NXO25 – Writing and Recording Music with Z'EV

Working with Z'EV was key to the Nexialist Organization – aimed at creating projects at the intersection of architecture, music, and visual design through shared creative methods and theoretical inquiry. We collaborated on recordings and performances from our first meeting in 2005 until his passing in 2017. Marcelo Aguirre (Spastic Dementia, Evil Spirit, Æternum Sacro) was key to facilitating a collaboration between us. THE.BÄND initially featured Z’EV, Alexandra von Bolz’n, Marcelo and I, as Fragment King. The project combined percussion, bass, and voice into an extreme, physical form of metal-drone performance art.

The Bänd emerged in 2008 from a collaboration between legendary percussionist and sound artist Z’EV, drummer Marcelo Aguirre, vocalist Alexandra von Bolz’n, and bassist Fragment King. Their partnership began with a live performance in Berlin and developed into a long-distance creative exchange between Germany and England.

Critical Void, Munich, 2013. photo: Andreas Graf

The trio’s first major work, Death’s Radio, features four extended compositions that blend Z’EV’s ritual percussion, von Bolz’n’s visceral vocals, and Fragment King’s rumbling bass and atmospheric electronics. The result is death-trance for your edification — a hybrid of metal, drone, and industrial intensity.

In August 2011, The Bänd performed live at the prestigious Klangbad Festival in Scheer in the vicinity of the Faust Studios. After preparatory sessions of improvisation and sound exploration, their set culminated in a crescendo of chaotic yet structured energy. The performance was documented in a video by the festival organizers, who also released a compilation including an exclusive track by The Bänd.

Their collaboration exemplifies Nexialist’s ethos: structure and improvisation, physicality and abstraction, discipline and eruption — a dialogue of sonic extremes.

And what do reviewers have to say?

Disaster Amnesiac: 

"You just have to hand it to to z'ev: fifty plus years into his creative journey, and the man is still working. He seems to come back from any and all adversity. Most recently, Disaster Amnesiac has read that he was injured in some type of literal train wreck, only to rehab and recover, this time duly heading for South America. z'ev is not thin skinned, that's for sure.

Neither is his voluminous documented work, which, with his Bandcamp page, is growing all the time. While not located at that same cyber node, his music with Alexandra von Bolz'n and Fragment King is equally tough, and highly worthy of checking out.

Disaster Amnesiac has been digging The Garden, nineteen minutes of percussive trance bliss from 2011, especially of late. z'ev starts things off with a fine example of his ostinato drumming approach on what sounds like a single bass drum. It stays for the duration of The Garden, conjuring up hallucinatory images of snakes and surreal landscapes for this listener. Disaster Amnesiac is reminded too of a RE/Search interview in which the master percussionist/sound manipulator spoke of dispensing with flashy drum licks in order to get to some kind of deeper essences. This is most definitely the case herein. z'ev doesn't "do" a lot with his lines on The Garden, and in doing so does everything, moving the track to fully trance inducing places.

Atop the magic rhythmic carpet laid down by z'ev, one hears whirling, high pitched electronics from Fragment King that drill down into ears. Not so much melodic as atmospheric, they spin and cloud around the sound spaces, digging down and flying out and around the drumming. Alongside these moves, vocalist Alexandra von Bolz'n intones some kind of bizarre script. Disaster Amnesiac can't really tell what language she's singing in, but her dramatic vocal rises and falls sure sound dramatic and often somewhat disturbed. Perhaps they're some kind of vocalized asemic writing?
The sum total of The Garden strikes Disaster Amnesiac as some kind of sublime Industrial Black Metal, as its darkened vibes sink in to the auditory perception in a way that is heavy, mysterious, and singularly out there. This music is not traditionally pleasant, but it's surely compelling and fascinating to this listener.

It's my hope that z'ev, von Bolz'n and Fragment King have more of these sonic darts to throw at us." 

This is a special NXO25 – 25th Anniversary of the Nexialist Organization post.