Story
Requiem Soundsystem began way back in September 2010, with an idea to bring Drum & Bass and underground dance music to the youth of Hampshire and surrounding areas, for free, without the constraints of rules, security and capitalist culture.
After throwing free events and raves every other weekend throughout the first few years, Hampshire Constabulary, in conjunction with surrounding police forces, eventually launched ‘Operation Requiem’; an operation solely dedicated to eradicating the ‘scourge’ of illegal raves that had been plaguing the area.
With simultaneous early morning raids upon crew members houses, seizing laptops, mobile phones and rave equipment, pulling over of crew member cars and with squad cars sitting outside crew members houses and rig lockups at weekends, Requiem was forced to move the equipment away from the home town of Basingstoke and expand the operation to other areas of the country, anywhere from London to Wales, West Sussex, Bristol, Wiltshire and France.
Alongside a surge in legal events in clubs across the country, including the ‘State of Emergency’ string of events, RQM finally began to make some income to counter the many thousands of pounds that had been spent throwing free raves for the free party community.
Based on Tekno free party culture and ideals, welcoming everyone and with a ‘leave no trace’ attitude, Requiem grew and evolved, participating in hundreds of parties, raves, club nights and teknivals.
Eventually in 2018, moving the operation to Bristol and beginning a legitimate hire company, Requiem became one of the biggest sound systems in the UK, predominantly running South-West based club events but without forgetting their free party roots and the soundsystem culture that their ideals were based upon.
However, just as all event based companies and organisations were, Requiem were devastated by the impact of the Covid 19 pandemic, pushed into alternative areas of the music industry during 2020 and 2021 such as merchandise sales, in order to make ends meet.
This however, gave us the time to formulate and finalise a plan which had been a decade in the making- to create a brand new, independent, underground grass-roots music festival.
In October 2021, to celebrate Requiem soundsystem’s 10th and 11th birthday, we finally realised an ambition that had been in the making since the very beginning! Bringing it back to our roots, we sourced the original military vehicles that we used to do raves with from 2010 to 2012 and took over a farm in Somerset for a weekend of military-themed fancy-dress antics, with our brand new 24 bin / 8 top pro audio soundsystem (in full, for the very first time) and a huge line-up, showcasing artists and headliners that had supported us from the very beginning such as Vandal, T-Menace and Jacky Murda, alongside huge world-renowned Drum&Bass artists such as Ed Rush, Optical and Dillinja. Moving forwards, we are extremely happy to announce that this was a trial run for a larger festival we are planning for the future, with a launch date of 2024, entitled:
OPERATION REQUIEM
2022 has been a quieter year for us in the aftermath of this festival, as we start to get older and only do events when they are really really worth doing… With the Odyssey Vs. Requiem sound-clash in February and the huge ’12 Years of Requiem Soundsystem’ rave in October, you can expect in future to only see our name when its something really quite special.
You may sometimes hear music echoing from fields, quarries, forests and warehouses and wonder… Who is making that noise? But of course, it’s not us. We pushed a movement for a dozen years, and now it’s time for the younger generations to make their mark.
