By Vivian Host

ANDY CABIC HAS steely blue eyes, but that's the only thing steely about him. When I meet him over kung pao tofu at the Mission District restaurant Yum Yum House, he's serene and somewhat rumpled, his time-worn sky blue zip-up sweatshirt coiled around his skinny frame like an indie rock security blanket.

He reminds me of a lot of people I've known: all of my high school friends in bands that wanted to be Pavement, the plaid shirt-clad masses poring over the dusty 12-inch racks in Open Mind Music, the boy before me in line at last week's yard sale who got hyped to buy 10 old blues records for $2. But somewhere along the line, Cabic transformed from a fairly typical rock record collector into someone whose emotive songwriting and acute rhythmic sense would make his records as a member of whirling acoustic folk outfit Vetiver and dance punk unit Tussle collectible for legions of indie rockers.

Southern comfort

Growing up in northern Virginia, Cabic followed a predictable trajectory of listening to Pavement and Superchunk; his high school band played "Camper Van Beethoven covers and some original stuff that probably sounded like R.E.M." He moved to Greensboro, N.C., for college, where he began to lay the foundations for his current music. By Cabic's admission, Greensboro, a blue-collar university town, had a thriving and inspiring underground rock scene. "It was the place in the state that had the best punk shows," he says. "They never had a good club scene there, so it was all house parties. I grew up seeing shows in basements."

Pretty soon Cabic was a definitive part of the North Carolina scene, playing guitar and writing music as a member of the Raymond Brake, whose 1995 full-length, Piles of Dirty Winters (Simple Things), melded the experimental rock sensibilities of bands like Polvo and Sonic Youth with the bright melodic touches of classic pop. The typically self-effacing Cabic downplays Raymond Brake's importance – he simply says the band sounded like "an amalgam of bands from Greensboro and Chapel Hill" – although he admits that it was the first time he really developed his own melodic sensibilities and style of songwriting.

After graduating from college and dissolving the Raymond Brake in 1998, Cabic relocated to San Francisco, expecting to find a town full of musicians ready to start interesting bands.

Too many DJs

What he found was a town full of DJs. "When I came out here, I was hearing more electronic music, like drum 'n' bass, for the first time," he says. "The only way I knew how to make music was by playing with my friends, but all my friends out here were visual artists. Friendship-wise, I wasn't clicking with musicians. Everyone was too busy; everyone was, like, in three bands."

Cabic continued to write songs but didn't play out, not wanting to fulfill the cliché of a pathos-laden folkie strumming for an empty coffeehouse. "I never really wanted to play solo," he says. "I'm not really comfortable on the stage by myself, and I don't very often go out and see singer-songwriters with just a guitar. It's not my cup of tea. It's not what I would pay my money to go see. It's a little precious, and I actually don't feel half the time that those people are plugged into the tradition of the roots of folk. Most of the time when I see that sort of thing, I feel like it's a therapy session or a catharsis for them."

Inspiration to perform live came in the unlikely figure of eccentric folk troubadour Devendra Banhart, whom Cabic met through Banhart's girlfriend at the time. Banhart was the collaborator Cabic had been looking for and helped give him the fire to kick-start his pet project, Vetiver. "The first show I played was with Devendra just because I needed someone else to play with," Cabic says. "I had more melodic ideas than I could just carry across by myself."

High grass

Like the tall, narrow grass that is its namesake, Vetiver is fragile sounding but strong, densely layered with melody, texture, and rhythm yet uncluttered. Cabic's wistful tones at times remind one of Nick Drake, hobo folk, and even Cat Stevens as they meander along the dusty road of Americana. Strikingly, Cabic writes all of the music and the lyrics, often humming the backing parts so his bandmates, violinist Jim Gaylord and cellist Alissa Anderson, can write them down in musical notation.

Cabic is also a "stickler for lyrics," and songs off the trio's self-titled EP show his talent for a narrative style that's evocative but not overtly explanatory. On "Farther On," he summons up a surreal air of the city's coldness: "When I see the people standing there," he sings, "shy, cerebral, in the lonely air / Disenchanted, stony eyed / Bored to tears, but dry inside." "A lot of his lyrics take months to write," Anderson says. "He tries to tell a good story in a really narrative way or just create wordplay that's really beautiful to listen to and clever. Every single word is very important and is very thought-out."

Although Vetiver's sound could most commonly be described as folk, Cabic's inspirations are far from predictable. "What charges me up to write Vetiver music is old Cajun music, or stuff that has more of a jump to it," he says. "I've also been getting a lot of melodic inspiration for Vetiver from minimal techno. Sometimes, because the stuff is so bare, it suggests melodies. It's so empty, it asks you to fill in the spaces yourself."

Dance-floor democracy

Cabic's interest in minimal techno also stretches over to his other project, playing bass in propulsive dance band Tussle. The foursome is the polar opposite of Vetiver – they're modern sounding, rhythmically driven, and punchy, purposely omitting guitars and applying dub and punk methodologies to dance music.

"Tussle is a democracy to the core," says Tussle member Alexis Georgopoulous, who plays drums and melodica. "And that comes with all the good and bad things that democracy entails. Andy plays the role of the most overtly melodic. He's playing [bass], the one main melodic instrument. Everything else is texture and rhythm. In a way, he plays the narrative role. We play the role of the arrangers, the ones who structure things. But we try to break down the notion of the one person with the idea and the other ones who go along with it. We are the coming together of four disparate people.

"I don't think any of us would be making this music alone," he continues. "Nathan would probably be making IDM, Jonathan would be making hip-hop, Andy would be making folk, and I would probably be making kraut rock."

Tussle's creative process is also fundamentally different than Vetiver's. "The concept was to make music that was going to be fun to dance to and upbeat," Cabic says. "For Tussle, we hang out and go down to the basement and make stuff up off the top of our heads. It's just us getting together and fooling around and playing all these [instruments] that we don't normally play. We improvise, and then we record our improvs and listen to them and hear what works and doesn't and try our arrangements from there. It's kind of an organic process."

In some ways the two bands represent two sides of Cabic's personality. "It's hard doing Vetiver, so Tussle for me is a total release and a lot of fun," he says. "For Vetiver, I have to slow down a little bit. It takes a level of coordination and introspection that I don't have in Tussle. In Tussle, I just sort of lock in on the rhythm."

Although Tussle takes many musical cues – from glitch techno artists on labels like Kompakt and Mille Plateaux to Jamaican dub to no wave dance bands such as ESG and Liquid Liquid – Cabic says the band seek to evoke the spirit of bands they admire rather than ape their sound.

"Music that always really grabs me is a mixture of the band being tight – them knowing what they're doing, or having confidence in what they're doing – but a little iffy and kind of falling apart at some point along the line," he says. "Tussle has that in that our gear is always kind of falling apart and the way we have cues and changes. We have structure in our songs, but the actual transitions very much happen in the moment. I like that we kind of have it together and don't at the same time. That's one element of punk rock that I find intriguing about what we're doing."

Trolling other styles

When I talk to Anderson and Georgopoulous independently, they both say that Cabic's sheer enthusiasm for the music he listens to and plays is a driving factor in his success. They also namecheck his diverse musical tastes as a key component in their musical relationships with him. To that end, a busy Cabic also DJs at Vroom, the popular Monday night party at El Rio where an eclectic music policy is the rule, not the exception. Started with Cliff Hengst and Scott Hewitt from local psychedelic band Troll, Vroom is an outlet for all of those influences that don't make it into Vetiver and Tussle, from country to drum 'n' bass.