Out of the Box #7

Wipe Out!

Out of the Box is a bi-weekly series focusing on seven inch records. It’s an excuse to engage with my collection in a new way, as well as to write about older records and genres we don’t often cover at ACL.

OUT OF THE BOX #7
ZEV ~ Wipe Out! (1982)

We’re back after a few break weeks, this time with a classic from Z’EV.

Z'EV (born Stefan Joel Weisser, 1951 – 2017) was a poet, percussionist, and sound artist, a pioneer of industrial music, mainstay of NYC’s downtown scene of the 80s and 90s, and devotee of esoteric systems. Despite his association with New York, there’s a clear west coast genealogy in Z’EV’s work, a particular blend of conceptual art, mysticism, and performativity. Z’EV studied at CalArts in 1969-70, alongside Carl Stone, with whom he played in a jazz rock band. By the mid 1970s he had developed an idiosyncratic gestural performance style (“wild-style”) centered around custom built objects made from metal and plastic, a decade before groups like Neubauten, Test Department, and :zoviet*france: explored similar territory. But Z’EV’s work is unique in centering solo percussion, in a largely acoustic and very visceral performances.

Among a certain subset of listeners, Z’EV is routinely mentioned as a pioneer of industrial music. I first encountered Z’EV on Sub Rosa’s An Anthology of Noise & Electronic Music, later becoming of a fan of work such as Production and Decay of Spacial Relations, and seeing his name in the credits alongside artists including Glenn Branca, NON, Lydia Lunch, Psychic TV, Organum, Stephen O'Malley, The Hafler Trio, Oren Ambarchi, Pita… you get the idea. I picked this 7” up on Discogs a few years back. It was one of those situations where I was looking through what else a seller had available to pad out an order, so when I saw this record from 1982 for very cheap I jumped on it.

The a-side is an industrial cover of The Surfaris 1963 instrumental surf rock classic, “Wipe Out!,” built upon the tunes’s signature drum fill, with abrasive metallic scrapes and crashes taking the place twangy guitar. This sounds like it could be a gimmicky novelty, but Z’EV’s arrangement is surprisingly interesting. Afterall, the original is already a novelty as an instrumental pop hit, and that drum part is basically the hook, making it uniquely suited to a solo percussion interpretation. I’m reminded of contemporaneous work by John Oswald, who achieved a similar affect using sampled “plunderphonic” methods. Like the original single, this version of “Wipe Out!” is 45 rpm.

The b-side “Element/L” (“elemental”) could be played back at any speed, I think I prefer the pace at 33 but to each her own. I find this experimentation with format, giving the listener some agency, to be more interesting than the sounds themselves. What we have here is a repetitive rhythmic soundscape that seems to been manipulated and reversed on tape. And in fact Z’EV created his Element/L alias for studio tape compositions such as this. 1981’s Af/Uit 7” also featured a b-side comprised of tape manipulations, so these early works document Z’EV’s development as both a performer and a composer.