Label of the Month: KNTXT

At this point, calling Charlotte de Witte a superstar almost feels redundant – but the best part is, she still moves through the world like a raver chasing the next great pulse locking moment. 

Chatting with the down-to-earth techno juggernaut, it's easy to forget she has 4.3 million followers on Instagram, over 2.1 million monthly listeners on Spotify, and sells out huge venues. Those statistics matter in her ability to reach many ears – something she is mindful of – but it hasn't changed the way she approaches life. Even with a crazy schedule, her preferred state is to go with the flow and to live a life unrestricted by limits or goals. In turn, her drive, kindness, and penchant for hard beats have gotten her far in the global DJ landscape, and it's still only up from here.

At the end of the day, the techno maven just wants to make people dance and experience the freedom and trance-like state that captivated her as a teen in Ghent.

“The many hours I spent in clubs when I was young, and the many hours spent DJing in clubs since, helped me understand what a person would want to hear. Which elements will make you float, will make you go into a trance – it’s very subjective,” de Witte muses, calling in from her idyllic backyard outside of Lisbon, with an expansive blue sky framing her face.

KNTXT has become the place for her vision of transcendent techno and where she shares the spotlight with artists she's excited about. She launched the label in 2019 – a year before she was named DJ Mag's No. 1 Alternative DJ –as her career as a globally in-demand DJ was skyrocketing.

"I mainly wanted it to be a safe space for other artists to express themselves. A home where they could be themselves and get support for their skills and vision, without compromise," de Witte says about her reason for starting KNTXT.

"I'm very happy with the existence of KNTXT and the journey we've made so far. Like any journey, it's had some ups and downs, but the joy I get from supporting others and offering a platform is tremendous. Next to that, KNTXT is a creative hub and a personal safe space in which I can express myself, which is honestly such a luxurious thing to have."

All KNTXT releases get a vinyl pressing, something de Witte sees as intrinsically linked with electronic music labels. Three years ago, she launched the RPM sub-label to also be able to release and spotlight more music in a digital-only format. Just like de Witte, KNTXT is always growing and evolving.

"We are not a purist label, which comes from the fact that when I started DJing, I struggled to feel really accepted by the purist techno community. So, maybe in my own way, I started rebelling a bit… Because I didn't want to be put in a box, I also didn't allow the label to be put in a box, even though, in essence, it is techno-plus," she says with a smile.

The label is primarily focused on music de Witte can play in her sets, as that's where she can best support the tracks.

“My strength with KNTXT is that we have good numbers on social media, so I can really help push a release, and as a consequence, also the artist. In a time where music is released so often and it is so difficult to stand out, I can make a little bit of a difference. So if I don't play the music, there's less visibility. That is the main reason for signing an artist, to try and offer a big platform.” she explains. "It's really nice to be able to offer that to people, to be the trampoline and to watch them spread their wings."

KNTXT is largely responsible for amplifying Indira Paganotto's career to a global scale, among other exciting left-field "techno-plus" acts. In 2021, KNTXT launched an annual demo submissions program to find rising talent. The Spanish techno and psy-trance queen's demos captivated de Witte, who released her 2021 Himalaya and 2022 Lions of God EPs, and booked her for a string of label parties. 

Acid Asian also found success through the demo program. He was working as a pharmacist in Brazil when KNTXT put out his 2022 debut EP, Break into Acid. He's since released three EPs with them and also played several KNTXT parties, and has been able to quit his day job to focus on music. Berlin-based, Italy-born artist and Beatport Next alumni Alignment, who slings trance-infused hard techno, has also seen a major boost since linking with KNTXT in 2020, where he's dropped five EPs, including Mystical Energy earlier this year.

Back when de Witte was a young DJ cutting her teeth in Belgium (she started DJing electro at 17 as Raving George), Tiga gave her a hand up to a global audience. He was an early champion of hers, dropping her first release under her own name – the deep, melodic and smoky Weltschmerz EP – on his Turbo Recordings in 2015.

Now, 10 years after that first taste of her hard-hitting, expansive vision of techno – with 25 EPs under her belt and 15 years into her DJ career – she is finally ready to share her full-length musical statement. 

Her self-titled debut album, which dropped on November 7 via KNTXT, is a tribute to her club and techno roots. Charlotte de Witte used the 11-track project to color further outside of the lines of banging techno. There're doses of ambient, electro, trance and rave music, with plenty of haunting vocals – and even a breakbeat track ("Higher").

"The singles – "The Realm," "No Division," and "The Heads That Know" – are the three most peak-time tracks on the album. "Domine" is probably my favorite on the album. [That,] "Memento Mori," and "After The Fall" with Lisa Gerrard, they're much more deep and hypnotic. I wouldn't be able to release as many of those types of tracks on EPs."

She's also been keeping things interesting on the DJ side, finding ways to connect with and surprise fans with street parties and sets at smaller clubs, like the beloved 300-capacity Public Records in Brooklyn, New York. That gig was part of her NYC takeover in May, where she played six shows at different clubs across the city, along with a free surprise set on the Williamsburg Bridge. (She also did a five-date London takeover in October.) 

This past week, she celebrated the album release with a massive Los Angeles takeover where she hosted a surprise pop-up party and performed five more sold-out shows across three days at huge outdoor arenas and underground venues across the city.

"With the album, we also started hosting more street parties… [which] has been game-changing. I didn't realize how much of a personal mission that would be until I started doing them. There are few shows where I get as much love and reward and a sense of purpose as playing those parties because you're playing an hour of music for free for people. It's very beautiful to see how everybody is engaging, interacting and having a good time," she says.

As for her global KNTXT parties, where she shares the bill with artists she's signed and often does B2B sets with them, she's pausing to re-envision them so they remain special. Her main concern is outshining the support acts, which defeats the purpose of the parties. For now, she tries to make sure she can select her support acts to have KNTXT artists as well as local DJs open her sets.

A few months before she announced her album, de Witte caused a hullabaloo with fellow Belgian techno superstar Amelie Lens; first for their instantly sold-out B2B shows at Ghent's iconic 23,000 capacity rave venue Flanders Expo, and soon after for their banging, enchanting One Mind EP. They released it jointly on KNTXT and Exhale on Feb. 6, before the third and final gig.

They techno stars have been friends for years and began their careers and ascents around the same time, but they consciously uncoupled professionally because of constant comparison, something they called out in a joint interview at ADE last year. The moment was celebratory, now that they could "come together from a point of strength," as de Witte says. And while she says the B2Bs were "very nice for us" and "surprisingly easy," don't expect to get another anytime soon.

“We went with the flow and it turned out very well. She's a very good DJ, also technically, so it was really a pleasure to play those shows… Every time I mixed in a track, she smiled. When she mixed a track, I smiled. We were supporting each other. That was the nicest thing for me to notice,” the "No Division" producer reflects. "We would love to do it again, but we want to keep it special…maybe in another 15 years."

Charlotte de Witte will be returning for her fifth annual Flanders Expo shows on Feb. 6 and 7, where she'll celebrate her fifteenth anniversary as an artist. It's a special hometown venue for her, home to the iconic I Love Techno festival she attended as teen, one of Belgium's biggest dance music events that ran from 1995 to 2014 and gathered around 35,000 ravers at its peak.

To honor her Ghent rave roots, de Witte launched the Époque sub-label in 2024 to rework past dance hits. It's a passion project, involving lots of red tape to find the track's owners and locate stems hiding on old hard drives. Thus, there's only three (excellent) releases so far, the first being ANNA's rework of Niels Van Gogh's 1998 electro-soaked trance tune "Pulverturm." The most recent is de Witte's techno-infused rework of Scoop's 1999 ravey hit "Drop It," preceded by her driving update of Push's 1998 moody trance classic "Universal Nation." So far, it's been focused on Belgium, but she's open to expanding it.

A track that has stuck with her from her early days of DJing is Len Faki's Podium Mix of Dustin Zahn's "Stranger," which she heard at a festival she was playing. "My god, the power and simplicity of this track. It's really fantastic. That's what I love the most about techno music; it's very aggressive but less is more," de Witte reflects.

17 years ago, she fell in love with electronic music and clubbing in Ghent and soon after started DJing – that energy and passion has continued to fuel her artistry and career to incredible heights. "Going out as a 16, 17–year-old just completely opened my eyes to a world that I didn't even know existed, but also completely sucked me in and conquered my heart," she explains.

"I was captured by the beauty of it all, and the very primal feeling of being together and moving to the rhythm and feeling the beat pounding in your chest. It's always been a very magical, powerful concept to me."