Polish experimental music project Rzekomo has released The Gray Zone of Talk, the third installment in the ambitious long-form series 10 times 10 gives 100, a conceptual undertaking in which one 10-track album is issued annually over the course of ten consecutive years beginning in 2024. The record is available digitally and on vinyl.
Leading the release is the focus track ‘which’, accompanied by a meditative ambient video created by acclaimed Polish nature photographer Olsza Grochowska. The visual counterpart deepens the album’s atmosphere of suspension, ambiguity, and quiet perception.
Each entry in the 10 times 10 gives 100 cycle introduces a defining sonic element that distinguishes it from the others. On The Gray Zone of Talk, that role is played by a jazz-inflected guitar transformed through granular synthesis. Fragmented and reshaped, the instrument dissolves into electronically programmed rhythms and textured digital environments, creating a sound world that is simultaneously organic and alien, intimate and abstract.
As with previous installments, the album’s title serves as a conceptual axis around which the music, artwork, and track names revolve. Together, the titles across the series gradually assemble into a larger aphoristic structure. The Gray Zone of Talk draws inspiration from the philosophy of Henri Bergson, particularly his distinction between intuitive understanding and intellectual comprehension.
If language is inherently imperfect, if every act of listening already contains interpretation, then perhaps true understanding sometimes emerges outside words altogether. The album proposes silence not as absence or concealment, but as a mode of communication in itself: a shared, intuitive space where mutual recognition becomes possible without the need for precise articulation. In this sense, the “gray zone” of conversation becomes less a failure of language than an alternative to it.
The broader 10 times 10 gives 100 project operates simultaneously as artistic framework, conceptual experiment, and subtle provocation. Its rigid structure, ten tracks, one album per year, over ten years, imposes mathematical regularity onto an act traditionally associated with spontaneity and free expression. The result is a continuing exploration of the tension between human creativity and systems resembling natural law or determinism.
At the same time, the series reflects on the strange emotional and aesthetic power of numbers themselves. Perhaps the decimal system is merely an accident of biology, a convention born from ten fingers, yet numerical order continues to shape human thought, architecture, time, and meaning. Within Rzekomo’s project, numbers become both compositional device and poetic gesture.
There is also irony embedded in the undertaking. The project may be read as a search for harmony amid internal and external chaos, or simply as an intentionally over-structured artistic ritual. As Rzekomo suggests, it may equally be “nothing but a joke,” an unnecessary display of diligence not meant to be taken too seriously.
Active since autumn 2021, Rzekomo has steadily built an international presence within experimental and electronic music circles. The 2023 EP Spiritual Wastefulness and the first two albums in the series, Inner Life Dilemma (2024) and Everything (2025), received support across major streaming platforms including Spotify, Apple Music, Amazon, and Beatport, notably appearing on the 3.7 million-subscriber playlist Brain Food.
The project has also been featured on international radio stations such as Spain’s RNE, France’s LaRG, and New York-based FriskyRadio, alongside coverage in Polish media including K MAG, Going., Radio Nowy Świat, Radio 3/5/7, Kampus Radio, and Tuba.fm.
Beyond recorded releases, Rzekomo’s compositions have increasingly appeared in film and theatre. Recent works include music for the short film It’s Deep, but it’s not That Deep directed by Beniamin Koc for Festiwal Dowód, and the stage production Jednia directed by Maciej Kowalczyk for Proces Postaci. Further audiovisual collaborations are currently in development.
The Gray Zone of Talk is available now on digital platforms and vinyl.
