The Website That Started Commissioning Music: Roadburn and the Requiem That Took 31 Years

Most festivals ask the same question every year: who is available, and who will sell tickets. Roadburn asks a stranger one. What music does not exist yet, and what would it take to make it exist for one night in Tilburg?

That question is the whole thing. It explains why a festival built by two Dutch guys with a stoner rock website ended up funding a Swiss extreme metal band and a Grammy winning orchestra to finish a piece of music that had been unfinished since 1987.

From webzine to venue

Roadburn began in 1999 as a website. Walter Hoeijmakers and Jurgen van den Brand were writing about stoner, doom and psychedelic rock, and the festival was an extension of the writing rather than the other way around. The first edition, from 11 to 13 February 1999, was not really a festival at all: it was three shows in three towns, Amsterdam, Tilburg and Sneek, with Cathedral, Orange Goblin, Beaver, Celestial Season, Terra Firma and 35007.

For years it stayed scrappy and nomadic. Nijmegen in 2000. Three separate events in 2001. Nothing at all in 2002. Eindhoven in 2003 and 2004. The turning point was a December 2001 show at Tilburg’s 013 venue, where Masters of Reality played with Josh Homme and Nick Oliveri in the band, booked through Hoeijmakers’ relationship with Homme from Homme’s brief Amsterdam period between Kyuss and Queens of the Stone Age. Dutch broadcaster 3voor12 streamed it, and the stream travelled. Hoeijmakers has said that before that night, in his words, “we were mainly a website about the thriving stoner, doom, and psychedelic rock scene.”

In 2005 the 013 invited the festival back to Tilburg permanently. That tenth edition, headlined by Space Ritual and Electric Wizard with Sunn O))), High on Fire and Brant Bjork on the bill, was the first with multiple stages. The 2006 edition was the first to run more than one day. By 2008 it was a four day event. Van den Brand, who runs Burning World Records and Roadburn Records, left the festival in 2016.

The commissioning turn

The genuinely unusual move came in 2018, when Roadburn started commissioning artists to create work specifically for the festival. The first two were Waste of Space Orchestra, a collision of Finnish bands Oranssi Pazuzu and Dark Buddha Rising, and Vánagandr’s Sól án varma.

This is not booking. It is what an opera house or a contemporary arts biennial does, and it is funded accordingly. Roadburn’s commissions are made possible by Brabant C and the City of Tilburg, which is to say that a Dutch province and a Dutch municipality decided that heavy music was a form worth subsidising as art. The festival also runs an artist in residence each year, an act given multiple slots and permission to be strange across the weekend, and often a guest curator alongside.

The economics are worth sitting with. A commissioned piece is expensive, rehearsal heavy, and by design will probably never be performed again. Every incentive in the live industry points against it. Roadburn does it anyway, and that is precisely the reason the festival’s reputation is what it is.

Thirty-one years, three chapters

The best proof of the model is the Celtic Frost and Triptykon Requiem.

Chapter one, “Rex Irae”, appeared on Celtic Frost’s Into the Pandemonium on 1 June 1987, a six minute piece with a soprano, timpani and strings that already sounded like a band trying to escape its own genre. Chapter three, “Winter”, arrived nineteen years later on 2006’s Monotheist. The middle chapter simply never got written. Tom G. Warrior carried the intention to finish it for three decades without finishing it.

In 2018 Hoeijmakers contacted Warrior and proposed Roadburn as the venue to perform the completed Requiem, and the festival provided the resources to make it possible. Warrior, then 54, finally wrote the second part, “Grave Eternal”. On Friday 12 April 2019, Triptykon performed all three chapters with orchestration arranged by Florian Magnus Maier and played by the Metropole Orkest. It was the first time “Rex Irae” and “Winter” had ever been performed live, and the first time anyone outside the project had heard “Grave Eternal” at all.

A piece begun in 1987 was completed in 2018 because a doom festival in a mid sized Dutch city asked for it and paid for it. No label demanded it, no tour required it, no algorithm rewarded it. The performance was recorded and released in 2020, which is the only reason the rest of us can hear it.

Why it matters for a European band now

There is a straight line between this and the bands filling our inbox. The European heavy circuit, Argonauta and Heavy Psych Sounds and Ripple, Desertfest and Freak Valley and Roadburn, functions as an actual institution, with money and curation and memory. A Finnish stoner quartet putting out three singles ahead of an August album is not shouting into a void. There is a structure above them that occasionally decides to commission something impossible.

The lesson of Roadburn is not that festivals should book weirder bands. It is that a scene becomes a culture at the exact moment it starts commissioning work that only makes sense inside that scene, and finds someone willing to pay for it.

Sources: Roadburn Festival (Wikipedia), Roadburn Festival official announcement, Into the Pandemonium (Wikipedia), Century Media.