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An identity without labels

Music of the Third Ear does not resemble a festival, club, or curatorial model. It happens in institutional and non-institutional spaces alike. It draws in audiences, musicians of different generations, improvisers, classical musicians, experimental artists—and sometimes people from entirely outside the scene.

You can tell its story through years, places, and concerts—but the language of processes fits it better than chronology. It is a living, evolving form that began in the underground of Lublin’s independent scene and now exists as a branching organism: mobile, relational, and still not fully named.

Beyond the city, beyond the stage, beyond the label

Although the project was born in Lublin, it never confined itself to the city’s boundaries. An important part of its history consists of off-site sessions, where music could unfold at a different rhythm, far from fixed structures. Two events were particularly significant:

• Sucha Beskidzka – at Wincz’s place: a setting where recordings were made free from stage pressure, immersed in the space of encounter and landscape, including the album Skawa.

• Nowica 66: a mountain refuge hosting L.A.S. LAB, the Foundation’s creative workspace. Here, music became a time-stretched process, far from the city’s pace, surrounded by nature and freedom.

The project also had its concert satellites. One of them was the Liba Villavecchia Trio tour, organized within the framework of Music of the Third Ear, showing that the energy of this initiative can circulate through different geographical and personal constellations.

Lublin as the ignition point

Although the project expanded and spilled beyond the Lublin region, its roots are firmly embedded in the city of Lublin. This is where the first sessions took place, where the first participants appeared, and where spaces emerged that, for a time, became informal points on the map of Polish improvisation.

Concerts and meetings happened across various spaces within the city’s cultural fabric: the Cellars and Black Hall of the Cultural Centre, the Small Stage at Chatka Żaka, and the Music Club at the Centre for the Meeting of Cultures.But Music of the Third Ear also flourished—perhaps above all—in places where no one would expect concerts to happen: small apartments in old Lublin tenement houses. Kamienica Cudów and TrzyMaj became temporary refuges for unforced, intimate, experimental music. Many meetings, rehearsals, and recordings took place there, which today can be seen as an archive of a living scene.

The Third Ear Music – a history of sound maturing outside structures

Writing about Music of the Third Ear is a bit like trying to capture improvisation in words—you can get close to its essence, but you can’t freeze it or simplify it. Between 2014 and 2022, under this name (though not always used consistently at the time), a wide range of events took place, differing in form, scale, aesthetics, and location. Sometimes they resembled concerts; other times they were intuitive group sessions, audience-inclusive recordings, or loose gatherings of musical nomads. One thing connected them all: the need to act here and now—outside patterns, outside genres, outside institutions.

At the very beginning, nothing suggested that such a multidimensional project would emerge. The first events grew spontaneously out of the environment surrounding the Lublin-based band Tatvamasi, whose leader, Grzegorz Lesiak, was searching for musical forms that required neither costume nor notation. These were semi-private situations, sometimes unplanned, initiated more by a spiritual need than by any production ambitions. Musicians met, instruments appeared, energy flowed—and the rest happened on its own.

Over time, however, these ad hoc events began to exceed the framework of a single band’s activity. The improvisations evolved, and alongside them grew a community ready to participate in music unbound by formal structures. Step by step, the project became autonomous—first informally, then as an event with its own identity. Today it operates as an independent creative platform under the umbrella of the L.A.S. Listening and Sounding Foundation, co-created by Grzegorz Lesiak and Piotr Damasiewicz. The foundation now provides the organizational and ideological framework for the project, although its spirit—just as at the beginning—remains free.

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