What is the "industrial trilogy" actually made of?

Curses, the dark disco and EBM project of New York-born, Berlin-based producer Luca Venezia, has spent five years assembling one of the more obsessive archival projects in underground club music. The Next Wave Acid Punx series, released through Eskimo Recordings, closed this June with its third and final chapter, Next Wave Acid Punx TROIS, a 46-track, three-LP (or three-CD) set that Venezia frames as an industrial trilogy.

The first volume leaned into new beat, the mutant, pitched-down electro-techno hybrid that came out of Belgium in the mid-1980s. The second went deeper into dark wave and post-punk, the guitars-and-drum-machines sound of the same decade. TROIS closes the arc where it started to bleed into rave: proto-techno, EBM and Italo cuts that trace the moment industrial music turned into dancefloor music, told through scenes in Spain, Belgium, Germany, Italy, the US and the UK.

Some of the digging borders on detective work. To license "Jet Harris Tecno Dub" by Megabeat, a Spanish act tied to Valencia's Ruta del Bakalao scene, Venezia said he had to work through intermediaries in broken Spanish to reach a trio that had gone almost entirely offline. That kind of legwork is the difference between a nostalgia comp and an actual document.

Why does Curses call his sound punk, not techno?

Venezia grew up in a Tribeca loft, sang gospel at the Professional Performing Arts School (alongside a young Alicia Keys), and got into electronic music through punk and hardcore before he ever touched a drum machine. He named Front 242, Ministry, Fugazi and Sonic Youth as formative listening, next to DJ Shadow, Boards of Canada and Aphex Twin.

"I always had a punk approach to electronic music, because I originally came from bands," he told Groove.

He traces that directly to his first rave, at Metropolis Club in Queens at 13 or 14. "The energy was the same as at punk shows, only in a completely new context," he said. It is why Next Wave Acid Punx reads less like a genre exercise than a lineage: EBM, industrial and new beat as the actual ancestors of techno, not a footnote to it.

What comes next for Luca Venezia?

Closing the trilogy does not mean slowing down. Venezia runs his own label, Ombra International, founded in 2016, and continues to release as Tutto Vettro, a project with Mala Ika; their track "Eternal" takes its cue from Robert Miles' "Children." He told Groove he is currently watching the rave scenes in Bogotá and Tbilisi for what comes next, the same instinct that sent him digging through 1980s Valencia and Antwerp for this trilogy.

Melancholy, he said, is not a weakness in that work.

"For me, melancholy is never a burden. On the contrary, it sharpens your view of the world and makes creativity possible at all."