By Luke Nickel
When I sit down to interview Luigi Di Venere in Berlin, he asks if he should turn off the music. The sound is so quiet I barely hear it—some gurgling water that is St. GIGA’s album Sound of the Earth, part of a Japanese ambient recording series. He offers me green tea in a cast-iron teapot and moves what he calls a “composition” out of the way. It’s a novel, Clarice Lispector’s The Passion According to G.H., with some cock rings on top.
At this point, he relaxes a bit and gets animated. I start by asking about his party, Power Dance Club, beloved in Berlin’s gay scene, which I last attended at New Year’s.
There must have been almost 2000 people there, I tell him.
He laughs: “Almost 4000! It was Berghain numbers. I’m pretty shocked and happy about it. Hopefully, we keep the values intact.”
What inspired you to start Power Dance Club?
“The idea behind Power Dance Club is the empowerment we have when we’re together, when we dance, when we share a little euphoria, a little happiness.”
Luigi Di Venere started the party in 2018 in Athens after a one-off night called Threesome on Acid, created with collaborators Stathis, Maria Politi, and the team from Cocktail D’Amore. He tells me he and Stathis both had the same idea: “Why not start a party series and take over different locations and see what’s possible?”
He was already a full-time Berliner then. “I noticed that, at the parties here, the energy was starting to feel a bit stale.”
He remembers the excitement he once felt in Berlin nightlife, especially at clubs like Ohm, a smaller space in Tresor, in Berlin’s Kreuzberg neighbourhood. At events like Same Bitches, he tells me, it’d be so busy that he never actually made it inside.
“We just hung out outside in the garden. It was beautiful!”
One day in Reuterkiez in Berlin Neukölln, he ran into fellow promoter Danilo (Buttons). “He said to me, ‘Luigi, I wanna do a party with you. Do you want to do a party with me?’” That’s how Power Dance Club came to Berlin.
We both feel that, at Power Dance Club, that old-school Berlin excitement is back.
Do you see the dance floor as a political space?
“If politics is about sharing ideas and feeling safe to express ourselves, dance floors are political.”
But Luigi Di Venere is careful not to over-romanticise it. “I see politics as something so distant from myself, something that belongs to people with big egos and bad intentions.”
What genre is getting you going right now?
“Deep, a bit more minimalistic tech house, like early tech house, very UK. It’s a Terry Francis sound, an old progressive sound.”
Here, Luigi Di Venere looks through files on a USB stick for some standout tracks. He shares one he really loves now, called “Cut the Midrange” by Watchman, remixed by The Timewriter, from 1996, originally released on the German label Phuture Wax.
I see his computer screen and ask him how he organises his music.
“My library is divided by month and events,” he says. He loves the process of preparing and creating new track lists for each event that he can look at later. At the end of each season, he rearranges his favourite tracks by genre.
Are there different sounds for summer and winter?
“Winter is chunky, more sexy. It’s indoor, it’s foggy, more sexual in general. Summer has this tendency to go Balearic, more house, more Chicago.”
He points out that, when playing at venues like Kreuzwerk’s greenhouse dance floor or in Lab, Berlin’s legendary gay fetish club, “the vibes always outweigh the season”.
He tells me he loves to prepare, so I have to ask: With so much preparation, what stays spontaneous? Here he gets excited: “I have fun mixing. I have fun putting loops of things, letting things unfold in the moment.”
You’re also a producer. How did you move from DJing to production?
I loved his 2025 release, Spherical Waves, and wanted to ask about his journey to production.
“It’s important for a DJ to define an identity and bring something to the table, condense their personality to a song.” Once he found that idea, he committed to learning production software and synthesisers.
But his desire to make music goes back to childhood—he always wanted to be a musician.
“I studied music a bit when I was a kid, but not properly.” He used to play piano, but his parents couldn’t afford to buy him a full-sized one.
He laughs: “It is understandable, but they bought me a tiny keyboard, like very tiny, and I got so upset, I stopped playing.” I laugh too and tell him it’s ironic that he now produces tracks mostly on a small synthesiser.
His debut album, TIGERS EYE, was released in 2022 on Cocktail D’Amore and Ene Records as part of a duo project called Solidair with Jules Etienne.
Around this time, he met his friend and collaborator Olaf Yarce, aka Neu Verboten. “We connected online through our love for music. With Olaf, I learned more tricks with Ableton and got more familiar with the software.”
One collaboration that came from that time: the EP Discorgy by Affekt Unit, a duo project between Luigi Di Venere and Neu Verboten, who together founded Philoxenia Records.
Yarce had a studio above club Renate in Berlin, right by the river. “It was amazing. Water dripped from the ceiling. We had buckets out. But at the same time, it was so much fun because while we were making music, sometimes on Saturday night, the club was going on in the ground floor.”
How do you start a track?
“I just put the kick drum on,” he says. “Then I either start playing around with the soundscape. It could just be this sound,” he says, hitting a fan in his apartment to make a clanking noise. “From there, I just start building, like building a house.” I ask what kind of house he imagines.
“Very thick walls,” he says.
His upcoming release, Innuendo, will come out on a Power Dance Club collaboration album, featuring multiple artists who play regularly at the party.
“My next release is a thick, deep house vibe with acid, and a bit of EBM because I think that that’s my style now. I didn’t know that, but now I just can’t help myself, I end up doing EBM things.”
The term EBM, or electronic body music, was coined by Kraftwerk in the 1970s and refers to a genre of early electronic dance music. He says if anyone wants to dig into it, read about it here.
Tell me about Philoxenia Records.
Working with Yarce led to the Berlin-based record label Philoxenia. When I ask what inspired it, he says it was born out of a passion for the sound of late 80s Frankfurt house music.
“Chicago house started to get translated in European terms by these guys who were running Dorian Gray [a club in Frankfurt]”.
“We got very passionate about the story of Torsten Frenslau in particular, who was one of the residents of Dorian Gray, and who died very young in a car accident. He was not even 30 years old, I think, and left behind lots of amazing ideas.”
He says he wanted to continue a music that felt cut off, a style of “post-Cold War house music, it’s funny, it’s dark, there is some kind of TV news vocals going on.”
He shares an example—listen below.
Luigi Di Venere and Yarce explored the same technology Frenslau used. They thought: “We love his story. Why don’t we keep going with his sound?”
He doesn’t want to be limited to one historical sound, though, and he says the label will keep evolving. “If you stick to one sound, it gets boring, and then you really have to be lucky with the trend.”
“I think it’s cool to focus on a sound when it’s not trendy anymore. Just keep doing this thing like a nerd. I love glamorous nerds.”
Luigi Di Venere’s favourite glamorous nerds: “Richie Hawtin is such a glamorous nerd. And Ricardo Villalobos!”
What do you do on days off?
“I read a lot. That’s my holiday, just reading.” Luigi Di Venere’s shelves are full of books. Right now, he’s reading the aforementioned The Passion According to G.H. as well as Ears to the Ground: Adventures in Field Recording and Electronic Music by Ben Murphy.
He’s also reading Quartet for the End of Time: On Music, Grief and Birdsong by Michael Symmons Roberts.
This one is difficult. “It needs a tough mindset to read it in, because he’s basically processing the death of his parents through analysing this piece of music.” Olivier Messiaen’s Quatuor pour la fin du Temps (Quartet for the End of Time) is a landmark 20th-century chamber piece. Messiaen composed and premiered it while in a concentration camp.
It premiered on January 15, 1941, in the Stalag VIII-A camp in Görlitz (then Silesia) before an audience of prisoners and guards. The instrumentation was dictated by the specific prisoners available to play: a cellist, a clarinet player, a violinist, and a pianist.
“It’s really sinister,” Luigi says of the piece. “There’s some hope in it, but it’s really dark.”
It seems I’ve steered this to a dark place, so I aim lighter:
You love perfume: What’s your scent playlist right now?
“Aventus Creed for daytime, Narcotico from Meo Fusciuni for nighttime, and Gannymede from Marc-Antoine Barrois for when I feel otherworldly.”
What does success mean to you?
“It’s really a capitalist idea, this idea of attaining success,” he says.
“I want to concentrate on living day by day with satisfaction and gratitutde. That, for me, is being a success. And I suppose the ultimate success is to have my own house close to the sea in the countryside.”
He thinks back to Puglia, a southern region of Italy. “When I’m old, I imagine myself there. That’s where I come from. I imagine a thick olive tree and cicadas”.
Let’s talk identity, briefly.
“I’m queer and gay,” he says, though it took him time to come around to queer as a label.
As a kid, “I played with Barbie. I stole lipstick from my grandmother’s hairdresser when she would get her hair done,” he says. He loved being around women and remembers his mom’s hairdresser, Clarissa, a trans woman, who often came to their house. “I loved hanging out with her. I loved the smell of the hair dryer.”
Does this queerness find its way into his music? Totally, he says. At one point, he was “obsessed” with 90s house tracks that have orgasms on them, but then he realised it’s only women orgasming. “These 90s house dudes making music, they were all high on coke, objectifying women.” So he decided to record his own track featuring his own orgasm, called Booty Call, recorded with Olaf Yarce as Affekt Unit.
What’s next?
His upcoming release, Inneundo, will be part of a Power Dance Club compilation album called PDC TRAXX and will feature Power Dance Club residents. The release will be accompanied by a 24-hour party at the end of May.
He also has a release planned for later this year on Andre Zimmer‘s Big Trouble Records, but he doesn’t have any more details about that one that he’s ready to share.
Aside from that, he’s already thinking about New Year’s. “It’s a long one this time. The first of January is on a Friday. It’s going to be insane.” ✦
Follow Luigi Di Venere on Instagram and RA, and check out Philoxenia Records on Bandcamp.
Dr Luke Nickel is an award-winning Canadian multidisciplinary artist, writer, and composer living in Berlin. His interests include experimental music, speculative fiction, roller coasters, and contemporary performance. He’s eager to write about people and practices on the margins of the mainstream.
Words: Luke Nickel
Edits: Alexander Cheves
Images: Mara Menzel + additional images courtesy of the artist
