Date: 4/18/07
Bands: Z'EV, Illusion of Safety
Location: Enemy
Cost: $10 suggested
Things I missed to be there: Rejects! with Far Rad, LMNOP and DJ Rotten Milk at Sonotheque, The Freeform Shuffle with Jilt, Fragmentation, Oxime and Scrabblor; Flosstradamus and Kid Sister at Subterranean; Scape Grope, Right Eye Rita, Dewayne Slightweight, Slyfox at Nihilist; The Hump Day Dance Party and Mary Nisi at Shubas; Kate and Rachel's Old Time Radio Show at Town Hall Pub
Reason for going: Z'EV hasn't played Chicago in 21 years
I often have a hard time differentiating between noise and jazz, at least I do when the noise in question has an obvious structure (not that the structure is obvious, just that there obviously is one). There's a part of me that refuses to acknowledge the difference between the two. It is probably the same part that struggles with punk::hardcore and techno::electro. The running theory is that noise is just a term that jazz musicians use when they don't want to deal with the people who tend to go to jazzclubs. For example, Enemy's downstairs neighbor Heaven Gallery is the type of place where you might hear soul patch jazz, whereas Enemy is the place you'll end up if you want to hear the type of jazz favored by guys with pierced dicks.
Z'EV and Illusion of Safety are both experimental musicians who thrived on the outskirts of the early eighties industrial scene, Z'EV utilizing more acoustic, percussion based instruments and Illusion of Safety favoring more synthesizers and electronics.
As I climbed the stairs past Heaven and the tapas restaurant below, I heard something that sounded like a wave of shrapnel washing over a beach of broken glass. Z'EV crouched in a corner playing an array of percussive instruments, from maracas to a hanging box that looked like some sort of a bird feeder. Perhaps his most interesting drum was a large piece of sheet metal that looked as though it had been folded as carelesly as the tinfoil around the bag of mixed meats I bought at the Polish deli earlier today. It made a terrible crash when he hit it, but it did something else when he rubbed it with a little mallet, the way you might rub your finger across the rim of a wine glass. Here it would make a sound like a star might make before it supernovas and dies, this low cosmic howl that shook inside your head.
Every one of the secret jazzbos, including more than a few reps from the North Side's WZRD and the South Side's WHPK, sat silent, the only sounds were Z'EV whose music would come in waves, first a battery of bangs and clangs and then that otherworldly moan, and the floorboards creaking underneath them as they tried not to shift in place. He finished when he had run out of instruments, announcing that he would be playing more of a rock set tomorrow at The Empty Bottle.
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