Founded in 2023, CBZK brings together Kopczak (vocals and everything but guitars) and Fas (guitars), who already gave free rein to their madness in the avant-garde/experimental black metal project Malconfort. We weren't expecting them to play anything too predictable or cheerful, and we got what we deserved: CBZK cultivate mystery and darkness, mixing industrial, noise, hip hop and black metal. The two artists, based between the UK, Poland and Greece, present their first EP as "surreal take on the Subcarpathian identity in Poland, distant closeness, camaraderie, passing and death". In a dreamlike, allegorical way, they speak of realities past and present, weaving together regional folklore with personal history: we'll have to take their word for it and bet that the title, Dybuctwo, refers to the dybbuk, the demon of Jewish and cabalistic mythology.
Musically speaking, you can feel death, dying and mysteries from W Głębi onwards: lyrics chanted in a cold voice, between menacing murmurs, an almost demonic low clear voice and incantatory whispers. Crushing beats, opaque guitar fog: somewhere between sinister rap and atmospheric black metal, CBZK plunges us into a dense, hypnotic darkness from which a gloomy melody emerges. The mix works, oppressive and possessed. The noise/industrial electronics add their strangeness and layers of depth to these very short tracks. Even if CBZK seems to borrow its sticky atmospheres from horrorcore and a few trap beats and spectral reverberations from witch-house, the result, funereal and leaden, doesn't make you want to waddle or stir.
Over the course of the EP's fifteen-minute duration, we drown in cold, icy water with dark ambient temptations that often veer into hallucinatory nightmares, as with Topiel and its psychedelic overtones as well as its whispers that turn into croaks. CBZK have mastered the funereal and mystical ambiences, but they also know how to be more frontal and weigh down the sound: the repetitive and alienating bass of Płyty and Duchota are helped in their bludgeoning work by a text hammered with heaviness and incisive noisy industrial assaults: something massive seems to be swarming in the shadows, on the edge of our consciousness. The boldest will dare to confront it, at the risk of losing their sanity.
After -, a haunted and sinister track that leaks a certain melancholy into its abyssal nothingness, Dybuctwo is already over. This first contact with their universe proves convincing: the dive is as immersive as it is impressive. The heaviness and the more ethereal wanderings follow one another, somewhere between a funeral rite and a story told in a low voice by the fire. This first EP is full of terrors and mysteries, thickened by a language less usual than English, which gives the lyrics the air of curses muttered in the half-light. If there is indeed a dybbuk lurking out there, the soul of a dead person who has come to take possession of the living and drive them mad, then this first EP has opened the doors wide for it, and we're delighted to welcome it... What an atmosphere!
