For drummer, studio musician, composer and producer Christian Eigner, music has been a part of life since he was a small child. Born in 1971, he began drumming at the age of four by learning his favorite music by ear. By age 16 he was already a studio drummer for top Austrian acts and studying jazz drumming at the Vienna Conservatory. In 1995, he moved to London and fell right into session work with some of the top producers and musicians in the studio scene. Two years later, he became the first drummer for electronic pop icons Depeche Mode and has been part of the band ever since. His impact on their sound was immediately evident. Since joining, he’s embarked on six globe-crossing tours, and co-wrote songs, including "Cover Me," "Poison Heart," "Hole to Feed" and the Grammy-nominated "Suffer Well" from the album, Playing the Angel.

In 2007, Eigner founded his own studio in Austria and writes, produces and records on albums and projects for a variety of artists and brands. For Christian, his studio and the work he’s able to do there is the perfect complement to life on the road. Because his sound is a blend of so many styles and influences, he can use the studio as the perfect playground to truly let the language he has developed over his life-long immersion in music run free. Built for a musician who prefers to physically play all his ideas, his setup allows him to take performances from his experimental percussion setup and vault of acoustic instruments and transform them into baselines and arpeggios, sound effects, approximations of the natural world and more. True to his quest for the perfect recorded sound, Christian keeps all his custom drum kits, vintage organs, classic analog synths and selection of traditional folk instruments patched into his recording rig and has refined the sound of this studio-as-instrument to its sonic peak. And with the founding of a new company focusing on music for film, Eigner is ready to expand his practice into the art of the moving image where he can exploit every dimension of his unique creativity to transform emotion into sound.

by Frank Cifarelli