Rzekomo’s The Gray Zone of Talk doesn’t present itself as an album so much as a slowly unfolding environment, a space where sound, concept, and perception are continuously negotiating with one another. As the third instalment in the ambitious 10 times 10 gives 100 project, it continues a strict structural idea, ten albums over ten years, each containing ten tracks, yet what makes this release compelling is how little it feels constrained by that framework in practice. Instead, it behaves like something alive inside its own system, bending its edges from within.
At its core, the record is built around a single, striking sonic gesture: a jazz-inflected guitar subjected to granular synthesis until it fractures into a constellation of textures. At times it resembles a conventional instrument caught mid-phrase; elsewhere it dissolves into something closer to memory or static emotion. Rzekomo uses this unstable guitar language as a narrative anchor, allowing it to drift through environments shaped by microhouse rhythms, ambient drift, and carefully placed acoustic elements such as piano, clarinet, and subtle orchestral fragments. The result is music that feels both meticulously designed and emotionally unsettled, like architecture built out of shifting weather.
The conceptual foundation of the album draws from Henri Bergson’s philosophy of intuition, particularly his suggestion that direct, pre-linguistic understanding may offer deeper truth than rational articulation. The Gray Zone of Talk translates this into sound by consistently resisting closure. Tracks rarely resolve in conventional ways; instead, they taper, mutate, or dissolve into new states. Even rhythm, often a stabilising force in electronic music, is treated as something provisional. Beats appear, evolve, and recede rather than anchoring the music in fixed momentum. This gives the album a distinctive psychological texture, one defined less by progression than by awareness, hesitation, and drift.
The focus track “which” sits at the emotional centre of the record. Built on a microhouse-inspired pulse, it combines rhythmic precision with an aching sense of distance. The granular guitar line that threads through it feels both nostalgic and unstable, as though it is being recalled and forgotten simultaneously. This tension between clarity and erosion becomes one of the album’s defining emotional registers. Elsewhere, “speakable” offers a moment of suspension, an ambient passage that doesn’t so much develop as breathe, allowing silence to assert itself as an active compositional force rather than negative space.
As the album progresses, its internal logic becomes clearer. “is not” introduces a more kinetic energy, layering rhythmic elements with a subtle insistence, while “shapes unity” blends Rhodes piano and fractured textures into something that feels simultaneously cohesive and disoriented. “stronger” is particularly notable for its restraint; a loosely played, slightly unstable percussion pattern underpins a fragile melodic structure that never fully settles into certainty. These moments highlight Rzekomo’s ability to balance tension without resorting to dramatic escalation. The emotional impact comes not from peaks, but from sustained ambiguity.
One of the album’s most striking qualities is its handling of space. There is a constant awareness of absence, of what is not being said, played, or resolved. This becomes explicit in the closing track, “There is no need to talk about everything,” a sprawling composition that functions as both culmination and dissolution. A repeated guitar motif persists throughout, acting as a kind of emotional spine, while layers of orchestral and electronic material accumulate around it. Rather than overwhelming the motif, these additions gradually submit to it. The surrounding complexity slowly aligns, as though the act of repetition itself generates coherence. By the end, what remains is not resolution but quiet persistence.
Across its ten tracks, The Gray Zone of Talk maintains a rare equilibrium between conceptual ambition and sensory immediacy. It is intellectually grounded but never didactic, abstract but never detached. Rzekomo seems more interested in the conditions of understanding than in understanding itself, in the spaces where meaning almost forms but does not quite arrive. This gives the album a strangely intimate quality. It does not speak to the listener so much as position them within a field of partial signals, encouraging interpretation without ever confirming it.
Ultimately, The Gray Zone of Talk succeeds because it trusts ambiguity. In a musical landscape often driven by clarity, impact, and immediacy, Rzekomo offers something slower and more reflective: a record that treats uncertainty not as a problem to be solved, but as a state to be inhabited. It lingers precisely because it refuses to fully declare itself, instead leaving behind echoes, textures, and unresolved emotional traces that continue to shift long after the final note has faded.
Represented by Decent Music PR, the album was developed with the support of ZAiKS as part of the Creative Support Fund (Fundusz Popierania Twórczości). Purchase the album on vinyl here.
