Thomas Brückner[1] (12 June 1975 – 15 July 2024), known by his stage name Tomcraft, was a German DJ and producer. He specialized in progressive house and progressive trance music and is better known for having created the tracks "Loneliness" and "Prosac", working alongside Eniac.
Tomcraft began working as a DJ in Munich in 1994, shifting between techno and the emerging progressive trance style.[citation needed] He played his first major DJ gigs in 1995 at the Munich technoparade Union Move.[2] In the same year, he released his first track, "This Is No House".[3] He first met Eniac in 1996, and the two immediately started producing music together, beginning with "Viva". The same year yielded the track "Prosac", but this did not achieve success until it was re-released in 2001. For a decade or so, he worked alongside fellow German producer Eniac as a studio team, steadily releasing tracks on, among others, local label Kosmo Records.[4]
In 2002, Tomcraft released "Loneliness", a progressive vocal track that topped the chart in the United Kingdom in May 2003.[1][6] His DJ career was greatly boosted by this success,[5] and Tomcraft released several club tracks, including Prozac and Overdose, with regular singles releases as well as four albums released across six years. He also worked regularly with English DJ/producer Tim Healey (formerly known as 'Coburn').[citation needed] Over the years he also collaborated with artists such as Jimmy Pop (Bloodhound Gang's singer), the German Xavier Naidoo, America's Tommie Sunshine, and local rapper Sido. He set about building his reputation in the underground scene with the launch of Great Stuff and subsequent signings of such a talents as Lützenkirchen, Coburn, Oliver Koletzki, The Egg, and Ramon Tapia.[citation needed]
His other musical highlights over the years included playing to 1.3 million people at Berlin’s Love Parade in 2003, Japan’s Fuji Rock Festival,[7] festivals in Brazil, and clubs in Singapore, Tokyo, Los Angeles, São Paulo, Rio, Cape Town, San Francisco, and several European cities.[8]
2005 saw the launch of Craft Music, a new outlet for his productions with all other signed releases treated to a remix by the man himself – with the label undergoing a major relaunch in 2010 to bring it back to the forefront of house and techno music.[citation needed]
His sound morphed over the years from trance into electro house and now since 2007 into a balance of those influences with a progressive house backbone, returning to the melodic sound that he came from originally.[8]
Tomcraft released four albums, All I Got (2001), MUC (2003), HyperSexyConscious (2006), and For the Queen (2007), all on Kosmo Records.
His 2007 album, For the Queen, was a collaboration with Tobias David Lützenkirchen from their Great Stuff label, and while similar in style with previous Tomcraft releases, it is distinctive in a more narrative way, with less of the dance floor dimension of his previous works; he called it a "feature album" and it is rich with collaborations and two covers.[9]
Tomcraft died on 15 July 2024, at the age of 49.[10]
