Third Space - For The Upper Mantle (2023)

Third Space is the musical project of Melbourne based experimental artist and performer Matt Sabbadini. His work presents a convergence of electro-acoustics and drone, underpinned by tonal, pulse-based percussion, where polyrhythms and deceptive time signatures are linked together with sine tones.

Performing live, Third Space balances hesitancy and tension, flexing and bending within a sub-heavy framework, complemented by warped and mangled field recordings. The physicality of sound here is expressed, questioned, and reinterpreted.

His debut LP, Scissor Kick, was released in mid-September 2022 via jpeg. Artefacts, with guest appearances from R.Rebeiro and Abby Sundborn, plus reinterpretations from J (daisart, picnic) and Grand River (Editions Mego).

Artist notes:
This piece is centred around mass and time, specifically tectonic plates and geological time. Within geological time scales you have eras/eons/epochs that span for tens of thousands of years. These are often separated by boundaries (e.g. the KT boundary) that are associated with rapid change.

I’m looking to leverage this notion of extended periods of progressive growth, separated by eruptive pauses and restarts to shape the piece. There’s a sonic framework – distortion, noise, percussive pulses which inter-relate, reappear and morph into each other over different passages and sections. I wanted this framework to resemble earth smashing into itself – tectonic plates colliding and chunks of mantle being displaced. The piece follows these chunks of mantle as they push and pull to create brief passages throughout the 25 minutes – within all of that carnage there is growth and change at different rates and scales; concurrent timelines at different rates.

Extended listening naturally allows for a more glacially paced exploration. It raises some huge opportunities to explore tonalities, tension, release and harmonics – reframing the temporal aspect in how these themes are unpacked and explored. Urgency, expectation and immediacy are pushed further back in the priority order, facilitating a space where millimetre details have just as much weight as slabs of noise. I believe deep listening allows for these priorities to be reassessed and most importantly slowed down, which in the context of a world that seeks to accelerate time, is a very unique sort of cocoon.