On the other side of the music events spectrum, there is the blurry area of the free party culture. We had a quick chat with the guys over at Hypoxik Sounds, they told us about their parties and sound system.

The talk started by the crew explaining how the name came about: “Hypoxik came around because everyone on the scene does NOS, and if you look at the definition of hypoxia, "deficiency in oxygen”, it fitted really well with it all. 

“Hypoxik started with a house party, we had several hundred people round in our house, people on the streets, police turned up and we had several complaints from neighbours several streets over as the music was so loud. We got in shit for it, so decided to start club nights and packed them out, we had contacts with people all over the country and so decided to get involved in the free party scene, having attended for years and years.”

The crew started off doing club nights: “ We've done some club events (Jungle Party) in Leicester which were packed out every time, we had people from all over the country come just for the nights.”

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They are situated around the Leicestershire area, although their parties have reached all over the Midlands: “Leicestershire is not a bad space to be actually because it's quite central, we do spread around the East Midlands and to other areas of the country, big up Northants Collective. (That was) A party we did near Market Harborough, the police didn't expect it and so let us continue and finish as long as we cleaned up after.”

When it comes to the police and free parties, the stories we hear are always quite bad. However we were told that the Hypoxik crew have had good encounters: “Police are always about, and they are normally pretty sound if we're cool with them. They say like, ‘shut it off by 11ish and there’s no drama.’”.