On the night of October 26–27, 1999, Małgorzata Żarnowska, a 25-year-old railway track guard, was killed at the KD-1 signal box next to the Dębieńsko coal mine in Czerwionka-Leszczyny. The case was never closed. Twenty-six years later, Andrzej Kuberski and Julia Gembczyk of the Katowice TVN24 bureau built a documentary around it, “Kto zabił dróżniczkę? Tajemnica nastawni KD-1” (“Who killed the railway guard? The mystery of signal box KD-1”), available on the TVN24+ streaming service since May 10. The score is by Paweł Gregorczyk, working as Sadface, and it has now been released as a standalone EP titled “Unsolved: KD-1“.
The reconnection between Gregorczyk and Kuberski happened almost by accident. The two had worked together years earlier in regional television and lost contact. Kuberski recently joined Facebook, came across Sadface, and got in touch. A few messages later, Gregorczyk had a brief: write the soundtrack for a true crime documentary about a regional cold case. His first single under the project name, “Faint Trace“, had only come out at the end of February 2026.
The fit was unusually clean. Gregorczyk is Silesian by birth, and the coal mine country sits in the everyday backdrop of where he grew up. As a former regional journalist, he had spent years on crime stories. “As a former regional journalist, I covered many crime cases. That past let me step into the dark atmosphere of the documentary immediately and feel the weight of an unsolvable mystery,” he says.
It also explains the choice of German for the song titles, a decision that could read as affectation in another context. Silesian, as a regional language, is a crucible of Polish, Czech, and German, and Gregorczyk hears the hardness of German consonants as a fit for the gravity of the subject. Every piece on the record is named for the victim using the German “Margarete”, with a subtitle pointing to the emotional state the music is meant to carry: “Das Motiv” (The Motive), “Nachtwache” (Night Watch), “Nachklang” (Echo/Resonance), and “Blutspur” (Blood Trail).
Music and documentary were built in parallel. Kuberski, who handled cinematography and editing alongside his co-direction with Gembczyk, was, as Gregorczyk puts it, a direct guide through the story, precisely defining what emotional register the music had to occupy at each turn. The footage shaped the compositions; the finished compositions, in turn, affected how certain scenes were cut.
The result is a different kind of Sadface release than the debut “Draped in the Hollow“, which came out in February 2026. Where that EP swung between post-rock, film score, ambient, and metal influences with little restraint, “Unsolved: KD-1” is held to the requirements of the picture. The arrangements pull back. The dynamics stay disciplined. The five pieces move from cold melancholy and nostalgia, through growing unease, into the chaos of the night itself, and then settle into mourning.
The cinematic ambition Gregorczyk made openly in interviews around the debut, courting Netflix, HBO Max, Apple TV and others, here arrives via a Polish public broadcaster’s true crime investigation. It’s a more local answer than the one he was angling for, and a more interesting one.
“Margarete: Das Motiv” is the first piece he wrote for the project, sketched out shortly after the call with Kuberski. He hadn’t been told what the music should sound like; the details of the case set the direction. Built on a fragile piano figure, strings, and an industrial pulse, the track works equally as opening or closing music. In the documentary it plays at the finale, running through the end credits.
“Margarete: Nachtwache” was originally a fragment of a piece destined for a future Sadface release. Gregorczyk felt it could fit a few scenes after rearrangement and a different sound. The guitar part outlasts the track itself in the listener’s memory, even though the whole thing runs under a minute. It scores several interviews and a handful of other moments in the film, and the contrast between its emotional load and its minimalism is the entire point.
“Margarete: Nachklang – Klavier” sits underneath the parts of the documentary where Małgorzata’s loved ones speak. Gregorczyk wanted sadness with light, something that would correspond to the warmth of those statements rather than push against it. The arrangement is kept intentionally bare so it doesn’t crowd out the voices it sits under. Intimate piano, almost nothing else.
“Margarete: Blutspur” is the score for the killing itself, the scenes at the signal box. Pizzicato strings build a dense, unstable atmosphere; aggressive brass cuts through it; experimental violin and viola lines move closer to siren wails than melody, set on an industrial rhythm. The piece runs under ninety seconds, which Gregorczyk calls a structural choice rather than an aesthetic one. Anything longer would have turned suffocating. The track is meant to render the brutality of that moment and, in his account, what may have been moving through the perpetrator’s head.
The video for “Blutspur” leads the EP’s promotion and pulls visually from German expressionism, with reference points including “Nosferatu”, “The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari”, and “Waxworks”.
“Margarete: Nachklang – Ensemble” closes the EP with a second pass at “Nachklang”, rearranged for piano, strings, and trumpet. The strings deepen the melancholy. The trumpet, arriving at the end, is the most loaded choice on the record. In Silesia, the instrument is a fixture at miners’ funerals, and Gregorczyk wanted that local lineage in the closing minute of a piece scoring the death of a woman who worked at a mining signal box. It’s not subtle, and it doesn’t need to be.
Across the five tracks, Sadface lands a specific atmosphere: sometimes gripping, sometimes airless, but consistently dignified, progressing intimately rather than by accumulation. As a soundtrack it serves the documentary; as a standalone EP it holds together as a closed piece of work.
“Unsolved: KD-1” is out now via all major streaming platforms, Bandcamp, and SoundCloud. The “Margarete: Blutspur” music video is on YouTube. The TVN24+ documentary “Kto zabił dróżniczkę? Tajemnica nastawni KD-1” is available on TVN24+. For more on Sadface’s debut, see our long-form interview with Paweł Gregorczyk on the EP “Draped in the Hollow” from earlier this year.
🔔 IDIOTEQ is ad-free, independent, and runs on one person’s time. If you want it to stay that way: DONATE via PayPal 𝗈𝗋 SUPPORT via Patreon.
Stay connected via Newsletter · Instagram · Facebook · X (Twitter) · Threads · Bluesky · Messenger · WhatsApp.
