Trying to Be Free: A Conversation with Curtis Hasselbring

Concepts of genre are odious as they defy human reality. Even the most ardent adherent to stylistic norms, if they are being honest, draws influence from elsewhere. While categorical boundaries may help in the marketplace, they fail to address the complexity of art or individual expression. One of the most blatant of these dividing lines is drawn between electronic and acoustic languages. In reality, however,  as Bill Laswell has noted, “computers and electronic music are not the opposite of the warm human music. It’s exactly the same.” Curtis Hasselbring & the Curhachestra (-est, 2025) explores this unity of computer-generated sounds and the acoustic in depth.

A frequent collaborator with Satoko Fujii, member and arranger for the Ghost Train Orchestra, and member of Chris Lightcap’s SuperBigmouth, Hasselbring is no stranger to experimenting to find a new sound. In the case of the Curhachestra, such creative openness has resulted in an incredibly deceptive group. Its name – a combination of the leader’s nickname “Cur Ha” and orchestra – suggests a big band or concert band setting, but in reality, it is anything but. Instead, it is merely a quartet with a much larger-sounding descriptor. Its unusual instrumentation allows Hasselbring to explore pieces he wrote for electronics within a predominantly acoustic setting while keeping a foot in both realms. Raphael MacGregor’s lap steel guitar evokes a taste of Americana and mid-Century dance halls. It stands in stark contrast to Adam Minkoff’s continually propulsive basslines. The leader’s trombone adds a lyricism even as it becomes distorted under pedals and manipulations. It is also sometimes difficult to tell Dan Reiser’s tight drum hits from mechanized beats. The result is tracks like the shape-shifting “Morphology” with special guest Nels Cline, where an edgy punk rock anthem drifts to the sounds of surf before the tide takes it somewhere more menacing. Or the lost disco excursion through the spaceways of “Bee Alley” that ultimately becomes a global jetsetting dance party ala Balthvs, Glass Beams, or Khruangbin on acid. 

More than an exposition on some space between humanity and technology, Curtis Hasselbring & the Curhachestra is a welcome reminder that the two are more unified than they may first appear. In even the most technologically advanced, there is an inescapable ineffable human quality – you simply need to look for it – a message essential in this new age of artificial intelligence.

PostGenre: In another interview, you indicated you make music for “accountants, ice sculptors, and food truck proprietors,” not critics. Do you take criticism into account when making music?

Curtis Hasselbring: I wonder why I said that. It’s kind of true. The music I make is what I would want to listen to, and I like to listen to many different styles and genres. I’m mostly trying to please myself. My general approach to composition, production, or whatever aspect of music making I’m working on is ultimately tied to what I want to hear as a listener. 

PG: For the Curhachestra in particular, the group started as an electronic project and morphed into a quartet of trombone, lap steel guitar, electric bass, and drums. How did the group change so much?

CH: I’ve made music as a solo performer under the Curha name for around fifteen years. But I have had a hard time doing solo shows as an instrumentalist augmented by electronics because it feels like I’m cheating by just pressing a button to sound bigger. I’ve long created electronic pieces and wanted to play them with real people. Part of my interest comes from the fact that the process of creating as a band can be somewhat random. I could write a bunch of random MIDI notes on a piano roll, start cleaning them up, and come up with something. To me, the exciting thing is putting the music in front of humans and seeing how they deal with it.

During the [COVID-19] pandemic, many musicians were picking up new instruments to learn. Mine was the lap steel. And from that, I started thinking about how cool it would be to have the lap steel and trombone play together. I ultimately found Raphael McGregor, who plays lap steel in the band. I’ve known Dan [Rieser], the drummer in the band, since we were both living in Ohio in the late 1980s. And [the band’s bassist] Adam [Minkoff] is another creative mind. Adam and I talked a lot about Moondog for one thing. My first show out of the pandemic was that quartet, and it felt really good. I decided that I would stick with the group’s lineup for a while, rather than do a couple of gigs with it and move on. 

PG: Since you were learning lap steel, you were never tempted to play that part yourself?

CH: I have been, but there’s only so much time in the day. I do tend to bite off more than I can chew, and decided to purposely try to keep things simpler and more direct with this project. I was going to go back to my strengths of the trombone and guitar and let an expert like Raphael handle the lap steel. 

PG: As far as the lap steel more generally, it is often associated with country western music. Some have also noted that the trombone is the horn that sounds closest to the human voice. So, while maybe not as evident on the record itself, is there a country western influence to some degree on this project?

CH: Yeah. I mean, it’s in the sonic nature of the group. I’ve written grants and press releases for the group, where I have mentioned that the band was rooted in a very old sound, and I think that ties back to what you are speaking of. Ultimately, I’m just trying to be me and my more modernist self, but with a super old sound. I’ve been listening to this podcast called “Cocaine and Rhinestones,” about the history of country music, and it talks a lot about the session players. 

But it’s not just country music that brings the lap steel to the band. Daniel Lanois put out a video around 2020 where he demonstrated his pedal steel playing right before a gig. He had his whole amp setup, and it just sounded so huge and dreamy. That was an inspiration for this project too, because the instrument produces such a dreamy sound. 

PG: You mentioned earlier how you play both guitar and trombone. The pairing is not very common. What made you decide to perform both in a professional capacity, and do you feel your work on one instrument informs how you approach the other? 

CH: I’ve played guitar as long as I’ve played trombone. At some point in high school, I was deciding whether I would continue as a classical guitar major or a jazz trombone major. The jazz won out, which I’m happy about in retrospect. 

PG: Why?

CH: Classical guitar is a solo instrument, so you don’t play with other people, whereas jazz is such an interactive music. So, I gave up the guitar for a while. But once I was in college, somebody turned me on to the Meters and early 1970s, James Brown, and hearing that music made me want to play in a rhythm section. So, I bought a guitar when I graduated from college and started playing it again. 

But I do see the guitar and trombone as connected. I visualize them very similarly in my head because of the mechanics of both. With the trombone, you have seven slide positions and move chromatically. The further you go out, each position is a half step. I see that as akin to the frets on a guitar, just moving in a different direction than you would on the guitar’s neck. Brass instruments also have partials based on the harmonic series, and the guitar has strings. You could tune them to the harmonic series, but they’re more in fourths and thirds. But for both of them, I scale patterns and stuff like that, I visualize in a very similar way. To me, both instruments have always had a weird parallel nature. 

PG: Is the way you approach music typically very visual? And, if so, what is the vision you had in mind with this record? 

CH: That’s a good question. To me, my music is very visual. It’s very much about color. With this record, I was trying to think of it less as a broad palette and more as five different monochromatic colors – one per instrument – or four people contributing. At one point, I had a group – we don’t play together anymore because everybody lives in different cities – called The New Mellow Edwards with John Holmbeck, Chris Speed, and Trevor Dunn. With the music I created for that group, I tried to maximize using two or three voices to create a big sound. I always thought of that as my version of writing for string quartets. If I were, you know, a classical composer, I would have written symphonies, operas, and string quartets. That group was my string quartet, just very pared down to minimalized colors. That’s how I see this new Curhachestra record as well. 

PG: Did you write for this new quartet in a similar way as you did for The New Mellow Edwards or your other quartet, Number Stations, with Mary Halvorson, Matt Moran, and Satoshi Takeishi? 

CH: Yeah, there are similarities. I use many different approaches to writing. Usually, my process involves coming up with some nugget and going for a walk and working it around in my mind. But yeah, I did that for all three groups. 

PG: You have also written and arranged music for the Ghost Train Orchestra. You contributed arrangements to the band’s Moondog album, Songs and Symphoniques: The Music of Moondog (Canteloupe, 2023), as well as its forthcoming collaboration with David Byrne. Do you feel those experiences arranging have shaped your approach to writing music? 

CH: It all goes into and comes out of the same place for the David Byrne project. For the Moondog one, I found my work on that project to be very helpful for thinking about bigger pictures. I did a lot of composing for a group in the late 80s and early 90s, the heyday of the Downtown Scene, called the Either/Orchestra. [John] Zorn’s world was just getting off the ground, and I was trying to think like a downtown musician with many quick cuts to different things. 

Working on the Moondog project has been very helpful for me in terms of my becoming comfortable with letting something be what it is. With that project, we would let something happen for ten minutes, without fundamentally changing, because Moondog’s music is very minimalist. It’s been a lot of fun to let go of the feeling that you have to constantly create something exciting. 

PG: So, do you find the Downtown Scene in general has influenced your approach to music? Certain moments on this new record recall Steven Bernstein’s Sex Mob, for instance.

CH: God, yes. The Downtown scene has definitely morphed into my music.  I think my generation was the last Downtown generation. 

Another scene that ran parallel, but a little earlier, that I am very into is the post-punk movement that took place in big American and English cities during the late 70s through the 80s. I love how the post-punk musicians would let go of preconceived ideas of language and draw all kinds of influences into their music. I’m definitely impacted by all that. What I try to do in terms of making music is to make something free of any preconceived notions of what it has to be. And, so, some of this record is straight out rock with minimal improvisation, and I had to let go of the idea that there needs to be an improvisatory section or had to do something specific. 

PG: To ask about another of your projects, you had a trio with Matt Moran and Sarah Elizabeth Charles called Audible Spirits. In it, you would combine your instruments with samples of the Jamey Aebersold Play-a-Long recordings that many students have used to learn how to improvise. Was your thought behind these samples also to emphasize a breaking away from the institutionalization of improvised music?

CH: I think the project came from a combination of something we thought was a cool idea and a desire to reflect how we all grew up with those recordings. I don’t feel we were being disrespectful towards the Aebersold recordings as much as we were trying to find a creative way to utilize them. The other aspect of the project was that we wanted to try to do something interesting with the overdone jazz standards and not feel compelled to do them in a certain way. So, every tune ended up using a completely different approach. For instance, we turned “A Moment’s Notice” into a weird drone piece with snippets of one and two-bar phrases from the recordings, which are already super scattered if you play them as written. Ultimately, I’m just trying to be free.

‘Curtis Hasselbring & the Curhachestra’ is out now on -est Records. It can be purchased on Bandcamp. You can learn more about Curtis Hasselbring on his website.