Breathless is an ongoing research project exploring gesture, duration, and instrument design.
This project originally started with the idea of playing a saxophone without breath because breath is the most essential form of expression and control for making the saxophonic apparatus resonate. By imposing this limitation on myself in 2019, I wanted to discover the sound of the gestures that the saxophonic body hears and experiences silently through every solo.
If we imagine listening to John Coltrane's solo on Giant Steps without his breath, we would discover a fascinating progression of short lived harmonics punctuated by his fingers, leather pads against open tone holes, and the closing and opening of the tube with clamping sounds of unpredictable combinations of volume and pitch. The musical result seems a continuation of the rhythmic approach found in John Cage's works for prepared piano because it renders the intrinsic expectations of the sounding of a musical gesture completely mute, and replaces it with an alternate tuning and sound world.
Still from 2022 music video for Danders by Luci Lux.
In the years 2019 - 2023 before inventing the Breathless Sax, I was able to develop a repertoire for a breathless tenor sax that explores a natural acoustic percussive sound, an electro-acoustic version that amplifies the latent harmonic and adds duration to the transient sounds, and a polyrhythmic concept for singing while playing. I recorded and released this research in 2025 with my album Breathless.
Parallel to developing this repertoire and motivated by the limits of my tenor to realize the potential of the concept, I developed an instrument with Markus Krispel that I call the Breathless Saxophone. This first version of the horn operates by tightening a Helikon tuba bell onto a cut-off Baritone sax to create an instrument that naturally adds amplification to these percussive sounds. I could previously only capture these sounds with close microphones and amps on the tenor sax.
Premiere Art Week Berlin 2023 at Yellow Solo. Photo by Clara Meister.