Puhhhh... That's a tough one: Born on the 22th of October, 1981 in Graz, Markus Hollenstein spent his earliest years in Dietersdorf, which is in the rural aeras round the styrian capital. It was in this time when he got influenced with jazz, funk and psychodelic rock, cause his mother, who was a teacher for music in highschool then, played records all the time...
Soon Hollenstein himself put the records on the decks (ab)using his "mother's finest" collection, his favourites ranged from Michael Jackson to Pink Floyd. He enjoyed listening to his mother's beautiful voice, when she sang him lullabies. His brother Felix and his sister Anna also enjoyed the sounds he put on, singing and dancing round. Hollenstein always wanted to be a singer and a pop-star, he seriously felt like the "märchenprinz" (EAV).
He was about five years old, when his parents divorced and after a short stay in the house of his father's new flame, they all moved together to burgenland... After spendig his "volksschule" time in Neustift bei Güssing, a small village near the hungarian border, he attended the Gymnasium in Fürstenfeld, which was about half an hour per car away.
There he met his first band members and friends: When he was 14, they found a band named TRIXX. He played bass and wrote most of the texts and songs, the style was crossover partly with german lyrics, but most of the time they just jammed in any thinkable way, from punk to funk and also very jazzy...
The years had passed and just after the final exams the band split up, although they won the "america is waiting" newcomer award (burgenland) and had some local success. Hollenstein teamed up with the creative members of "Notstand", which was another crossover band from Fürstenfeld, forming ARTO... There he got in touch with electronics for the first time and also with DJing, for his former saxophonist Max Leimstättner and his drummer Clemens Reisner got into spinning the wheels and also had some little radioshow on Antenne4 then.
Hollenstein got deeply into the sounds and styles, espacially the amsterdam D&B stuff, so that he formed the CREAM ART COLLECTIVE (http://www.myspace.com/creamartcollective) together with his former singer Peter Zotter aka San Pedro, the skate-pro Andreas "Eddi" Eder-Halbedl aka Ètre and Markus Prassl aka Antimelon... Their style touched nearly any thinkable electronic realm and soon they had their first local gigs and jams.
After his finals at the BG Fürstenfeld he moved to Linz to study music- and mediatechnology at the Bruckner University with his most influential teacher Adelhard Roidinger. He told his ARTO-mates about it and after half a year the sounddesigner Herbert Kopitar and the drummer/producer Armin Koch aka mohn_manola joined him in his studies and moved together in a flat... They produced lots of music there, some of it is still a stable in Hollenstein's reportoir. In Winter 2002 he also started jazz bass with Adelhard Roidinger, just to leave the Bruckner University with much inspiration, spiritual gifts and also a diploma in music- and mediatechnology in summer 2003. There was also nice colaborations with Wolfgang Sambs, Andreas deSantis, Klaus Suppan, Matthias Pichler and Sebastian Weiss, which resulted in some of his finest productions ever made...
Since this time Hollenstein lives in Vienna, where he also studies cultural and social anthropology. He has his HipHop Homies known as the Anti Elite and still is with his DJ mates from the Cream Art Collective, trying to burst Vienna with unknown Balkanism, Brazil, NuJazz, Funk and TripHop at it's finest...