CINTHIE

Berlin’s Cinthie maintains an extremely busy schedule as a dance music producer, touring DJ, owner of a record store and several labels, and mother. First surfacing with a handful of breakbeat electro singles during the early 2000s, she remained active as a DJ, and built up an impressive home studio filled with vintage synthesizers and drum machines. She co-founded the Beste Modus label/collective, which spawned several sublabels and ballooned into the Elevate Berlin record store and label group, and released a bounty of singles, mainly focusing on house with disco and rave influences. Her debut album, Skylines - City Lights, arrived in 2020, and her contribution to the long-running DJ-Kicks mix series was released in 2022.
Cinthie Christl started to DJ when she was 16, after she began working at Saarbrücken, Germany’s Humpty Records during weekends. Spinning any records that came into the store that she liked, she played gigs at local clubs, and WestBam invited her on tour after catching one of her sets. She learned how to produce tracks and released a few breakbeat singles on the Electric Kingdom imprint between 2002 and 2004, with the first two credited to Cinthie aka Vinyl Princess. As her taste in music shifted, she left the label and connected with the D.I.Y. party scene in Berlin, throwing illegal raves and squat parties. She gave birth to her daughter in 2009, and nearly retired from music, but after meeting some friends who were passionate about music and eager to share ideas, they founded Beste Modus in 2012. Following the death of her mother and the dissolution of her marriage, she quit her full-time job working for software company Ableton and dedicated all her time to DJ’ing and producing music, focusing on classic analog synthesizers. She released tracks through Beste Modus and sublabels like We_r House, additionally launching 803 Crystal Grooves in 2018. “Trust,” her first single for Will Saul’s Aus Music, appeared that year, followed by “Mesmerizing” in 2019.
Beste Modus came to an end in 2019, but Cinthie remained active running the Elevate Berlin store, and continually spinning and releasing music. Her full-length debut, Skylines - City Lights, arrived on Aus Music in 2020, containing a mixture of deep house, garage, and electro tracks. Shall Not Fade released Cinthie’s Free Fall EP in 2021, and she remixed tracks by Frankie Knuckles, Tensnake, Dusky, Scuba, and others. Her first commercially issued mix, an entry of !K7′s DJ-Kicks series, appeared in 2022. ~ Paul Simpson