Improvisation, Imperfection and Isolation: Inside Third Person’s debut album on R&S Records

Emerging from the strange psychological fog of the pandemic years, Third Person arrives on R&S Records with a debut album that feels both deeply personal and intentionally elusive. Across eight exploratory tracks, the self-titled release drifts through psychedelic textures, jazz-informed improvisation and fractured club rhythms, balancing abstraction with physical movement in a way that feels instinctive rather than calculated. But perhaps the most revealing aspect of the project is the sense of detachment that surrounds it, a feeling embedded directly into both the music and the artist’s identity itself. 

“The album was conceived and produced during the pandemic period,” Third Person explains, reflecting on the surreal ara in which the record took shape. “The atmosphere around us was already strange and a few months after recording the album I thought: but who actually made this? How did I manage to make this music?” 

That sense of dissociation became central to the project’s identity. The alias Third Person was chosen specifically to embody distance, observation and disconnection, “because what I needed, and still need, is to make music by detaching myself from what I normally do.” He describes experiencing “a total detachment and yet awareness of reality,” adding that “the first spectator was myself.” 

Even now, with the album preparing to land on one of electronic music’s most revered labels, Third Person intends to preserve that ambiguity. “For now I prefer to remain an enigma and once again a spectator,” he says. And yet beneath that anonymity sits a lifelong relationship with electronic music culture. “I won't hide the fact that R&S is, to me, an institution of electronic music and releasing my album on this label is the realisation of a dream that began in the early 90s.” 

That reverence for R&S Records feels deeply aligned with the album itself, a record rooted in experimentation, emotional atmosphere and refusal of rigid genre boundaries. Third Person repeatedly speaks about freedom as the core principle behind the music. “There was absolute freedom of expression, nothing was planned,” he says. “I recorded sound by sound and composed track by track without any real purpose or preconception.” 

The result is an album that constantly shifts shape. Ambient passages dissolve into hypnotic groove. Broken rhythms emerge and disappear. Acoustic instrumentation sits beside modular synthesis and raw analogue textures. Tracks like ‘Person Six’ and ‘Person Seven’ lean toward deep, immersive techno, while ‘Person Five’ fractures jazz sensibilities through broken drum programming that echoes Drum & Bass without ever fully settling into it. Meanwhile, ‘Person Four’ feels uncannily connected to the classic R&S lineage, carrying submerged sub pressure and acidic 303 lines that evoke early electronic futurism. Yet for Third Person, these intersections were unconscious rather than strategic. “Listening to it now that it's on R&S, one might think that, but it wasn't something pre-planned,” he says. “I frequent clubs, festivals and concerts and it was natural to have this crossover of styles.” 

Improvisation sits at the centre of everything. Jazz, in particular, became less a stylistic reference point than an entire philosophy for the project. “The entire album was influenced by jazz,” he explains, “because jazz is an open musical form, free from formulas or forced attempts to achieve commercial success at all costs.” 

That openness is audible throughout the record’s fluid structures and constantly evolving arrangements. “Yes,” he says when asked if he intentionally resisted conventional dance music structures, “this is precisely the magic of jazz, the freedom to not follow conventional patterns.” 

At the same time, the album never abandons physicality. Beneath the abstraction sits a persistent need for movement, something born directly from the isolation of lockdown itself. “Having no longer any way to go to parties or festivals,” he recalls, “through those static months of the pandemic, I needed groove and movement to stay alive.” 

That emotional contradiction, solitude versus motion, meditation versus club energy, gives the album much of its tension. Third Person describes the record not as strictly a listening album or a club record, but as “a dynamic listening experience” intended “to stir in myself and in whoever listens to the album the need to move and to have space to think.” 

The psychedelic and cinematic atmosphere running through the release also emerged naturally from the emotional conditions of the time. “During the pandemic period I needed my own soundtrack to face those days, those absurd times,” he says. “So, it is definitely a personal soundtrack of that period.” 

Musically, the album draws from a lifetime immersed in sound. Third Person comes from “a family of musicians” where collecting instruments and records became a generational obsession. “Collectors of musical instruments, both acoustic and electronic, collectors of records ranging from jazz to electronic and hardcore,” he explains. “I believe that all these influences, etched into my DNA, have shaped the style you will hear in my album.” 

That inheritance extends directly into the production process itself. The album was created using an enormous collection of instruments accumulated across decades: guitars, acoustic and electric basses, organs, percussion, drum kits, modular systems, Moogs and analogue drum machines, all routed through a long-owned 64-channel desk alongside vintage compressors, equalisers and pedals. “In our family we have always bought instruments and never sold them,” he says. 

Yet despite the scale of that setup, Third Person remains suspicious of perfection. The album’s tactile roughness, its friction, instability and unpredictability, feels entirely intentional. “Perfection does not exist,” he says bluntly. “Imperfection gives space to imagination and creates open spaces.” 

For him, overly polished music becomes emotionally closed-off: “Perfection, to me, is a closed, well-defined and limited enclosure from which you cannot escape, whereas imperfection gives you the means to jolt both the brain and the soul.” 

That philosophy ultimately defines the album as a whole. Third Person is not interested in clean categorisation or easy resolution. Instead, it operates like a shifting psychological landscape, part jazz improvisation, part dancefloor hallucination, part personal document of isolation and survival. And while the artist behind it may still choose to remain hidden, the emotional intent behind the music feels remarkably exposed.

“This is the DNA,” he says of the project’s future. “In the future it may take on different forms, rhythms and sounds, but I am certain that the perception of the style will remain tangible even going forward.”

Third Person – Third Person is out on R&S Records on 19^th June. Pre-order it on Beatport HERE.

Read the full interview with Third Person on The Night Bazaar HERE.