Dan Blacksberg’s latest album, The Psychic/Body Sound System, may be a solo trombone record, but it’s so much more than that. Raw and unfiltered, the 11 fully improvised tracks are both visceral and enigmatic. Guttural drones ripple through the body, as if pulling apart each muscle fiber and filling the empty space with resonance. Blacksberg conjures fluctuating waves in hypnotic repetition, at times evoking the timbre of an electronic instrument. Sharp frequency squalls, hushed melodics, and relentless surges of otherworldly sound—sometimes mesmerizing, sometimes grotesque—flow in endless streams, offering an intimate look inside both the instrument and the artist.
The Psychic/Body Sound System is out now on Relative Pitch.
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I always like starting at the very beginning. I’d love to hear about some of your earliest memories of music and sound – are there certain things that stand out to you as memorable or formative from when you were younger? What are some of your first memories related to music? From there, when did you start playing music and writing music?
My first memories of music are from my home and from my synagogue. I remember my mother playing light classical or maybe arrangements of showtunes on the piano, though she, unfortunately, stopped playing when I was still young. We were active at our fairly mainstream synagogue growing up, so that means I was exposed to a ton of singing of Jewish liturgy and folksongs (though very little Yiddish music). We also had a cantor who was a trained opera singer and had a great tenor voice. I definitely remember being enamored by his voice and other sounds.
Funnily enough, I don’t recall listening to much music growing up before my brother and I started making my parents listen to whatever we were into (lotta showtunes in the earlier years), but there was always music in school, in other communal activities. Again, almost all singing, but also stuff like going to see the Tchaikovsky Nutcracker at the Academy of Music in Philadelphia. In high school. I started to see big rock concerts and jazz, both local acts and international ones.
Instruments! I did start and stop piano lessons pretty early and now, I honestly wish I’d stuck with it. Other instruments entered the picture when I was 10. I’d wanted to play drums in elementary school, but I was handed a french horn instead. I was terrible at it but very excited by it. I could barely play any notes above the note they started me on, but I could play far down. Then summer of that year, I tried the trombone and was hooked.
Most of my big formative experiences happened at the Philly public school I went to for middle and high school. There, I had the same band director for all types of music, orchestra, band, jazz band, and more for 8 years. He provided the crucible where the foundation of who I am today. Really got me going. He taught us a lot of music completely by ear, mostly but not exclusively in jazz band, which was both very cool and a little I think because he couldn’t be bothered to get sheet music together. He was quite a character and was the first in a long line of idiosyncratic teachers who, regardless of what style of music they were most into, really taught me that forging my own path and being myself was the coolest thing to do. I also met guitarist Nick Millevoi in late middle/early high school, and I feel like we both carry this good aspect of what our band director showed us.
Psychic/Body Sound System gets into so many new sonic territories. It was such an awesome surprise when I first heard it. What inspired this direction for the album?
Thank you!!! When I recorded the music that eventually became the record, I didn’t have a full picture of the finished product. Instead, each phase of making the album became its own creative process. To record it, I worked with my friend Don Godwin, who is an engineer at Tonal Park studios outside of D.C. and knows my whole musical life really well from the klezmer to the out stuff and back. I arrived with a bunch of sonic spaces I wanted to explore and a bunch of ideas on how to creatively record them. We experimented a lot in how to capture my sounds: recorded with mics inside the trombone to see what wild frequencies we could capture, used all the different spaces in the studio, definitely ran my really low tones through their SunnO)) amp and we used their grand piano as another reverb. It was a fun and very free session.
Choosing the tracks and mixing surprised me with how separate from performing these sounds it felt. I was still working from the same basic sound ideas, but mixing to maximize the vibes I was going for the piece I’d chosen was more of a discovery process than I expected. It felt like we were sculpting the music from the clay of what I’d recorded. I liked how much it reminded me of this John Cage quote (which I’ve tried looking for and not found, so I’m paraphrasing) “Composing is one thing, performing is another.” So that would be true of recording, mixing, and producing an album too. You bring a different part of yourself to each of those stages, and to me, it meant I could freshly infuse each stage with my full creative mind in ways that were specific to the work of that stage. For example, the mixing was when I started imagining the record as a “story setting” rather than a story itself. It’s also where my nerdy, comic book/sci-fi/kid mind started to come in.
I will say that the track order was very inspired in an indirect way by the De La Soul catalog appearing on streaming for the first time, which happened right in the middle of the mixing process. As I dived into their music for the first time, I got inspired by the skits that they put in between songs and realized I could use that kind of flow of alternating ideas to order the tracks. So the mostly short, low circular-breathed drone pieces for me are like those skits, and that gave the album this feeling of having chapters or something for me.
I’m so grateful that Kevin Reily of Relative Pitch asked me to make a solo album at a show I’d organized for an artist he was working with a few years ago. I’ve wanted to figure out a solo voice as an improviser since I heard George Lewis’s Solo Trombone record back in high school after I found it in a random Barnes & Noble somewhere on a family trip in high school. But it was so daunting, primarily the physicality of it, that I’d always let myself be channeled into other paths. So Kevin’s push and encouragement finally got the ball rolling for me and I am very thankful for it.
What drew you to creating this record with such a visceral approach – no effects, no overdubs, fully improvised?
Haha, it’s mostly because I’ve tried using pedals in a few ways before and always had a very hard time manipulating them well. I know so many people who make electronics or acoustic instruments plus pedals such an organic and natural part of their artistic voices and I was having and had such a hard time with it every time I tried that I felt like I had to find another path for myself. So over the years, I’ve been drawn to develop lots of extended techniques (some common and some more unusual) for the trombone so I could have “acoustic effects” that I emulated or just fit in with all the really amazing musicians who use electronics and effects to great effect!
I had another thought recently about how I came to this approach. When I was 18, I spent a week in New York City for the first time, and my cousin, who is more of an uncle to me, composer and violinist (and scientist) Dave Soldier. On that trip, he took me to all the classic spots for experimental music back then: Tonic, Knitting Factory, and others. The flautist Robert Dick was staying with him at the time, and at some point, he and I were sitting at a coffee shop and he said to me something like “Make sure your own playing is complex enough that you couldn’t be imitated by a computer.” I think that message has been bouncing my brain around for the last two-plus decades and that’s also something that’s led me down the acoustic path I’ve been on.
What’s amazing is that Relative Pitch also released another solo trombone album in mid-2024 (they’ve put out a bunch of great trombone albums in the last few years) by Danish trombonist Maria Bertel who is like the complete opposite of me in that she has figured out a whole super cool, amplified trombone setup with lots of pedals. And yet I think our albums have a lot of noises in common. I think that’s so cool and I’m really inspired by what Maria’s done. It would be so much fun to play together someday with her with all her gear, and me with just a microphone and create some intense soundscapes together.
How do you see improvisation as a form of storytelling, especially in a solo setting?
What a great question! I’ve said about this record that I hope people feel it not just as a narrative storyline, but also as a setting for telling stories, like how Forgotten Realms in Dungeons & Dragons isn’t a story, but a fantasy world setting for people to make up their own stories inside of. I hope people feel like they can take their own journey through the sounds, rather than feeling like they are just watching my journey.
Improvised music is great because you can always change, reframe, or challenge what you’re doing or how you are organizing your ideas and sounds and solo playing is no different (though it’s also different). I think storytelling is one of the primary functions of music in human history, so it’s very natural for a lot of improvised music to have a “narrative” energy. Roscoe Mitchell said, “Whatever music you’re playing, in or out or whatever, you’re always following the rules of music.” I think that’s both completely true and always ready to be challenged. And lots of musicians who I love skillfully subvert that sense of storytelling, which I think is a very hard thing to do and is super cool when done well. For me, I play a lot of conventional music alongside my experimental music, so I spend a lot of time deep in the narrative mode. With the idea of the “story setting” I’m feeling with this record, I feel like I’m aiming to split the difference and provide a big, inviting space for people to sit and dig into the music.
When I think about where I fit in on the spectrum of narrative on the one hand and, for lack of a better term, “sonic object” on the other, I remember a Jack Wright essay from the 2000s where he was responding to his idea of the “new” “lowercase” or “reductionist” improvised music that seemed to be “popular” at that moment. In this essay he talked about being drawn to those sounds and starting to work with them, but that he couldn’t give up some sense of narrative expression and that was always going to be part of what he did. That really resonated with me and I think that comes through a lot in the way I approach the more static drones and other sounds on this record.
I just want to say that I used so many quotation marks a few sentences ago because all those terms and ideas, which I felt too at the time need to be seriously questioned and taken as both real and not real. Real because that is what I and some other people truly felt in those days, whether we were trying to play that way or not (I was trying to do both), and not real, because if you ask any of the musicians who were supposedly leading that movement, they all say that they were just trying to find something interesting and personal to play, not define some style that people should conform to. That’s a whole separate conversation!!
Were there specific influences—musical, philosophical, or otherwise—that shaped the album’s sound and approach?
Oh very much so. My main goal in making this record was to make an all improvised record of the wilder parts of my sonic world that was inviting and energizing to listen to. All my decisions from the mixing to the track order to the artwork were all about making the sound sparkle and giving people many paths towards connecting to the music. That’s why I wanted to have the writing alongside the tracks, and the art be as eye-catching as possible. I’ve listened to and seen so much brilliant solo improvised music, on trombone and otherwise, and I didn’t have some grand compositional or musical system kind of statement to make, so I thought a lot about honing in on what I honestly love to do. I felt what I had to offer was to keep things straightforward, be as honest to who I am and how my soundworld relates to the larger past and present of this music as I can, and make an improvised music album that’s simply fun to experience.
I’m pretty deep in the heavy, low drones vibe at this point in my life and I always knew it would be a big part of the album. I’ve always enjoyed the lower reaches, but as an adult, I was introduced to and fell head over heels for the sounds of heavy bands like Earth and SunnO))), which led me to make my doom metal/Hasidic music band Deveykus back in 2014. That interest led me to one of the most fun musical relationships I have which is with the amazing band The Body. I’ve had the pleasure of recording on 3 of their albums, most recently The Crying Out of Things, and playing with them live a handful of times on their tour stops in Philly. I was also really inspired by how The Body is able to make these incredibly loud and intense records that still feel inexplicably like you’re listening to pop songs and leave me with a pep in my step like a great pop song would. It’s an awesome musical achievement and I thought if I could achieve my own version of it with just a trombone and a recording studio, I’d have something really inviting.
I could list musicians I’m inspired by for pages and pages, and I wanted to bring as much of their influence on me into this project. Huge shout out to my teacher Joe Morris, who has helped me navigate the wide world of what he calls Free Music. Through the people he connected me to and the ways he helped me understand how to fit myself into this music, I’ve ended up having big formative experiences (and a ton of fun!) with so many of my heroes. And I’ve learned that I am someone who can really meet people where they are musically, and figure out how to play well together without compromising my own artistic voice. But put that in a solo context, and I have the challenge of applying that skill to myself to find the joyful noise.
The album is accompanied by poetic fictionalizations by Alex Smith. How did his writing interact with or influence the music? And what about James Dillenbeck’s incredible artwork – how do you see the relationship between the visuals and the sound? Were the written and visual elements created in response to the music, or were they developed alongside it?
I knew I wanted to involve Alex and James in some way before I’d even recorded anything. I know Alex from many years living in West Philly, though we’ve recently started collaborating a lot more closely, including in a new quartet called Glitch Proverbs. Alex is also an incredible writer, visual artist, musician, organizer, and more, and I’ve enjoyed and learned so much from his work.
I met James because of a comic book that he and Alex created together called Black Vans. It’s a very Black, POC, and Queer-centric sci-fi, action-packed story and it looks incredible. It also features a lot of fat protagonists being hot and awesome. I’m a big, fat man, and I knew that I wanted a glorious, fantastical depiction of me to be the center of the artwork. This is my solo album after all. From knowing Alex’s work and seeing how James drew his story, I knew that James would draw me gorgeously and I was completely right. He’s an incredible artist.
Their work, which came after the music was finished, is still a super important part of the whole experience of the album to me. Their work started with the finished tracks, which I titled. Alex wrote the short pieces that accompany each track and came up with the album title, while James created the artwork in conversation with me. Like I said before, each part of this album was its own creative process, so I think that this part of it was shaping that sense of a story setting. My interpretation of it is that Alex’s words function almost like an example or artistic description of the elements of this “world” while James’s artwork is something like where an adventure starts, i.e. where the audience would be before the first track “We walk through the Petrified Gate” starts. Like we’ve all gathered and about to walk through the gate.
Given the improvisational nature of the album, do you find new meanings or emotional resonances in the music each time you listen back?
Yes. I feel like the album went through several creative processes after the act of recording it, which meant I applied other layers of meaning and my own mind to it. I’ve responded to the same sounds so differently at each part of the process and still do.
I also recognize that many of my recordings are really the start of an exploration for me to a specific aspect of my musical world, so the sounds that I made here are also seeds for sounds and solo playing I’ve done since. They are still growing and that’s very fulfilling. I’m excited to do a lot more solo work and share that with people live.
What surprised you the most about making this album?
The biggest surprise making this album was the way we used the studio’s grand piano as a reverb “chamber.” It’s on a lot of the tracks and subtly feeds the acoustic energy of the whole album. And then we realized that my slap tongue technique that I used on track 8 “Infinitely shattering crystal wishes” made the piano strings go wild. That was a sound I discovered while recording and it’s one of my favorite tracks.
One thing that wasn’t exactly a surprise, but a total joy was going into this project with all my collaborators, Don, Alex, James, and believing we’d have a unity of vision and voice. It all worked out as great or better than I’d dreamed.
Would you ever want to revisit this concept in a different form—perhaps with effects, overdubs, or additional instrumentation?
I’m still working on developing creativity and endurance in all of the sound worlds I explored on the album. I’d love to figure out how to make some of these sounds the foundation of compositions or band sounds with other people. I’ve always been super inspired by people who do that well. Nate Wooley comes to mind as someone I look up to who’s done that a lot, but he’s of course one of many many. And I’m not against pedals, effects, or other processes! I’ll just need a lot of help and patience from other people to help me get into them.
And, as always, to close – what are some of your favorite sounds in the world?
The sounds of rain on a skylight. The quiet after a break in a storm or even in the conversation of a crowded room, the brilliance of a great trombone sound from any tradition. The original Alice Coltrane Turiya Sings. All of Stevie Wonder’s wild 70s albums. A scratchy 78 RPM klezmer track from the 1920s. The sounds of Yiddish language sung by generations long gone. George Lewis’s Solo on Anthony Braxton’s composition 23J from Dortmund 1976. A billion more, but mostly anchored by the amazing sounds created by my colleagues and peers in all my brilliant musical communities.
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