Die Dritte Ebene documents a finely tuned encounter between Emilio Gordoa and Sven‑Åke Johansson, two improvisers whose methods are as different as they are strangely compatible. At Sowieso in Berlin, on 26 August 2023, Gordoa’s vibraphone and Johansson’s drums and accordion trace independent trajectories: one built from extended techniques, scraped metal and pointillist strikes; the other from loose, loping grooves and wheezing, air‑thick chords. At first, their lines seem to run side by side, each maintaining its own logic. Over time, something else appears between them – a “third level” of sound and feeling that neither player is directly playing, but both are somehow generating.

The album takes its title from that phenomenon. As Gordoa has put it, they realised their music moved “as if in parallel lines,” and that after a while “something third will emerge from it, almost like a ghost.” That ghost manifests as phantom rhythms, beating patterns and implied harmonies: the way a vibraphone resonance locks into a ride‑cymbal wash, creating a pulse that wasn’t there a second before; the way an accordion chord draped over a tom‑roll suddenly suggests a key centre or a distant song form. Johansson shifts between dry, fractured drumming and earthy, almost cabaret‑like accordion figures, while Gordoa alternates between crystalline attack and hushed, textural bowing or muting of the bars. Their interplay is additive in both musical and metaphorical senses – two lines whose sum is greater than their parts.

What makes Die Dritte Ebene compelling is its refusal to spell out structure. There are no heads, no obvious themes, but there is a strong sense of form: arcs of energy that rise and recede, pockets of near‑silence where the tiniest gesture becomes significant, passages where groove and rubato rub shoulders without cancelling each other out. Gordoa’s “textual” approach to the vibraphone – treating it as a surface to be activated in multiple ways rather than just a melodic keyboard – meshes with Johansson’s lifelong project of expanding percussion beyond time‑keeping into theatre, noise and song. When he moves to accordion, the music tilts again, suddenly coloured by wheeze, breath and reed‑tone, giving Gordoa new planes to reflect off.

Recorded by Gordoa himself at Sowieso, the sound is close and tactile: you hear mallets hitting metal, air moving through bellows, the small clatter of hardware. Mixing by Werner Dafeldecker preserves that intimacy while carving space so that the “third level” – those emergent beats and overtones – can bloom in the stereo field. The vinyl master by Andreas “Lupo” Lubich translates it all into a warmly detailed pressing, manufactured by Daniel Klotz / Die Lettertypen. Portrait photography by Carina Khorkhordina and artwork by Laurent Daubach frame the duo visually with the same understated precision that marks the music.

All pieces are jointly credited to Gordoa and Johansson, underlining the session’s collective character. There is no soloist/accompanist hierarchy here; instead, Die Dritte Ebene offers a study in shared invention, where the real subject is that elusive, “almost mystical” ghost‑zone that appears when two strong voices stay themselves and still manage to become something else together.