FOR a girl who doesn’t like techno music, Caitlin Moe sure knows how to tear up a set.
Not on the turntables — she leaves that up to the actual deejay. Instead, the 21-year-old beauty grips the neck of her electric violin and plays over the pounding bass with enough raw female fury to hypnotize a club full of even the most jaded ravers.
As the Fashion’s Night Out crowd at a packed DKNY store discovered, it’s nearly impossible to look away once Moe’s face becomes flushed with concentration, her hips gyrating in time to her bowing. The electric violin she plays looks and sounds like something off the Starship Enterprise, light years away from the New York Philharmonic.
“Very strict classical violinists are disgusted with me,” explains Moe before a show at Saks Fifth Avenue. “But none of my friends would come if I stuck only to acoustic violin. This shows younger people that violin music is not some foreign, 16th-century relic.”
For the past few months, Moe has been touring with party deejay Mia Moretti, 25. The women are a finely tuned duo, with live strings mellowing out the driving bass tracks just so.
When Moe really gets into it, she seems to channel Jim Morrison, dropping back on her knees until her head touches the stage, violin wailing the entire time.
It’s no wonder she and Moretti have been flying to the Bahamas twice a month for a residency at the Atlantis resort. Or that Moe and her electric violin will soon be joining the rocking Trans-Siberian Orchestra on its West Coast tour.
It’s a long way from her first violin lesson in Gainesville, Fla., at age 4. She still credits her classical training with instilling structure and discipline on her music. Her teachers, though, criticized her for dancing to the music — an early hint that this violinist was not meant for life in the orchestra pit.
Yet despite Moe’s electric success, classic violin remains her true love. Her upcoming debut album seems to favor acoustic sounds, not to mention her own strong singing voice (hear preview tracks at caitlinmoe.com.)
“I’ll always prefer playing acoustic to electric,” she says. “It’s just so much more intimate. With the electric violin you don’t feel the vibrations and are so disconnected from the music. Then again, I just started experimenting with distortion pedals, so we’ll see what happens.”
jsilverman@nypost.com