Why Nina Kraviz Just Launched a Brazilian Funk Label

Nina Kraviz has spent over a decade being difficult to pin down, a Siberian-trained dentist turned Moscow techno export who built her reputation on stripped, hissing acid lines and then kept refusing to stay inside them. Even so, her latest move is a genuine left turn. In early March 2026 she introduced treats, a new label positioned as the younger sibling to her long-running imprint трип (Trip Recordings), and the debut release lands on a beach in Rio de Janeiro rather than in a Berlin basement.

The record is called treats 001, it came out February 27, 2026, and its B-side is a baile funk collaboration between Kraviz and a Rio MC named Nick, built from a track she stumbled across online and eventually flew to Brazil to remake in person. That's the short version. The longer one says something about where an artist who helped define 2010s European techno decides to look next, once the genre she mastered stops surprising her.

What Is treats, and Why Did Nina Kraviz Launch It?

treats is a new record label founded by Nina Kraviz, launched in March 2026 as a sister imprint to трип, the label she started in 2014. According to Electronic Groove's report on the launch, treats is built around club-focused tracks that move beyond fixed genre frameworks, music made for the dancefloor first and categorized never. Coverage of the release has described it, only half-jokingly, as trip's "younger, bratty sister," a label with looser rules and less interest in techno orthodoxy than the parent imprint.

That framing matters. трип has spent years developing a specific identity around hardcore, acid, and techno. treats exists, by contrast, to hold whatever doesn't fit that identity but still works on a system at 4am, whether that's Brazilian funk, something closer to hip-hop, or a sound nobody has named yet.

What's Actually on treats 001?

treats 001 is a two-track, one-off record, and both sides pull from Brazilian club music rather than the acid-and-hardcore vocabulary trip is known for. Both tracks reportedly started as records Kraviz was already playing out in her DJ sets before she brought them to the new label, according to details compiled by Electronic Groove and confirmed on the release's own Bandcamp page.

The A-Side: "pitbull de glocada"

The A-side is "pitbull de glocada," credited to Brazilian artist João Lágrima de Ouro featuring MC Pogba, a track steeped in the electronic funk sound coming out of Brazil's club scene. It sets the tone for the whole release: fast, bass-forward, vocal-led, and built for a very different kind of room than the one trip usually soundtracks.

The B-Side: "sem amor" and Its Backstory

The B-side, "sem amor," is Kraviz's own production, made with Rio de Janeiro MC Nick, and it carries the record's most interesting story. Kraviz discovered MC Nick's track "Mete com força e com talento," a baile funk record that has circulated online in several versions since around 2018 through artists including MC Nick, CL Faixa Preta, and DJ Cabide, and produced her own version of it. She and MC Nick later met in person in Brazil, and "sem amor" was recorded on a beach in his hometown in Rio de Janeiro, a detail confirmed on the track's own Bandcamp listing and reported by Electronic Groove. The release is available digitally, on 12-inch colored vinyl, and in bundled merchandise through Bandcamp and Beatport.

What Is Baile Funk, and Where Does It Come From?

Baile funk, also called funk carioca, is a genre of electronic dance music born in the favelas of Rio de Janeiro, built on heavy syncopated bass, chanted or shouted MC vocals, and loops sampled from older American funk and electro records. It is not related to funk in the James Brown sense so much as descended from it through a very specific Brazilian filter.

From Bailes Black to Funk Carioca

The story starts in the 1970s, when DJs in Rio's favelas began throwing large parties known as bailes black, playing imported American soul, R&B, and funk records for communities that had little other access to that music, as traced in DJ Mag's history of the genre's criminalization. By the late 1980s, producers were building their own tracks rather than just spinning imports, fusing Miami bass rhythms with Portuguese lyrics and Afro-Brazilian percussion patterns. DJ Marlboro is widely credited as the genre's founding producer, releasing the first funk carioca LP, Funk Brasil, in 1989, a lineage documented on Wikipedia's entry for funk carioca.

The Sound and the Stigma

Musically, baile funk runs on the tamborzão, a stripped, punchy drum pattern, layered under sub-heavy bass hits and call-and-response MC vocals meant to be shouted back by a crowd, not merely listened to. It has always been dance music made for a specific room: the baile, a massive open-air or warehouse party thrown in or near a favela. That origin has also made it a target. A darker subgenre known as proibidão, which references drug factions and gang life directly, has been used for decades to justify policing and stigmatizing the entire genre, even as mainstream baile funk has become one of Brazil's most commercially dominant sounds and, more recently, a genuine global export through crossovers with reggaeton, drill, and pop.

Why Is a Techno DJ Crossing Into Baile Funk Notable?

It's notable because Kraviz built her name on the opposite aesthetic. трип's catalog runs on austere, hypnotic 4/4 rhythms, acid squelch, and an ambient, druggy patience, exactly the palette described in Bandcamp Daily's 2020 profile of the label. Baile funk works on a different rhythmic logic entirely: syncopated rather than four-on-the-floor, vocal-forward rather than instrumental, built for a crowd chanting back at an MC rather than losing itself in a hypnotic loop. For someone with Kraviz's stature in European techno to spend a year of her attention on a Rio funk record, and to fly to Brazil to record it in person rather than sample it from a distance, is a real statement about where she thinks dance music's energy currently lives. It also sits inside a broader pattern of techno and house producers over the last several years reaching toward Brazilian funk, South African amapiano, and gqom for rhythmic ideas that four-on-the-floor techno had exhausted for them. Kraviz doing it under her own name, on her own new label, with the original artist credited and present, is a more honest version of that borrowing than most.

What Is трип, and What Reputation Does treats Inherit?

A Label Built on Hardcore, Acid, and Punk Attitude

трип was founded by Nina Kraviz in 2014, after she found herself with a surplus of unreleased music while researching her DJ-Kicks mix that same year. In the years since, it has become known for pairing hardcore, acid, techno, and ambient "with equal reverence," in Kraviz's own words to Bandcamp Daily, releasing everyone from Bjarki and PTU to Marc Acardipane under his Pilldriver alias, wrapped in the label's distinctive Tombo-illustrated artwork. Kraviz has described trip's connecting thread not as a genre but as attitude: "What makes all of the music on trip sound coherent is that it appeared with no reason other than a creative spark." She's also been candid about the label's punk streak, telling Bandcamp Daily, "I'm definitely a bit of a punk person. I like to play with people a bit. I find it funny seeing people take things way too seriously, especially in dance music." The label's own site, triprecordings.com, carries that same unbothered, artist-first presentation, with little of the polish a major-adjacent label would apply.

treats Isn't trip's First Sibling

treats also isn't the first label Kraviz has spun out of trip's orbit. In January 2017 she launched GALAXIID as a sub-label dedicated to experimental, ambient, and psychedelic music, complete with its own visual identity and reissues of obscure archival material, as reported at the time by Resident Advisor. treats follows that same instinct: rather than stretching trip's own catalog to cover a mood it doesn't fit, Kraviz builds a new house for it and lets trip stay exactly what it already is.

How Does treats Fit Into or Break From Trip's Legacy?

treats both extends and complicates trip's reputation. It extends it because the underlying instinct, an artist-run label with no fixed release schedule, no genre mandate, and no outside ownership calling the shots, is identical to how trip has always operated. It complicates it because trip earned its name specifically inside techno's harder, more hypnotic corners, and treats explicitly steps outside techno orthodoxy into a completely different rhythmic and vocal tradition. That's arguably the healthiest way for a label's legacy to age: not frozen in the sound that built it, but confident enough in its own identity to let a "bratty younger sister" chase something else entirely under the same roof.

It's the same tension RTS.FM traced in our look at Cocoon Recordings turning 25, where Sven Väth's label stayed relevant for a quarter-century precisely by refusing to calcify into one aesthetic. Independent, artist-run labels that survive tend to share that trait: enough discipline to sound like something, and enough looseness to let that something change. For more on how this fits into Kraviz's wider 2026, including her Ibiza residency, see our recap of her year and our closer look at her Sunday residency at Amnesia.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is Nina Kraviz's treats label?

treats is a new record label Nina Kraviz launched in March 2026 as a sister imprint to трип, her label since 2014. It's dedicated to club tracks that move beyond fixed genre frameworks, explicitly less tied to techno than trip's own catalog.

What baile funk track inspired "sem amor"?

Kraviz built "sem amor" after discovering "Mete com força e com talento" by Rio de Janeiro MC Nick online, producing her own version before the two met in Brazil to finish it together. The final track was recorded on a beach in MC Nick's hometown and released February 27, 2026.

Where can I hear treats 001?

treats 001 is available on Nina Kraviz's Bandcamp page, as well as through Beatport and Traxsource, in digital, 12-inch vinyl, and merchandise-bundle formats.

Is treats replacing Trip Recordings?

No. трип continues to operate as Kraviz's primary label for hardcore, acid, techno, and ambient material. treats runs alongside it as a separate outlet for club music that doesn't fit that mold, similar to how GALAXIID has operated as trip's ambient and psychedelic-focused sibling since 2017.

Has treats released anything since treats 001?

As of this writing, treats 001 is the label's debut and only confirmed release, though given how trip has expanded its own catalog steadily since 2014, further treats releases would fit the pattern.

Labels like treats exist because someone with a platform decided a genre boundary wasn't worth respecting anymore, and that's the same spirit RTS.FM has run on as an independent, artist-run station and label since 2006. If that kind of cross-pollination is interesting to you, the live stream at rts.fm rotates through plenty of it, and the back catalog on RTS.FM's Bandcamp or updates through our Telegram channel are good places to keep tabs on what's next.