAZAZZA, and remains a rough and violent selection of guitar-noise deconstructions and primitive machine-noise rumblings. Conversely, the 'Empire Of Passion/Splice Of Life' 7" was a marvelously sinister bit of apocalyptic sound-poetry and industrial soundscaping. All of these releases have been criminally out-of-print for years, but fortunately, the fine Tesco label has released a double-CD collection of FACTRIX's legendary recordings, entitled 'Artifact'. This compiles tracks from the group's many cassette and vinyl recordings at last onto digital format for a new audience to hear and appreciate. Order the CD or read more about FACTRIX at Tesco's website, at http://www.tesco-distro.com.

(Editors note-- For more about FACTRIX go to Factrix: Industrial Music Pioneers (fan site); for Factrix mp3s, visit http://music.download.com/factrix.)

Another act that never received much notice stateside was 23 SKIDOO. Formed in England in 1979, this collective (led by Alex Turnbull, Johnny Turnbull, Fritz Catlin, and Sketch) released a small, but highly-influential amount of vinyl 12"es and LPs. Their LP, 'The Culling Is Coming', dared to combine post-TG noise and cutup work with meditational and rich multi-cultural percussive experiments. The track 'Mahakala', from 'Culling', is a solemn ritual piece that invokes some dark and contemplative spirits. Other releases, like the 'Just Like Everybody' LP, brought a virulent strain of mutant electro-funk later co-opted (and sampled prominently) by acts like THE FUTURE SOUND OF LONDON and the CHEMICAL BROTHERS. The cut, 'Gregouka', from their 1982 'Tearing Up The Plans' 12", blended ancient Moroccan music with dark electronics to creepy effect. After years of being out-of-print, 23 SKIDOO's back catalogue is supposedly now available on CD. And the group has since returned to performance and recording, reportedly in a more dance/hip-hop vein.

MAYBE MENTAL were another largely-forgotten post-industrial act in the late 80s. Likely best-known for their split 1987 LP with CONTROLLED BLEEDING (entitled 'Halved'), MAYBE MENTAL were formed in Arizona in 1982 by David Oliphant. The group mined the atmospheric industrial arena as well or better than most of their underground peers. Their 1985 cassette release, 'To Cease Burning', was a textural post-industrial landscape of tonal fragments, cinematic noise, and fractured collages--which still holds up next to any modern-day experimental outfit. Other early cassette releases veered into traditional noise and power electronics territories, but later recordings were spiced up with field recordings, found tapes, and other more subtle and diverse influences, culminating in their landmark 1987 LP, 'Lotuses On Fire', which heralded the group's interest in rich multi-cultural instrumentation and ritual textures that would later play a key role in the band's transition to the formidable LIFE GARDEN. As LIFE GARDEN, Oliphant and company went on to release a number of simultaneously meditational, tribal, and percussive tapes and CDs, including some collaborative works with the equally as transcendent VOICE OF EYE.

The mysterious German/English group GERECHTIGKEITS LIGA only released one LP, but 'Hypnotischer Existenzialismus' made some waves upon it's release in 1985 on Graeme Revell & Brian Lustmord's legendary Side Effects Records. This long out-of-print record featured a series of very industrial-sounding compositions recorded live. From percussive attacks with megaphone-style declarations to ritualistic ambience, G.LIGA influenced some prominent artists of their day, including cEvin Key and Bill Leeb. Fans of any of the classic, early industrialists would do well to seek out this fine recording from a time long past.

Almost as mysterious and fleeting was the group LAST FEW DAYS, who gained a measure of prominence for their early collaborations with LAIBACH. They released precious few recordings in the early part of the 1980s, but the LP, 'Pure Spirit And Saliva', was a compilation of live performances from 1983-1986. The group eschewed studio recordings in favor of live actions, and musically, LFD relied on drum machines, strange tape effects, and clanking percussion assaults to paint rough, feral onslaughts of environmental and urban sound. LAST FEW DAYS were one of the missing links between early avante-garde 'industrial' scene and the later beat-oriented dance and EBM splinters. 'Pure Spirit' is a marvelous and influential recording that has oddly escaped CD reissue to this day.

Finally, we have the obscure but very important DELIA DERBYSHIRE. Not an 'industrial' artist by any stretch, Delia worked at England's BBC Workshop in the 1960s and 1970s, creating some very early electronic and experimental music for TV and radio soundtracks. If you've heard the theme for the classic sci-fi series 'Dr. Who', then you have heard some of Delia's work. She took many chances and composed her themes using exotic sources (like animal sounds), often challenging her employers as well as her listeners in a time when electronic music was not accepted or taken seriously. Her interests and work in these avante-garde arenas led to encounters with many prominent rock and psychedelic musicians of the day, and it is certain that some, if not most, went away with new ideas borrowed from Delia. She passed away in 2001, but not before starting some new electronic musical projects with former Spacemen 3/Spectrum mainman Pete Kember (aka Sonic Boom). Her lovingly-crafted website has free MP3 samples available, as well as a complete bio of this visionary artist. http://www.delia-derbyshire.org

And there you have it. To see the future you must know the past. Or something like that.


[this article originally published in INDUSTRIAL NATION magazine #19, 2004]

factrix