Goran Trajkoski

Goran Trajkoski is a Macedonian singer, musician and composer, born on 21 November 1963 in Veles. He grew up between Veles, Struga, Ohrid and Skopje, studied English language and literature at the Blaže Koneski Faculty of Philology in Skopje, and has worked in punk, post-punk, dark wave, electronic and ethnic music.

He has no formal musical training. He started in the late 1970s in Struga with the punk group Afektiven Naboj, then played in Skopje with Saraceni, led by Vladimir Petrovski Karter, later of Aleksandar Makedonski. In 1983 he founded Padot na Vizantija, an influential band of the Macedonian eighties, and in the second half of the decade he played bass in Mizar and worked on the band's first album, released in 1988.

His best-known group is Anastasia, formed in 1987 as Apokrifna Realnost and renamed in 1989, which joined Byzantine and Orthodox church music with Macedonian folk rhythms. Trajkoski learned folk music from Vanja Lazarova and Pece Atanasovski and church chant from the priests Vladimir and Stefan Sandžakoski. Anastasia wrote the music for Milčo Mančevski's Oscar-nominated film Before the Rain (Pred doždot, 1994), released on PolyGram, and followed it with Melourgia (1997) and Nocturnal; their songs include "Na rekite vavilonski", "Lice" and "Gori".

From the late 1980s to the early 1990s he also worked as a music journalist for Macedonian Radio and Kanal 103. When Mizar reunited in 2003 he became its singer, and with him the band released the album Kobna ubavina - Terrible Beauty (Is Born) in 2004 and toured Croatia and Serbia.

Since the late 1980s Trajkoski has written music for theatres in North Macedonia, Serbia, Bosnia and Herzegovina and Greece, including Hamlet, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead and Peer Gynt in Skopje and Bure barut in Athens. His later film scores include Srekna Nova 1903 (2013) and Kino ljubov (2022), and in 2011 he released Bioscopia with the singer Elena Hristova. He also makes electronic music under the name Gotra.