Get to know Charlotte de Witte, the Belgian artist crafting dense, dark techno

Charlotte de Witte has never forgotten her first gig. “January 22, 2010,” she recites. “Specific, I know.” The Belgian DJ is currently getting used to playing prestigious venues like Watergate and DC10, but her first outing came in far less salubrious surroundings. “It was a youth club in a small town near Ghent,” she laughs.

“I had never touched a CDJ in my life before I played. My track selection was shit – really bad – and I didn’t know what I was doing. Luckily, it was only a few friends and staff there.”

Although she grew up with a father who worked in the music industry, she tells us his job in sales at EMI meant it was mainly ‘accessible music’ available to her at home: “Compilations of whatever they were selling at the time.” She didn’t discover electronic music for herself until she started exploring the clubs of Ghent at the age of 16. “I went into all these places and found sounds that weren’t mainstream,” she tells us. “It grabbed my attention, and I fell in love with the underground.”

After her initial dalliance with the decks, Charlotte knuckled down to learn her craft and entered a competition on Radio Brussels a year later. She won a slot at Tomorrowland alongside a residency on the station, which she titled Switch Playground and still holds to this day.

With Charlotte steadily building her profile as a club and radio DJ she decided it was time to start making her own music, and began producing two years later. “There was a need in me to create my own sound,” she says. “I needed to see a crowd move to sounds that I had created.” After finding her feet making the kind of pummelling techno that wouldn’t sound out of place in a Ben Klock or Len Faki set, she’s been picked up for two EPs on Sleaze, plus a release on Tiga’s Turbo Recordings.

“Techno is just pure emotion,” she says. “You don’t need a lot of elements to create something incredibly strong-sounding.” And with the big gigs currently flooding in, it seems that plenty agree.

Amy Fielding is a freelance journalist, follow her on Twitter

Charlotte de Witte is performing at Oasis Festival in Morocco this September. For tickets visit theoasisfest.com

This feature is from the September issue of Mixmag