Catching His Breath

"I saw this really weird guy the other night at Electric Lounge -- this guy, `Sxip' -- he was playing the flute, but in a really weird way -- like this" -- demonstrates what appears to be an elephant struggling to bring its trunk under control -- "He was making all these weird sounds... it really made me want to talk to him, to find out how he came up with that music...."

This testimony comes to me from the friend of a friend, another Austin music fan who has encountered this unexpected composer at one of his recent shows around town -- this particular one, the "Prince Hoot Night" at Electric Lounge in March. That she felt compelled to ask how he came up with this music -- when we're so used to merely measuring what "type" of music we're hearing, then judging whether it's good or bad, successful or unsuccessful at living up to the type -- is intriguing enough. That she might just as easily have been referring to Sxip playing his otherworldly guitar pieces with paper clips over the strings, or playing the harmonica with mad stomping and huffing sounds, or playing the tampon applicator, or the "Springlin," an instrument designed by local mad inventor Brooks Coleman which is best described as an enormous, amplified spring played with a bow, fairly quadruples the intrigue factor. Anyhow, how do we judge whether an artist is good or bad when we've never experienced something performed that way -- indeed, in some cases, when we've never seen the instrument with which he's performing before?

Just how does he come up with that music?

Perhaps the best place to start answering that is the story of how Sxip came to Austin and nearly ended up not being able to perform music at all.

"I guess I started out as a folk musician," says Sxip, "playing folk songs on the guitar. Then I was composing for modern dance at Ohio University [in Athens, Ohio] and I started playing with putting paper clips on the strings, and that's how I started generating this weird stuff. But I was still trying to be an instrumental folk guitarist."

Sxip left Athens and moved around a lot, but he continued to experiment with different sounds and art forms. In Boston, he played music in the subways; in Minneapolis, he practiced puppetry; in Denver, he made breakthroughs with his flute techniques. He also spent time in San Francisco; Missoula, Montana; and Santa Fe, New Mexico, playing music in all those places. He also wrote, having long been interested in short fiction, particularly children's stories. This was another art form that would eventually come in handy.

Then, in the fall of 1994, Sxip moved to Austin. "I had heard that Austin had a good music scene -- someone in Denver told me about going into a club and seeing a band that played French jazz and also a yodeler -- now I realize it was probably 81/2 Souvenirs and Don Walser," Sxip says. "I read about Liquid Mice (the now-defunct experimental band fronted by singer-performance artist Sheelah Murthy) in Mondo 2000 -- so I figured I'd at least have some cohorts." Shortly after arriving here, Sxip played an open stage "and afterwards, [Kerthy Fix] came up to me and handed me two phone numbers -- one of them was Sheelah Murthy's. I called her up and she said, `Well, you want to come over and jam?' I thought, wow, what a friendly town...."

Although Sxip and Murthy developed a friendship to the point that Sxip now lives in the room in an Eastside apartment that Murthy vacated when she moved to Chicago last year, they never really collaborated musically. This was because of something that happened soon after they met, while Sxip was practicing a guitar composition entitled "Tilt-a-Whirl." As the name implies, the song spins out a great deal of music, and in playing it, Sxip is perhaps attempting to get more sound out of the guitar than it is accustomed to making. For Sxip doesn't "play" the guitar by strumming or plucking the strings; he beats and slaps it every which way, wrings its neck with his hand, all of this with a loving, happy kind of anger. On this particular night, it was as though the instrument bit back. Sxip was struck with a pain "from the tips of my fingers to my shoulders in both arms." It was diagnosed as a combination of carpal tunnel syndrome and tendonitis. Suddenly, it was extremely painful for him to play music at all; playing guitar was out of the question.

The injury was devastating -- Sxip still speaks bitterly of it, that bitterness having contributed to the demise of a long-term relationship -- but it also started Sxip on an amazing artistic transformation which, if it hasn't completely altered his way of making art, has certainly altered his way of thinking about, of understanding, his art.

It was about this time that another friend of Murthy's approached Sxip: Fausto Fernós. Fernós had just founded the Performance Art Church (PeACh), and he invited Sxip to perform with the troupe. "I came on the second or third show," Sxip says. "At first PeACh was just a place for me to play music -- I didn't realize how important PeACh would become when I couldn't play music -- to be creative in other ways."

At these early shows, Sxip was often limited to serving as emcee. But he was also beginning to appreciate the enormous energy of the other PeACh artists, and several of them -- particularly Fernós, Murthy, and Kerthy Fix -- began to influence his work.

Sxip began to develop some of his written material into pieces he could perform out loud, in front of an audience. Although he'd never been to a storytelling performance, he was impressed with the possibilities of storytelling after seeing a Spalding Gray film, and he'd been working on children's stories and submitting them to a friend who worked at a children's book publishing company. PeACh gave Sxip the perfect set of offbeat collaborators and audience members with whom to explore the form.

photograph by Jana Birchum

Then last winter came the puppetry. Sxip saw a flyer for a puppet show at Electric Lounge. As he had worked with puppetry before, he went. "It was really wild," he says. Sxip noticed "one guy, sort of moving around directing everything." This turned out to be local puppeteer Chris Green. Sxip befriended Green and before long began developing his own puppet shows, which became a regular feature at PeACh shows and in Rachel Heiken's series of "-phobia" shows (notably Xenophobia and Erotophobia), and shows in Sxip's backyard (indeed, at one point, the shed behind Sxip's house and part of the house itself were crammed with enormous Styrofoam breasts, an eight-foot vagina, and other genitalia that were used in some of these shows). Inspired by Green, Sxip "started doing this adult fairy tale thing," he says, during what he calls a "really high creative time, everything just bursting and bursting," early last summer, which also happened to be the period during which Sxip's relationship fell apart.

But it was the working with other artists, being influenced by them and influencing them himself, that was as important in getting Sxip through this time as the art itself. Being willing to humble himself to the task of learning these new art forms and letting these artists influence him -- "They become a part of your brain," he says of his collaborators, mostly in PeACh -- "you create work that's different, and you'll never create work that's the same as before you met that person."

It seems obvious to conclude that Sxip was drawn to these particular art forms precisely because his hands were damaged -- unable to perform the physical hand-work of writing, Sxip turned to telling his stories out loud, while puppetry gave him a safe way to use his hands. And he readily acknowledges this is true, to a certain extent. But there was more to it than that:

"For a long time, I didn't know what I was doing with this music," Sxip says. "I finally realized, when my arms got fucked up for two years -- I was wounded because my religion was gone, and I became very conscious of that.... And that's when I got into the performance art and the storytelling. Because I needed to come up with some kind of art form -- like storytelling, like puppetry -- that moved through time like music and resonated with those deep parts of your psyche and soul and your enjoyment of rhythm like music did. But I couldn't play my instruments."

Sxip also felt the need to achieve the same special relationship, the same exchange of energy, that he'd felt with audiences while playing music -- the ability to adapt to the audience's energy, feed off it, improvise performances according to the feel of the crowd. With storytelling and puppetry, "you have that same living quality that music has -- like I'll adjust my pieces of music just suddenly for the crowd and I definitely do that with storytelling." The exchange of energy is such that Sxip can hardly tell to whom the art belongs: "Sometimes you're really on. You get to a point when you feel the audience has as much to do with the performance as yourself."

Perhaps the best metaphor of all -- the best statement, however indirect, of Sxip's artistic purpose -- comes from one of the stories that he's been developing recently. It's a familiar story, one we all know because we've lived it in one way or another: An adolescent boy goes with his older brother down to a lake, but eventually he finds himself alone, and a girl shows up. They begin to talk. As the attraction between them builds, the boy notices something strange about the girl: "Instead of breathing in after she speaks, she's breathing out....." They move close. When they make the inevitable physical contact, however, it's not exactly sexual -- it's something more intimate and ooky. Their mouths seal, the girl wraps herself around the boy, and they begin to breathe each other. This image is difficult to describe without Sxip's wordless demonstrations, but imagine a slow, deep seesawing of lungs between two people until they've balanced on the same breathing -- they've become lost in each other, unable to tell who's pushing in and who's pulling out. And this is the ultimate relationship, it seems, that Sxip is attempting to establish between himself and his collaborators and audience, between himself and his art.

With this in mind, we can finally answer that question: How does he come up with that music?

Toward the end of last summer -- after two years of all sorts of treatments, including acupuncture, physical therapy, and a macrobiotic diet -- Sxip was able to begin playing music again. "I was offered a paying gig to play on this woman's CD in Denver," Sxip says. "So I was able to quit my job and really concentrate on resting and healing my hands, which I did. Now, even though I still have pain (my joints still crack), I'm beyond the point where I was before technically, and I'm coming up with new stuff." Last fall, he played a short Halloween show in his living room for some friends, combining the music with storytelling as a way of going further with that experiment, and of protecting his hands. In January, he played a "coming out" show at the Victory Grill ; it was the first time he was able to play a full set of music in front of a real audience, using all his various instruments and techniques.

I never really understood what Sxip was doing musically until I watched him at that performance. Then it hit me that he's essentially a percussionist who's concerned not so much with holding a note as in striking it one time good and hard and moving on to the next. In this context, his guitar is string drum, his flute is a breath and finger drum, and his singing -- which is somehow like plucking notes off his vocal cords -- is a voice drum, if you will.

And all Sxip's music is based on a particular kind of percussion: the rhythm of breathing. "That's it -- that's the foundation," Sxip says. "The thing about breath that's fascinating -- I didn't realize this while I was developing it, but of course, people are going to respond to this -- is that you hear someone breathe and you try to match it. I'm doing breath like..." -- he demonstrates fast, heavy breathing -- "and heartbeat rhythms [underneath]," he adds, stomping out a big, bass-like sound.

Now, taking a pattern of breathing as a rhythm section while the heartbeat serves as a bass drum may seem somewhat monotonous at first -- don't we always breathe the same, more or less? Actually, there are many different kinds of breathing, and hardly any of Sxip's compositions follow a relaxed pattern (except when they slow down to catch their breath, so to speak). There's the breathing of giving birth, a desperate delivering kind of push that seems to characterize some of his crazier Eastern-European influenced songs (mostly played on harmonica). It's as though he's suddenly transformed into a Romanian gypsy midwife struggling to bring some strange baby into the world. "I call that kind of music `push-push,'" Sxip says.

There's a breathing of being chased, a frantic run-for-your-life heartbeatingness that goes into what Sxip calls his "Industrial Flute" compositions. For these, Sxip takes the cork stopper out of the end of the flute and replaces it with an amplifier pick-up, which is often run through an effects unit. He then slaps the keys rapidly with his fingers, making a sound like a hurried rain, and instead of sweetly exhaling across the blowhole in the traditional manner, he blows or sings, or screams straight into it. Many of these pieces -- a kind of music he calls "wet tech" or "wet organic industrial music" -- are set up by this tense, sharp listening sound that Sxip creates that so often grabs an audience's attention.

Sxip says he discovered this listening sound while playing an open stage in Denver. "It was this bar, it had drag queens and coke addicts -- it was a real mixed crowd. So I thought -- `I'll play the industrial flute -- it's kind of mellow and what the hell' -- so I get on the stage and went `sshhHHA' into it and it was like shebang through the room. And I played the piece I was going to play, but it was incredible -- I had never heard it like that before. I was blown away, and everyone just lost it in the club -- the place was rumbling with this amazing sound and I was amazed, like something else had done it. I looked up without even thinking to thank whatever it was for performing such a nice piece of music."

All right -- but how in the world does one work breathing into playing guitar? Well, who says it has to sound like a human breathing at all? Some of his songs -- especially those on "prepared guitar," Sxip's name for having paper clips over the strings -- recall a concert of chimes of bells that only the delicate breathing of the wind could produce. And when the song is a little off, some of the notes sound out of place and unhappy to come out that way -- certainly a sound anyone who's lived too close to a set of windchimes has endured on a gusty day.

The last time I saw Sxip perform -- in February, at one of his Saturday night shows at Electric Lounge opening for out-of-town acts -- was a night like this; there were repeated problems with the sound, and everything seemed out-of-place. Sxip stuck exclusively to the guitar, but tried some of his more daring pieces, including "Tilt-a-Whirl" and some prepared guitar. But it just didn't sound right and the crowd wasn't into it. The woman sitting next to me turned to her boyfriend between songs and said, "Is he finished? Poor guy. Didn't I see him playing in front of the Gap one day?" It was that kind of night. Still, it was apparent from the way Sxip held his guitar -- no longer just with his hands, but with his whole body and eyes, like a dancer -- that he had found that balance of breathing between himself and his music. Once he looked up at the crowd, impatient that we hadn't connected with him in the same way. And I could have sworn I heard the man respond to his girlfriend, after a moment: "I like his little finger poems...."