During New York’s No Wave years (the late ’70s and early ’80s), Z’EV played relentlessly crashing waves of percussion on stainless-steel gongs, titanium pipes, plastic tubing, bottles, and more. His bald head and muscular sense of broad gesture made his performances look like avant-garde dance pieces — sometimes very humorous ones. Although Z’EV was pigeonholed as an American response to European industrial bands like Throbbing Gristle or SPK, his background in electronic composition and sound poetry ran back to the late ’60s.

In the intervening years, Z’EV (born Stefan Weisser) has tried his hand at Kabbalah studies, visual art, ethnomusicology, short-wave radio, and European house music. He once staged Wagner’s Parsifal, taught dance in Amsterdam, and had a lengthy retrospective of his work issued by Jon Wozencraft’s Touch label. The common thread in Z’EV’s art is easy enough to pinpoint. In fact, every good musician makes voodoo magic out of junk; it’s just that Z’EV does so literally. His continued investigations into sonic and shamanistic phenomena are genuinely unusual, interactive, and just a little less packaged than, say, Blue Man Group.

This article appears in May 23-29, 2007.