Jakub Zytecki

Adopting a new approach to his fusion of prog, metal and ambient music, the Polish guitarist has got the balance right.

Jakub Zytecki may have cracked the work-life balance. Over the last nine years, this prodigiously talented guitarist – in tandem with his trusty rhythm section of bassist Michał Sarapata and drummer Józef Rusinowski – has released three albums in the shape of 2015’s //White Lotus Proof//, //Nothing Lasts, Nothing’s Lost// in 2019 and last year’s //Remind Me// as well as the lockdown LP //2020 (Live)// and a number of EPs, but the cycle of writing, recording, touring and recuperating has proved unsatisfactory. Newly signed to InsideOut, Zytecki has now elected to record songs as he goes along and release them one by one.

“I like the idea of this approach,” Zytecki tells //Prog// from his home in Kraków. “For the last six years of my life, I’ve spent shutting myself down from the rest of the world for two years working on a record and then having a depression at the end of it because I have nothing else to do. And then I come out of the depression to start a new album. Now I want to try working on music all the time. I hope this is the start of a new experience. I started current single //Bound By Better// in mid-April and it was finished two months later. It’s very fresh. I mean, when you’ve worked on a record for two years, some of the songs I started at the beginning felt a bit worn out.”

Having taken up guitar aged 10, Zytecki credits the influence that growing up in the countryside of southeastern Poland has had on his music. “I spent the first 20 years of my life living in a village surrounded by wide-open spaces and this element is present in my music,” he says.

Pondering the development of his music, Zytecki says, “It started very Dream Theater-like, very technical and metal-oriented and it slowly became something a bit more chilled and simpler, both in terms of the amount of notes played and in the structure of the songs. But I do feel that aggressive expression is exciting to me again. It’s like a cycle.”

He adds, “For years, my ambition was to create something complex in terms of the arrangements but to make it easy listening at the same time.” And it sounds like he has. JM

See www.jakubzytecki.bandcamp.com for more

— JM