tkr
TKR, born in 1982 as Thomas Schwarz, is come a long way since he first launched his musicial career in 1998 as Drum and Bass DJ in Thuringia / Germany.
After a few years of being addicted to listen to fast broken beats and co- founding a party- series, it was just a logical step for him to take his first steps in producing electronic music back in 2001, influenced by artists like Klute, Polar, Cause 4 Concern or Total Science.
After re-locating to Jena / Germany, were he still lives, his musical turning point was at the end of 2007 when he got in touch with Dubstep for the first time. This style of music was totally new to him and he was absolutely impressed by the deep progressive basslines and the slow beats.
Dubstep combines all the music genres he likes, he said: I can explore a range of different tempos and styles, e.g. combine techno with dub and phat basslines with house- samples.Cause of this new musical influences he decided to leave Drum and Bass scene behind him and concentrate more on producing suchlike deep beat and basses. The first outcome was a collaboration project with one of his best friends, Norman Bogatzki alias Mr. Boogie from Potsdam / Germany, in 2008, named Submodulation. They were a good team and soon there were results: tunes like Big Up! feat. Phokus (Scrub a Dub), Screamer (Fake ID) or Ruff ‘n’Tuff (Police in Helicopter).
During the year 2009 TKR decided to go his own way increasingly and now his production are more inspired by Dub and Minimal or soulful music. TKR’s tunes and remixes were also signed on record labels like Redvolume (SE), Bassism (US), Paradise Lost (US) or Barish Records (DE). Furthermore, Thomas started working for Barish Rec.- one of the first German Dubstep- oriented Labels, as A&R and with his TKR-Artworkxxx – project he is responsible for a lot of graphics for artists and label profiles on the internet, as well as a lot of party – flyer.
In January 2010 he founded his own dubstep & electronic music label, Stoke Audio, which is planned to be first a digital- only label for deep and technoid dubstep tracks but TKR is also planing vinyl releases for the future. TKR signed dubstep artists like Twisted & Rakoon from the famous Dutty Dubz and The Next from the WobWob crew for the first releases – so watch out there’s more to come!
