Rzekomo releases new album ‘The Gray Zone of Talk’

There’s something delightfully unreasonable about Rzekomo’s 10 times 10 gives 100 project. Ten albums. Ten tracks each. Released every year for a decade. It sounds less like a release strategy and more like a conceptual dare someone made at 3am after reading philosophy and reorganising their vinyl shelf by colour. Thankfully, The Gray Zone of Talk — the third entry in the cycle — proves the idea has far more substance than gimmick. If previous releases hinted at an artist building a private sonic universe, this album feels like stepping fully inside it.

At the centre of the record is a beautifully warped guitar sound: jazzy, melancholic phrases stretched and broken apart through granular synthesis until they resemble half-remembered conversations overheard through apartment walls. Around them swirl crisp electronic beats, microhouse rhythms, drifting ambient textures, and flashes of classical instrumentation. The focus track “which” captures the mood perfectly — wistful, hypnotic, and oddly emotional for a track built on glitches and rhythmic precision. It’s music for walking home too late, staring out train windows, or pretending your life is secretly an arthouse film.

What keeps The Gray Zone of Talk engaging is its refusal to sit still stylistically. “is not” pushes forward with nervous rhythmic energy, “speakable” exhales into ambient calm, while “which can” introduces a detuned bassline that feels charmingly unstable, like the track itself is slightly seasick. Even the album’s longest title — “There is no need to talk about everything” — somehow feels earned by the time you get there. The record moves with the confidence of an artist who trusts atmosphere more than obvious hooks, but still understands how to keep listeners emotionally tethered.

And honestly, that might be the album’s greatest trick. Beneath all the philosophical framing — Henri Bergson, intuitive understanding, silence as communication — this is simply a deeply enjoyable listen. It’s cerebral without becoming homework. Thoughtful without losing warmth. Rzekomo has made a record that sounds like electronic music thinking out loud while simultaneously questioning whether words were ever necessary in the first place. Which is either profound… or a very sophisticated excuse to make beautifully glitched sad-guy microhouse. Either way, it works.

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