Maddison Carter is a Melbourne-based drummer, percussionist, vibraphonist and composer whose work spans jazz, improvisation, pop, rock, folk, contemporary classical and experimental music. Renowned for his rhythmic imagination and textural nuance, Carter is a highly versatile musician and recording artist whose performances and studio credits reflect a broad stylistic fluency.
Carter leads Polymorphic, a six-piece ensemble dedicated to layered rhythmic structures and temporal multiplicity. The group’s debut album, released through Earshift Music, was selected as PBS Album of the Week and signals a bold expansion of Carter’s polytemporal language. As Eric Myers wrote in The Age, “This is how jazz will sound into the future.” UK publication Jazzwise described the record as “a defiant call for creative freedom… [with] enough angularity to keep things interesting,” highlighting its balance of rhythmic complexity and infectious momentum.
Earlier projects include the critically recognised ensemble The Rest is Silence, whose album A Short Film (released through Earshift Music) was nominated for a Music Victoria Award. The project expanded Carter’s compositional reach into a hybrid sound world drawing from indie, folk, electronica and jazz.
In 2019 Carter released his first album as a leader, Elbow Room, featuring Eugene Ball, Theo Carbo, Tamara Murphy and Joe O’Connor. The album presented early investigations into polytempo through an acoustic quintet framework. Carter has also received composition commissions from the Victorian Youth Symphony Orchestra and the Beautiful Fragments project, extending his writing into orchestral and cross-ensemble contexts.
A sought-after collaborator and session musician, Carter has recorded extensively across genres. His credits include work with Tamara Murphy on her singer-songwriter project The Golden Tone Retrievers, as well as significant contributions to Nat Bartsch’s multi-award-winning albums Hope Renewed and Forever More. His adaptability in the studio mirrors his live performance practice: attentive, responsive and rhythmically assured across jazz, art music and contemporary song-based projects.
Carter is completing a Master of Music (Research), examining the use of polytempo in contemporary jazz composition and performance. His research centres on Polymorphic — in which he performs on both drum kit and vibraphone — and extends into orchestral contexts, investigating how layered temporal systems can function across ensemble types while remaining responsive to improvisation.
Across all of his work — whether leading Polymorphic, contributing to studio sessions, or composing for larger forces — Carter’s practice is defined by a commitment to rhythmic depth, ensemble sensitivity and music that holds complexity and immediacy in equal measure.