It is 1982, a school park in Queens is rocking, and a young DJ is setting the party off with a couple of turntables. That is how Onionz tells his own origin story, and it explains a lot about the duo he went on to form. Born Andrew Venegas, he learned music first from his father, Victor Venegas, who played upright bass with the kings of Latin jazz, Mongo Santamaria, Tito Puente and Celia Cruz among them. Before he was ten, Onionz was playing percussion alongside him, at times on stage with Candido, Steve Berrios and Paquito D'Rivera.
He grew up in Bayside, Queens, and began mixing hip-hop, breakbeat and disco as a kid at Woodside's Irish Cottage, moving into techno by the end of the '80s and playing some of the same rooms as his father, including the Village Gate and Club USA. That upbringing put rhythm at the centre of everything. For Onionz, DJing has always been about transformation: taking the rhythm and making it change without a seam. Latin percussion, hip-hop's park-jam energy and house music's endless groove all live in his sets.
In 1994 he founded Electrik Soul Recordings, which went on to release early work from Kaskade, Moby and Dubtribe Sound System. In 1997 he formed Onionz & Master D with Mike Mandel. Together they built a sound on solid beat loops, south-of-the-border percussion and heavy bass, house music that hits hard but always swings.
Time on the road in more than thirty countries has fed more than a hundred studio projects, including work with the 6400 Crew circle of Tony Hewitt, Halo, Hipp-E and Joeski, the bi-coastal network that tied New York and the West Coast together in the late '90s. Onionz has shared bills with The Orb, Josh Wink, Slam and Sven Väth, and in 2002 he was nominated for Billboard's DanceStar USA award for Best Breakthrough DJ. As he puts it, from house to techno, breaks to disco, it has always been about diversity.
To keep it fresh, Onionz has said, "you just have to continuously create and consistently rock it." That attitude, restless, prolific and floor-first, defines the duo. Their records are made for DJs who need a groove they can trust and percussion that can lift a room, and they carry the confidence of producers who learned rhythm long before they learned production.
On Red Melon, Onionz & Master D remixed Dano & Tony's "The Crawl" for the 1998 EP. Their remix sits beside the pitched-down original, the phaser-soaked Phazer Dub and "The Aquarian," bringing New York percussion and heavy bass to one of the label's signature early records.
It was a natural link in a web of friendships. Tony Hewitt was a 6400 Crew partner, and the remix put that circle squarely on a Red Melon record, a meeting of Queens park-jam energy and San Francisco groove that still sounds as lively as the day it was cut.
