Markus Czenia

Born in 1972 in Germany, Markus Czenia had a brainstorm in his early 30s: what if he tried to tell the rich story of the Vikings as a modern saga “ only with drums (instead of more traditional narrative media)? The result was his composition œJourney To Vinland, a musical œradio drama sparked by his virtuosic drumming, and a 2007 album of the same name, which Czenia supported with a European tour in 2007; œVinland is the name that Leif Erickson gave to a large island, supposedly located west of Greenland, in his early 11th-century travels. Since 2006, Markus played all important drum festivals across Europe. In 2008 he played at the Montreal Drumfest. Czenia, it turns out, has made his own exploratory journey in modern music. He started playing drums at the age of 10, eventually performing big-band jazz and cover tunes, but gravitated toward heavy metal in his early 20s, when he joined the trash-speedmetal band Rattfink; he then moved into fusion and finally progressive rock, before settling into a busy schedule of studio drumming and education. In 2000, he opened his own drum school (at the age of 28), which now enrolls over 150 students. Czenia is featured on more than a dozen albums and three DVDs, and was named œBest Drummer at the prestigious German Rock and Pop Awards in 2007.