Zev Asher
| Zev Asher | |
|---|---|
| Born |
May 9, 1963 Montreal, Canada |
| Died | August 7, 2013 (aged 50) Montreal, Canada |
| Nationality | Canadian |
| Known for | Documentary film, noise music |
| Website | web |
| Elected | ≠ |
Zev Asher (May 9, 1963 – August 7, 2013) was a Canadian experimental musician and documentary film maker.
Born in Montreal to a Jewish family. His father Stanley was an compulsive collector of popular cultural artefacts. A mountain of it occupied the basement of the family home. Zev would mine the ephemera; from the pile he found a frame of reference for the media critique implicit in his pioneering noise and multimedia performance group Roughage. He attended M.I.N.D. high school and in 1986 entered the film studies program at Concordia University. He dropped out after being given his first assignment; an essay on Les Unes et Les Autres by Claude Lelouch. Fronting several bands in the city's no wave/punk scene of the early 1980s that he, along with Tim Olive, later revisited in the early 1990s as Nimrod.
Living in Japan with Leah Singer from 1985 to 1987 he became acquainted with the denizens of Tokyo's burgeoning noise scene. Through friendships and collaborations with the artist John Duncan and the noise musician Masami Akita he performed in several noise super groups that were spin offs from Akita's Merzbow project – these included Bustmonsters and Flying Testicle. His Roughage project began here, using a four-track tape recorder he developed techniques for collaging sound recordings. He produced micro editions of these audio cassette collages that were distributed through friends and specialty record stores in Tokyo, a hand made collage was included with each cassette copy. Working with the experimental filmmaker, Mark Nugent, Zev enlarged the scope of Roughage into the multimedia performance unit that included contributions and collaborations with other artists, including Willy Le Maitre, Eric Vasseur. Roughage performances took place throughout Canada, Japan and Europe from the late 80's to the late 90's
During one Roughage tour of the newly minted state of Croatia in 1995 he documented and interviewed artists that he met. These interviews provided the basis for his first documentary 'Rat Art: Croatian Independents'. The video looked at artists making art in the context of a society at war.
His second feature was called 'What About Me: The Rise of The Nihilist Spasm Band'. The documentary premièred at the Toronto International Film Festival in 2000. Drawing from the inspiration of finding a copy of the Nihilist Spasm Band's first L.P. No Canada in the pile of 1970's ephemera in his family's basement; the documentary explores the legacy of the Canadian noise music pioneers.
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