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Under the Lime light
A rocker at heart, Drop the Lime finds his voice in electronic music.
Pass him on the street, and you’d never guess Luca Venezia is one of the leading figures on the U.S. bass-music scene. His ’50s greaser style—tattoos, slim denim, ample pomade—doesn’t seem to befit a genre-defying DJ and producer. But under the nom de guerre Drop the Lime, Venezia is just that. His music, which straddles the line between electro and dubstep, has garnered acclaim in the dance-music world and helped reshape electronic music in his hometown of New York City. Through it all, he hasn’t lost touch with his rock & roll roots.
Born to an ex-hippie photographer mother and an Abstract Expressionist painter father, Venezia was encouraged to pursue his artistic inclinations at an early age. “My parents would always play Ritchie Valens, Chet Atkins or Roy Orbison, so I wanted to play guitar, be a musician or a lead singer, have the ladies swoon over you,” the jovial 28-year-old says. His fondness for early American rock occasionally sees him spinning exclusive rockabilly, doo-wop and sock-hop sets, but lately he’s used those sounds to spice up his club sets, like the one at Smart Bar Friday 23. “It triggers something in people when they’re experiencing more organic dance music,” he says. “Rockabilly was made to be danced to, so it’s the root of [dance music] even though it’s so far removed from what we hear today.”
Though Venezia dabbled in rock bands just out of high school—including a gig at legendary New York venue CBGB—it wasn’t until he discovered dance music at his first rave that he found his musical footing. “I saw thousands of chicks going crazy to a DJ, and I realized I could make all these people dance and still get the girls,” he says with a hearty laugh.
Trouble & Bass began as a party outlet for Venezia and his friends, including onetime XLR8R magazine editor Vivian Host. “Nobody was playing bass-oriented music in New York,” Venezia explains. Despite the city’s well-regarded house-music scene, the grimier side of electronica has never been as well represented. “We were making drum ’n’ bass at a house tempo. I shopped a few demos and it didn’t really fit anywhere, so I decided I needed to make a label.” Now Trouble & Bass the label is home to Stockholm-based synth-pop starlet Jinder, electro upstart AC Slater and Host’s ghetto-step productions as Star Eyes.
Trouble & Bass is also, of course, the main outlet for Venezia to release his own music. His productions may not have the guitar twang of his favorite rock records, but they embody rock’s boozed-up fuck-all attitude Though he resists categorizing his sound—“I just want it to be music”—it’s very much a composite of his influences. Venezia’s music is anything but subtle. Building upon beats from his early rave days, he makes fast-paced dance-floor destroyers that encompass dubstep’s undulating bass pulses, drum ’n’ bass’s drum breaks, and techno and electro’s four-on-the-floor dance rhythms.
Less straightforward than Venezia’s musical influences is the meaning behind his handle, Drop the Lime. The third-generation Italian-American says, “The lemons in Sicily are huge, like the size of a fucking boxing glove, and they use them to make limoncello,” he says. So…what about the lime? He explains that, according to an old wives’ tale, if you pick a green, unripe lemon and it stays green, you’ll have good fortune. “And then I’ve always been influenced by U.K. music,” he adds. “So there’s the whole limey thing, too, ya know?”
Drop the Lime rolls into Smart Bar Friday 23.
