Petar Sarkanjac

Petar Sarkanjac is a Macedonian composer, arranger, producer, guitarist, and multilingual lyricist from Skopje, North Macedonia, born in 2000. He graduated summa cum laude from Berklee College of Music with a dual major in Contemporary Writing and Production and Game Audio and Interactive Media Scoring, supported by a Macedonian Government scholarship and a Berklee World Tour scholarship.

His debut album, Conference of Grammars, is a progressive chamber-world concept album mostly featuring string quintet arrangements of songs in English, Spanish, Portuguese, Turkish, and Macedonian. The album moves from meaningless drift toward resolution, from nothingness to existence. The project features collaborators from Macedonia, Serbia, Spain, Brazil, Turkey, the USA, and China.

Sarkanjac’s work is shaped by eight-string guitar, contemporary composition, progressive metal, linguistics, world literature, and stories of redemption and spiritual growth. He describes his music as an attempt to create “an abode of immunity from the nausea of nothingness.”

Petar Sarkanjac is a Macedonian composer, arranger, producer, guitarist, and multilingual lyricist from Skopje, North Macedonia, born in 2000. Currently based in Skopje, he graduated summa cum laude from Berklee College of Music, where he completed a dual major in Contemporary Writing & Production and Game Audio & Interactive Media Scoring. His studies were supported by a Macedonian Government scholarship and a Berklee World Tour scholarship.

His main instrument is guitar, with a focus on eight-string guitar. At Berklee, he received the T-Bone Walker Award. His private instruction teacher Norman Zocher described his work on the eight-string guitar as putting him “at the forefront of players on the instrument,” noting his technique, rhythmic precision, theoretical command, and ability to move between different tuning systems.

Sarkanjac’s musical language comes from several places at once: progressive metal, Romantic and post-Romantic classical music, Balkan folk, Turkish folk, jazz, samba, and fado. Lyrically, he is drawn to stories of redemption and spiritual growth, including The Shawshank Redemption, Rumi’s Masnavi, and The Count of Monte Cristo.

His debut album, Conference of Grammars, was released independently through his label hapax noumenon. The album is a progressive chamber-world concept project built largely around string quintet, vocals, and multilingual songwriting. Sarkanjac composed, arranged, produced, and wrote lyrics across the album, also playing guitar and bass on Ontopathy and guitar on Olympus. The string quintet was recorded at AV Studios in Dračevo, the studio of Antonie Veskovski, who is the marimba player on Ontopathy and the recording engineer of all the string quintet songs. Andy Gilmore created the illustrations for the front and back cover.

Sung in English, Spanish, Portuguese, Turkish, and Macedonian, Conference grew out of nearly ten years of composing and songwriting, followed by two years of arranging and production. The album features Viktor Tumbas from Sombor, Serbia, Thaïs Morell from Curitiba, Brazil, Iván López Sanz from Valencia, Spain, Elena Vasova from Skopje, Sime Zlatkov from Skopje, Ilcho Nechovski from Skopje, Andrijana Janevska from Skopje, Aviana Gedler from Des Moines, Iowa, USA, Elif Sanchez from Istanbul, Turkey, and Jimmy Lin, with Forrester Savell mixing the opening track, “Ontopathy.”

The title Conference of Grammars was inspired by The Conference of the Birds by Attar of Nishapur, the Sufi poem in which birds representing human afflictions travel in search of the Simurgh, often read as a symbol of the Divine. In Sarkanjac’s album, “Grammars” are the hidden universal checkpoints on the journey from nothingness toward existence. They are the inevitable rules that one discovers when confronting nihilism.

Before and alongside his solo work, Sarkanjac played in several bands across Skopje, Berklee, and the wider region. He was guitarist for Metanoia, performing at D-Fest and Loserfest; drummer for Lincoln Letter, performing at the Youth Jazz and Rock Festival in Subotica; lead guitarist for Voodoo Baby Aliens, a Berklee group centered around Pavle Zvekić’s original music; and drummer for Lost in Reverie, with whom he performed at Hills of Rock 2025.

Conference of Grammars has received strong early support from musicians and educators. Matthew Nicholl, Chair Emeritus of Contemporary Writing and Production at Berklee College of Music, called it “a tour de force” and described Sarkanjac as “an important voice in the art of contemporary song.” Dr. Andrea Pejrolo praised the music as “fresh, original, and extremely engaging,” highlighting its “eclectic stylistic approach, from polyrhythms to esoteric string writing.” Macedonian pianist, composer, and arranger Ilija Pejovski described encountering Sarkanjac and his music as “one of the most significant events” in his musical life.

At the center of Sarkanjac’s work is the pursuit of a new harmonic language. His goal is direct but demanding: turning numerous traditions into a coherent aesthetic, to “shake the pillars of grammar,” and to build “an abode of immunity from the nausea of nothingness.”