Charlotte De Witte at Coachella 2024: Building techno’s new temple

Before Charlotte De Witte’s set this year, techno didn’t have an obvious home at Coachella.

For decades, the Sahara tent was one established space for techno, with artists like Kevin Saunderson and Richie Hawtin playing there as far back as 1999. In the 2010s, Martin Garrix and Dillon Francis took over Sahara with their giant forms of dance music. Consequently, artists in the house and techno realm started playing the Yuma tent, Coachella’s onsite nightclub.

Since then, Yuma has hosted myriad major players in techno — from Drumcode boss Adam Beyer to uptempo queen Amelie Lens and the underground mysticism of Nicole Moudaber. But now, techno is out of the underground, and artists dealing techno beats can be found on almost every stage.

Last year, when Calvin Harris closed the main stage Saturday night with his Returning to the Desert set, he played UMEK’s stomping techno track, Collision Wall. Also in 2023, house mavens Fisher and Chris Lake drew an enormous crowd to the Outdoor stage where they peppered a house set with ample dashes of techno.

Plenty of non-techno DJs, such as John Summit, Dom Dolla, and Grimes, played a few techno tracks during their turns at Sahara this year.

You can hear techno everywhere at Coachella. But where is the best place for it? Charlotte De Witte answered that question with her Overdrive set during Weekend 2: the Mojave tent.

What makes Mojave special for Charlotte’s thundering beats is its outdoor setting. Ravers can still enjoy the festival feel, but its curved metallic megastructure creates a massive industrial aesthetic. And because it’s a standard stage that hosts all different types of artists, the production is completely customisable. The artist has free rein over how they will present their set which they (likely) curated especially for Coachella.

Charlotte curated her set especially for Coachella, pushing every element of Mojave to its limit — in the best way.

There were five rotating rectangular towers behind her as she DJ’d. They could switch from pure LED screens on one side to the other side where constructions of lights and lasers shifted and swerved like motorcycles going around a high-speed race track (which is the imagery she intended to evoke with her Overdrive EP).

The feel remained consistently heavy with Overdrive energy, but with 75 minutes (one of the longer sets at Coachella) she also took the crowd through a series of different moods. Some required icy white lasers that were extra visible under the structure of the Mojave. Others were pure acid and the squelching 303 lines overlapped with equally distraught red flashes.

Whatever Charlotte decided to do, standing in the Mojave, she was in the exact right place for an authentic techno experience.

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