Requiem Founder DJ Velvetine Steps Away From the Booth With Final Event

Any unsuspecting patron who stumbled into Tommy’s Pub on the evening of June 13 likely noted the gothic vibes rather quickly, but they may still not have fully grasped the significance of the event, which served as a farewell to a queen of Charlotte’s dark scene.

Dictionary.com defines requiem as “any musical service, hymn, or dirge for the repose of the dead.” Saturday night’s Requiem gathering was not to mark a death, only the end of an era for Laura Grace Bright, aka DJ Velvetine, who nurtured her concept for a “goth industrial dance night” into a beloved staple at Tommy’s Pub in the Eastway Crossing shopping center.

Bright has now retired from DJing, having marked the seventh anniversary of Requiem on June 2. After 16 years of spinning, she decided to step back from the decks, but not before “Requiem: DJ Velvetine’s Laid to Rest Party” provided the proper send-off last weekend. 

“Over the past couple of years it’s just started getting to me physically,” she told Queen City Nerve. “I was having to take off the whole weekend to have the energy for it and then recover. I also felt like it was time to usher in the next generation of dark scene DJs. In addition to that, I’m ready to do some different things such as trying to create my own music.” 

The seed for Bright’s fascination with DJing was planted nearly four decades ago at The Pterodactyl Club, one of Charlotte’s most iconic nightclubs of the 1980s and ’90s. Like so many legacy dark-scene DJs who are still on the scene today, from Christian Hoefle and Sanity Ana to DJ Spider, Bright found camaraderie and community inside The Pterodactyl Club. 

She remembers getting as close to the boards as possible to get an inside look when she would hang out at the club in 1987. The late Jeff Lowery, owner of The Pterodactyl Club, sparked her fascination with the art.

“There were no female DJs, it was all guys, but [Lowery] would let me sit in the DJ booth with them, and sometimes he would let me do the lights,” Bright recalled. “He would let me show the records of whatever I wanted him to play next and I’d pull out a whole bunch of stuff. I felt like it was so cool, you know.

“I really came to want to be a DJ very badly, and looking back, I probably could have asked him to teach me. It’s just that there weren’t any girls back then, so I just sat on it,” she continued.

Her interest resurfaced while she was living in Philadelphia in the early 2010s. Utilizing a laptop and a copy of Virtual DJ, Bright practiced at home while hunting for places comfortable taking on an amateur. For a short time, she cut her teeth working mixes at burlesque shows.

Around 2015, Bright returned to North Carolina, settling in Mint Hill and connecting with Mandy Kimry of Mandyland Entertainment, a Charlotte-based burlesque troupe. Bright became one of their regular faces.

After dancing at her first show with Mandyland, she learned that the group needed a DJ. Kimry saw it as a natural fit and Bright was able to build more experience with Mandyland. She spent the following years traveling across a few more states with her husband up until their separation in 2018, which brought Bright back to her family in Lancaster, South Carolina.

She reconnected with Mandyland and worked as the troupe’s DJ while looking for a night she could produce on her own. Mandyland’s DJ again. The late Brett Butler of Charlotte-based surf-punk band The Flight Risks directed her to Tommy’s Pub, where she met with booker Mark Lynch and owner Jamie Starks. 

Those two greenlit Bright’s new brainchild, a listening and dance night called Reflexions. Starting off as an ’80’s New Wave and alt-goth session, Bright as DJ Velvetine spun alongside DJs Sanity Ana and Tech Bat, both longtime friends in Charlotte’s scene.

“We didn’t have a really big turnout for the first Reflexions, but Jamie loved it. He was thrilled and he even slid me some extra tip money that first night,” Bright recalled. 

Starks encouraged her to make it a regular thing and Bright began hosting Reflexions every Sunday at Tommy’s, going for about three years save for a COVID hiatus.

Bright would eventually rebrand Reflexions into Requiem, and as her former co-leads stepped down, other faces would pop up and bring their own flavors to the event. Marvin Lynch introduced new music and added thematic flair with backdrops and stage props. DJ Dil3mma and Deathflower, both up-and-coming names in Charlotte, played some of their earliest sets alongside Bright at Requiem. 

Along with events like Digital Noir and Shadowplay, Requiem has become a staple of Charlotte’s emergent dark scene. In a world where third spaces for subcultures have diminished, Bright will be remembered for sharing one of her dreams with an ever-expanding community of folks with common interests from across the Charlotte area.

Read more: DJ Spider Marks 10 Years of Digital Noir at The Milestone (2025)

“We constantly have new people showing up,” she explained. “One of my favorite things about Requiem is seeing people walk in that I’ve never seen before, some meeting each other for the first time in public, and seeing them start to really connect. I think I feel really good about the fact that I’ve helped people connect that way and help the community grow.”