About Me

For fifteen years I lived and breathed ska-punk with Jesus Christ Smokes Holy Gasoline. Those years were brutal in the best way: countless sweaty shows, chaotic stages, and that shared moment when a crowd and a song become one. We started in small clubs and later landed on huge festival stages — playing at Nova Rock, Frequency Festival and Donauinselfest — and every size of room taught me what it means to own the moment. concertarchives.org+1

At the same time I was pulling at different threads of sound. Under the name Zavs I threw away rulebooks and let noise, image and silence collide. The video Deshperat from that period won the audience award at the Underground Music Videos screening, and that recognition confirmed something I already felt: people are willing to follow you into the darker, stranger places if you’re honest about why you went there.

Over the last decade my musical focus shifted more and more toward metal and core. Bands like Killswitch Engage, Architects and Tesseract showed me how brachial riffs and soaring harmonic choruses can coexist — heavy and relentless, yet still deeply melodic. That balance between aggression and beauty became a major influence on my writing, and it now runs like a thread through everything I do.

I’ve always loved collaboration — showing up as a guitarist, composer or producer depending on what the song needed. Those projects taught me patience with texture and arrangement, and gave me the freedom to experiment without worrying whether a track would “fit” somewhere. Everything fed into a larger view: music isn’t just riffs and beats, it’s a conversation between sound, image and the listener’s memory.

Today all those parts live inside Starfish Assault. It’s heavier and more direct than what I did before, but it’s also the sum of punk’s urgency, experimental unpredictability and that hunger for melody that won’t be silenced. A Starfish Assault song might hit you with a crushing riff and then pull open into a fragile, haunted moment — because I like the tension between raw force and quiet exposure.

My writing is honest rather than neat. I’m interested in conflict and catharsis, in the small human moments that make a chorus mean more than a line of lyrics. Live shows are still the reason I keep going: the chance to create something loud and immediate and to watch it change people for a few minutes. If you want heavy riffs that hit the body, or atmosphere that lives under your skin afterwards — I’ll bring both.

Right now I’m focused on new material, stronger production, and ways to bring visuals and performance closer to the songs. The work that carried me from punk basements through festival fields and experimental screenings is still the same engine — just tuned sharper. Thanks for listening. — Thomas