Zarkoff – Completed With Errors (EP – Tripalium Records)
Genre/Influences: Technoid, EBM.
Format: Digital, Vinyl.
Background/Info: Croatian artist Sasha Rajkovich has been active in the music business for a while. Next to his involvement with projects like Zarkoff, Sumerian Fleet, NauGrau, FFFC.. he now strikes back with Zarkoff. This is the first work he released on the French label Tripalium Records.
Content: Zarkoff claims to be inspired by EBM and that’s an element that comes rapidly through. The bass lines are pretty EBM driven while he achieved his work with Technoid elements and vintage strings. There’s a strong 90s touch running through the work. I also refer to the pitched vocals which are dealing with themes of the bible.
+ + + : This EP smells like pure retro Electro reminding me 90s productions. It like the way he merged Techno elements together with EBM and even Kraftwerk arrangements -especially at “Evidence Of Purgatory”. The last track which is the title song is an instrumental one and still the hardest piece with extra EBM influences and great string parts.
– – – : This EP sounds maybe a bit old-fashioned but I don’t care.
Conclusion: Imagine productions from the 90s Frankfurter scene and Techno club mixed with good-old EBM and you get “Completed With Errors”.
Best songs: “Completed With Errors”, “Exodus”, “Evidence Of Purgatory”.
Rate: 7½.
Artist: www.facebook.com/Zarkoff.music
Label: www.tripaliumcorp.com / www.facebook.com/tripaliumcorp
“Completed With Errors” was released on 29 April 2022 as Tripalium Corp catalogue entry TRPLM009, with mastering by 4bstr4ck3r and artwork by Mat Malinard. The four tracks draw on Old Testament and Gnostic writing about the Demiurge, and the vocoded and speech-synthesised lyrics are taken directly from the King James translation of the Bible.
Listen to “Completed With Errors”:
About Zarkoff
Zarkoff is the project of Croatian musician Sasha Rajkovich, who has been active in underground electronic music since the mid-1990s. He is also a member of Sumerian Fleet, NauGrau, FFFC and Kali Jugend, and works across EBM, acid and electro with occasional moves into post-punk and techno. He writes lyrics as well, citing Leonard Cohen, Philip K. Dick and Vladimir Mayakovsky as reference points.
Tripalium Corp, based in Brittany, France, issued “Completed With Errors” as the project’s first release for the label. Side-Line had previously covered Rajkovich’s work through the compilation review V/A Wave Earplug No.1, released on 4mg Records in 2017. The artist supplied no written commentary with this EP, leaving the biblical source material as the only stated context.
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