Svast (chicago/las vegas/st pete, il, USA)
Affiliates: bro.kn records, calamity of noise, domina productions
http://www.myspace.com/svastmusic


  Time Out Chicago / Issue 188 : Oct 2–8, 2008
Beats to remember
Nobody said making dance music was easy, especially not Chicago’s Svast.

By Dani Deahl

UNBREAKABLE Svast’s house thrives under adverse conditions.


Sitting at Wicker Park’s Milk & Honey Café, Thom Svast—decked out in heavy silver jewelry and a touch of eyeliner—looks more like an industrial holdout than a hot producer with tracks in the Nu Disco category on Beatport. Svast is also something of a novice. “I’ve only been making music seriously for about two years,” he says. “But in that time I’ve literally made hundreds of songs. I guess I started producing to help me through my toughest times: My life is the soundtrack to music; music is not the soundtrack to my life.”

Those tough times read like a tragic movie script. The past few years have found him going from homeless and living in his car (and running his computer off the car battery) to staying in an apartment with no utilities and using the neighbors’ electricity. The struggle began in 2004, when he found out he had inherited a degenerative brain disease, affecting the frontal lobe responsible for memory and reason. “Sometimes I wake up, and I don’t remember where I live or what I did yesterday,” he says. He went from single to engaged to abandoned by his mate, but not before acquiring a meth addiction. It’s an understatement to say he’s continued with music as a means of personal catharsis.

But Svast remains positive, narrating his past with gusto as if it were a piece of gossip he heard thirdhand: “Oooh, and did I tell you about the time I had no gas and water for two months? My neighbors let me shower [at their place], and my friend Jim brought me a basket of food.” He pins his ability to survive a seemingly endless string of bad luck with one thing: his love for house music.

Through all the hard living, Svast kept producing. “My sound is always changing, depending on how I’m feeling,” he says. As a result, his body of work is extraordinarily personal. “If I can convey something to you through my music, some type of emotion, then I’ve done my job,” he says.

Svast’s tunes range from intense and synth-laden to minimal and gothic, a collage that borrows from his beloved industrial music and includes tones from turn-of-the-century instruments he gets from an antique shop where his father works. “I just hate when people ask, Well, what kind of music do you play? I make electronic music,” he says.

While living in Vegas, Svast passed his originals to a resident DJ and upon hearing them, Los Angeles–based bro.kn Records handed Svast a five-EP deal. “We see eye to eye on the artistic side of things,” Svast says, “that it’s an art and not just music.” For Svast, creative control over every component of his releases—from sequencing to artwork—is integral to telling his story correctly.

Now, with two of the five EPs available at Beatport.com, monthly release parties at Betty’s Blue Star, and his tracks charting in Europe, Svast’s luck seems to have turned. But ever humble, he can scarcely believe someone else loves his creations as much as he does. He ends our interview with a sincere, “Thanks for listening.”