True subversion has no time limits. No set formats. No rules. It’s a red stained brick wall with a green-screened madman prophet screaming at the heavens while a trumpet follows the whistle of a thug in the alley.
TDK — the humble rulers of the Separatist Republic of Dobrina are back with a new EP titled ZHVK clocking in with 13 minutes packed full of rancor, razor blades and a rowdy good time. Singing of things like “your mother”, Peca the gangster, and living in the (proverbial) sewer with the wretches, you’re bound to reassess your life as Nikola N. shrieks sweet nothings into your ear as you slowly sail down the Maritsa with four heroin-stuffed corpses in your rickety boat. This EP is not for the weak or the uninitiated as one traverses into the idiosyncratic world of this Plovdiv collective. The dissenting universe that this group creates echoes the portals of Black Midi and NSK alike, but truly barely scratches the surface of comparisons with the Greeps and the Fras’es.
There is a freeform anger to this work. A swirl of Jazz in the drums while the bass weaves around it, warranting multiple excursions and listens. It is hyperspeed, it is slow-motion, it is its own doing and undoing, clutching at itself while it unravels. It is pure in the sense that the text is delivered with a conviction, somewhere between pleading and indifference. An anomaly in its construction —ZHVK is not life-affirming but life-reflecting as stated in the liner notes proclaiming that “this album is the epitome of pure living.”
What lurks in these steel-corroded tunnels escapes reason and explanation. It is not beast nor man, it is an apparition stuck roaming the septics looking for a quiet sacrality, an ear worthy of whisper, or in its most divisive — a confident bludgeon on the dome to show that it means business. TDK certainly means business.
