By 1985, he was playing house and block parties in his local Bronx neighborhood of New York, as well as engineering and mixing. (Erasure’s The Two Ring Circus features his earliest dabblings in the studio.) His first nightclub residency was at the Devil’s Nest, in the Bronx, and later he moved to Roseland, Studio 54 and the Palladium in Manhattan. During the 1990s, Vega was playing at one of the most influential nightclubs for house music, The Sound Factory Bar. By the mid-90s, the Masters At Work team had Vega spending less time behind the turntables and more time in the studio as the team’s remixing skills became legendary.