techno · acid

Nina Kraviz

1 upcoming festival

Siberian-born DJ and label head whose sets swerve from acid to raw hardware techno, with her own voice sitting on the records.

Nina Kraviz grew up in Irkutsk, in eastern Siberia, and trained as a dentist, gaining a residency in Moscow. Before turning to music full time she held a string of odd jobs, among them fixing cosmonauts' teeth, hosting a local radio show in Irkutsk, writing for a fanzine and holding a Friday-night club residency, groundwork for the DJ career that followed.

In 2005 she was accepted into the Red Bull Music Academy in Seattle but could not get a visa, attending the following year in Melbourne instead. By 2008 she held a regular night at Moscow's Propaganda Club. Her early records appeared on Underground Quality and Rekids, the latter releasing her self-titled debut album in 2012. "Ghetto Kraviz," with her half-spoken vocal over a stripped drum track, is the one most people know.

In 2014 she started the трип (Trip) label, which put out music by Bjarki, PTU and Population One alongside her own edits and reissues, and later added Galaxiid. Her sets lean on hardware and on records that sound unfinished on purpose, moving between 303 acid, blunt early-nineties techno and the odd trance or breakbeat detour. She mixed the forty-eighth instalment of the DJ-Kicks series in 2015.

Kraviz has worked outside club records too. She helped write music for the 2020 video game Cyberpunk 2077 and voiced her own cameo in both its Russian and English versions. In 2021 she joined Ben Sims, Oscar Mulero and Marcel Dettmann on PX099, a techno compilation raising awareness of Colombia's social unrest. In 2023 Jean-Michel Jarre invited her onto a remake of his track "Sex in the Machine."

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