The last time we saw Luca Pointzero, he was handling flyers, tickets, and cash for his illegal Caustic rave in Hackney with Acid Techno DJ legends such as D.A.V.E. The Drummer and Chris Liberator.
He was the first to come on location, downloading and setting up Caustic mobile Soundsystem from his van. Caustic was just one of many connected clusters like Malfaiteurs, bringing techno underground, again. “Nearly half of British clubs have been shut down in the last decade, leading to the rise of sanitized ‘superclubs’ under the heavy gaze of tight security.”
Then, in 2019, Luca disappeared after running Caustic illegal raves for four years. Then a year later, we got a call from him. Luca went to Los Angeles, bought a car, and drove to Northern California, looking for weed farms and a job. He stopped in a village, left his vehicle, and jumped into a farmer’s car—a guy with a long beard and a shotgun next to his seat. “Welcome to California,” he said, laughing.
Farms are far away from the limelight of the big cities. Luca lived for two years in a tent in the desert with 15 people, with no wi-fi and frequent encounters with rattlesnakes, one of which almost killed one of his comrades in a desperate one-hour drive to the closest hospital. This is an area where people disappear or get killed and buried, their bodies never to be found. And, of course, he was seen raving at Renegade, the “illegal” version of Burning Man. What the fuck was he doing there?
Luca moved to Detroit this year to get a life and see with his own eyes where techno started from. And you can hear this city’s impact in his latest production and DJ sets.
I asked Luca why he had left England. “For the simplest of reasons, love,” he said. But I feel he also wanted to break from his past and start again. In 2021, he turned Caustic into an online event streaming underground techno DJs worldwide, relying on us at Public Pressure to organize all the logistics and marketing strategies.
So, when we told Luca we were moving to Web3, he decided it was time to launch Caustic as a Web3-only techno label, from somewhere in the US between LA and Detroit.
Join Caustic taking over Public Pressure Discord Radio Sunday 12 June from 6 pm:
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