DGTL Festival Amsterdam 2026: Lineup, Tickets & What to Know

Easter weekend in Amsterdam arrives with a particular density this year. DGTL Amsterdam 2026, the 14th edition of the festival that has made the NDSM Docklands its permanent home, runs April 3 to 5 over a long weekend when the city's electronic music offer compresses into 72 hours of competing programming. Under the theme CTRL//BREAK, DGTL positions this edition as something more than a lineup announcement: a systemic interruption of how festivals talk about themselves and what they ask of their audiences.

Thirty-plus artists across three days. A cross-generational bill spanning Armand Van Helden's New York house legacy to horsegiirL's UK rave irreverence. And at the centre of the site, a 160 m² LED installation built by six emerging artists through the DGTL Academy. Explore DGTL Amsterdam 2026 on Outhere and discover more festivals, electronic music events, and cultural experiences happening across Europe this spring.

This guide covers what CTRL//BREAK means beyond the branding, the full lineup with context for each featured artist, the DGTL Academy Class of 2026, the NDSM venue, the sustainability model, and everything practical you need before buying a ticket.

DGTL has used annual themes as structural frames rather than decorative concepts since its early editions. CTRL//BREAK, the keyboard shortcut that forces an interruption in a running process, is this year's most direct statement. Applied to festival culture, it translates to a rejection of what the festival calls "sustainable talk": the communications posture that generates press releases about green commitments while operational structures remain unchanged.

In practice, CTRL//BREAK operates on three levels. The first is programmatic: the curation deliberately places established names alongside artists who are actively reshaping how electronic music sounds and functions, creating adjacencies across the programme that wouldn't exist if the booking logic was purely commercial. The second is artistic: the DGTL Academy's 160 m² LED installation is positioned at the centre of the NDSM site as a primary work, not a support element. The third is operational: CTRL//BREAK serves as the framing for DGTL's circular ambitions, plant-based food, circular water systems, zero-waste infrastructure, presented as systemic design rather than an optional layer.

What makes this framing credible rather than rhetorical is the track record. DGTL has been running the circular model since the early 2010s. The commitment to an entirely plant-based food programme is now over a decade old. The DGTL Academy has run multiple cohorts before the Class of 2026. The theme doesn't announce new intentions; it names a philosophy that is already embedded in the operation.

The DGTL festival 2026 lineup works as a map of electronic music across approximately four decades, from the mid-90s New York house that Armand Van Helden helped define to the current UK club moment that horsegiirL and Interplanetary Criminal represent. The bill is neither a nostalgia programme nor a hype sheet. It holds both registers simultaneously, which is the harder curatorial position to sustain.

Van Helden's productions from the mid-1990s onward established a template for what New York house could sound like when it foregrounded bass weight and vocal samples without losing momentum. His influence on what followed is direct and measurable. At DGTL 2026, his set is an anchor point, not a heritage act, but a working DJ whose catalogue translates immediately to a contemporary dancefloor and whose presence sets the historical baseline for the programme around him.

Frankfurt-based Gerd Janson has built one of the most respected reputations in European electronic music through his Running Back label and a DJ practice that runs deliberately wide. His sets draw from house, disco, and electronic music's outer edges without losing floor-function. He is the kind of programmer who rewards the audience willing to show up before the headliners and stay through transitions, not because he buries the energy, but because the logic of how he builds and releases it takes time to appreciate fully.

Jayda G, born in Vancouver, career built in Berlin, has become one of the more recognizable figures in the current conversation about electronic music that carries emotional warmth alongside technical precision. Her 2019 album Significant Changes brought funk and soul references into the club context without diluting either. Her DJ sets carry the same quality: structurally house music, affectively something broader. She is also performing at other European events this spring, discover more about her upcoming dates on Outhere.

The Australian producer and DJ has developed a profile over the past four years that moves between club programming and large festival headline slots without losing coherence. His tracks, melodic, rhythmically grounded, scaled for outdoor stages, work at NDSM's industrial proportions in ways that more intimate selectors cannot match. He brings the programme a different kind of momentum, and his Saturday set is likely to be the peak-time reference point for the weekend.

horsegiirL is the name on this bill that most clearly signals where UK club culture is currently pointed. Her sets treat genre hierarchy as a non-issue: rave, breaks, jungle, hard techno, and house pulled from the same pool based on what serves the floor at any given moment. She has built a following at UK venues and festival stages that is now translating into larger international bookings, and DGTL 2026 is one of the more prominent of her year. If you are oriented toward where energy in electronic music is moving rather than where it has been, her set at NDSM is the one to make a plan around.

Manchester-born Interplanetary Criminal makes a specific kind of UK-inflected house, chunky, rhythmically irreverent, built on the accumulated memory of 90s rave and contemporary club culture, that has earned him bookings well beyond his years in the scene. His releases on DFTD and his own imprint are reliable dancefloor tools. At DGTL, he represents the generational transfer happening across European electronic music: music that knows the history but treats it as a departure point, not a ceiling.

Joy Orbison brings his particular synthesis of UK bass and deep house, one of the more genuinely interesting careers in contemporary electronic music. CamelPhat, the Liverpool duo, have built a record of peak-time techno and house productions that function at festival scale. Âme & Trikk represent the Innervisions sound: deep, textured, patient electronic music that builds over hours. FJAAK, the Berlin duo with releases on Ostgut Ton and their own label, push the harder end of the techno spectrum.

Young Marco and Benny Rodrigues both bring Dutch and Rotterdam-rooted perspectives to the programme, while Kamma & Yu Su (a collaborative set between two artists with very different musical backgrounds) is one of the more interesting programmatic choices on the Saturday daytime bill alongside Philippa Pacho, DJ Heartstring, Héctor Oaks, Salomé, Colyn, Mees Salomé, Eileen, Jan Blomqvist, and more.

The DGTL Academy, run in partnership with ABN AMRO, is a six-month mentorship programme supporting female artists working at the intersection of electronic music and visual media. The Class of 2026 culminates in a single collaborative work: a 160 m² LED installation that will be the primary visual art element at NDSM over the festival weekend. It is the largest and most technically complex work on the site.

Naomi (Fluid Meditations)

A multidisciplinary visual media artist working with generative and interactive systems, 3D rendering, and real-time visual engines. Her practice is built around the point where code and image-making cannot be separated.

Emma Warmelink

A classically trained cellist who has been developing a practice that brings string performance directly into contact with electronic club music, not as contrast or novelty, but as a genuine hybrid form that takes both disciplines seriously.

Niki Scheijen

An artist working in interactive installations and A/V performance, with live coding as a central method. Based in Rotterdam, she also runs a monthly live coding meetup, a practical commitment to building community around the practice rather than keeping it isolated.

Carolien Teunisse

A visual media artist and educator whose installations combine code, video projection, and sensors. She is co-founder of DEFRAME, a collective oriented toward expanding screen-based art beyond conventional display contexts.

RHUIZ (Roza)

A producer working in dark, cinematic electronic music who is currently developing a live format that integrates DJing with live vocals, a hybrid performance approach that places her work between the DJ set and something more theatrical.

Jessica Dreu

A visual artist and photographer whose practice spans live visuals, installations, and mixed media work using both analog and digital techniques. Her approach bridges the handmade and the computational throughout the production process.

The 160 m² LED installation that these six have built over six months is the material test of DGTL's claim to place art and music on equal terms. It is also, by scale alone, one of the more ambitious festival commissions of the 2026 Dutch season.

NDSM, the Nederlandsche Dok en Scheepsbouw Maatschappij, is a former shipyard in Amsterdam Noord that closed in the 1980s and spent the following two decades as a site of occupation, artist studios, and squatter community before the city began formalizing it as a creative district. That history is not background noise. It is the reason the site has the texture it does.

For DGTL, NDSM provides something a purpose-built festival park cannot: material depth. The industrial infrastructure, warehouse structures, cranes, concrete dockside, shapes the acoustic and visual experience of every stage. The Modular, Generator, and Filter stages are built into this landscape rather than placed on top of it, making each space feel specific rather than interchangeable. The Academy's 160 m² LED installation can be deployed at full size here because the architecture has the scale to hold it.

The journey to the venue is part of the experience. The free ferry from Amsterdam Centraal takes 15 minutes across the IJ and deposits you at a site that still looks, from the water, more like a film location than a festival ground. Amsterdam Noord remains in active transition, cultural infrastructure building alongside residential development, the creative district identity not yet settled into something predictable. That quality of unfinishedness is part of what makes NDSM a more interesting context for DGTL than any alternative Amsterdam site would be.

DGTL's claim to be a circular festival is not a recent positioning decision. The operational model has been building since the early 2010s, making it one of the longest-running structural sustainability commitments in European festival culture.

The specifics: 100% plant-based food across every vendor on site, without exceptions or opt-outs. Circular water systems designed to treat and reuse water on site. Energy sourced from renewable supply, with a carbon-neutral operational ambition. Zero-waste infrastructure involving vendor contracts that prohibit single-use plastics and active waste-sorting throughout the site.

The 2026 art programme extends this logic into the public experience. Interactive installations address renewable energy, water recycling, and zero-waste material flows directly, making the operational infrastructure visible and engaging rather than invisible and administrative. This is the CTRL//BREAK argument made material: not a separate sustainability section, but the operational model treated as content.

The honest version of this is that no three-day festival running 30-plus artists at industrial scale operates without environmental cost. The distinction DGTL maintains is between structural commitment, contracts, supply-chain decisions, design choices made before the event, and marketing posture applied after. Across 14 editions, that structural commitment has held.

Dates: April 3–5, 2026 (Easter weekend, Friday through Sunday)

Venue: NDSM Docklands, Amsterdam Noord

Age restriction: 18+

Getting there: Free public ferry from Amsterdam Centraal (NDSM Werf stop, behind the station). The crossing takes approximately 15 minutes; ferries run frequently during festival hours. Cycling to NDSM is also a practical option — secure bike parking is available on site.

Food: The entire food programme is plant-based. This is a structural policy covering all vendors, not a curated option alongside conventional catering.

Tickets: Dynamic pricing — prices increase as tiers sell out. Current availability and pricing at the official website. Third-party resale cannot guarantee legitimacy or pricing.

Easter weekend planning: Amsterdam is busy over Easter. Accommodation across the city and Amsterdam Noord in particular fills well in advance of the long weekend. If your visit is centred on DGTL, booking accommodation early is the practical move. Staying on the north side of the IJ reduces ferry reliance and keeps you closer to the site.

Outhere is a platform for discovering arts, culture, and experiences worldwide. For DGTL Amsterdam 2026, you can find artist pages for Dom Dolla, Jayda G, Gerd Janson, horsegiirL, and Armand Van Helden on Outhere to follow their upcoming performances beyond Easter weekend. Explore the NDSM Docklands venue page to see what else happens at Amsterdam Noord's most distinctive cultural site throughout the year. For the full Amsterdam spring programme, the Outhere Amsterdam events guide covers the complete cultural calendar running alongside DGTL.

Two related articles from the Outhere blog worth reading before the festival: April in the Netherlands: Festivals, Concerts & What's On covers the broader Dutch cultural calendar for the month, and Rewire Festival 2026: What to Expect in The Hague covers another essential Dutch electronic and experimental music event running in the same season.

We hope to see you out there.