On the first Sunday of October, the Resonator Institute at 325 E. Main St. in Norman will hold its monthly Noise Church, a gathering that its organizers describe, only half-jokingly, as a worship service for sound. The congregation is small and the liturgy is loud. This month's offering brings four acts from four different scenes: Gong Slayer, a drone and sound-healing project from New Mexico; Beachpriest, an experimental electronic act from Fort Worth; Silkroad, an electro-symphonic drone project from Tulsa; and Inside.Gator, a harsh-noise project from Oklahoma City.
That lineup is the point. Noise Church is hosted by Dissociation, an Oklahoma-based experimental sound and visual art collective, and it convenes on the first Sunday of every month at Resonator. There is no reserved seating, no genre policing, and no expectation that the person next to you has heard any of the names on the bill. The show is general admission and walk-up, which in practice means the audience is a mix of local musicians, art-school regulars, and curious passersby who saw a flyer downtown.
The venue is the reason the bill is possible. Resonator is the project of a group of Norman artists who wanted a permanent home for a scene that had always been vibrant but never had a consistent place to gather. In addition to a gallery and exhibition space, the building houses a stage for live music, a working community printshop, and open creative space for local artists. Its stated mission is to foster the growth of artists and musicians, connect local and global creative communities, and promote all forms of challenging expression. The organization's events are supported in part by the Norman Arts Council and by members of the Norman community.
That mission is not decorative. A room that will book a harsh-noise act from Oklahoma City on the same night as a gong-based healing project from New Mexico is a room that has decided in advance to say yes to things other venues would decline. Norman has no shortage of bars with stages, but very few of them are set up for a performer whose instrument is a wall of feedback or a set of gongs played at meditation volume. Resonator's history is a long list of exhibitions, concerts, workshops, performances, film screenings, dance parties, and spoken-word events, and Noise Church sits comfortably in that lineage.
The October bill is a good illustration of how far the regional experimental network reaches on a modest budget. Gong Slayer is based in Albuquerque and records under that name; the project's Bandcamp catalog includes albums titled Valley of Fires, Roswell, White Sands, Desert Hills Motel, Grand Canyon, and Death Valley, a run of southwestern place-names that doubles as a map of the project's preoccupations. Its tags include drone, gongs, meditation, and sound healing. The project has a new release, The Portal, and cassettes for a North American tour running through October and November, which is how a New Mexico gong act ends up on a Sunday-night bill in central Oklahoma.
Beachpriest comes from Fort Worth, where the project has been a fixture of the city's experimental and electronic underground for years. Beachpriest is the work of Grant Ring, who is also known as the DJ half of the Fort Worth duo Def Rain. A 2017 Fort Worth Weekly listing described Beachpriest as an "ominous electro act" sharing a bill with the instrumental prog band Programme and the solo artist Diamond Age at Republic Street Bar, which places the project in a long-running Texas tradition of electronic musicians who operate at the edges of the club and noise worlds rather than squarely inside either.
Silkroad travels the shortest distance of the out-of-state acts, coming down from Tulsa. The project is described as electro-symphonic drone, a phrase that suggests the collision of composed, orchestral texture with the sustained, slowly shifting tones that define drone music. Tulsa has its own experimental and new-music history, and a project working in that overlap is a natural fit for a bill that also includes a gong ensemble and a harsh-noise act.
Inside.Gator is the local entry, an Oklahoma City noise project whose Bandcamp page describes it as Florida-bred and dealing in "all things gator and their interactions with people." That description is a fair sample of the project's sensibility: harsh noise with a sense of humor and a specific, absurdist image at its center. The project's recorded work includes tracks titled "Effect Erasure" and "Cause Containment," titles that read like bureaucratic language run through a distortion pedal.
What the four acts share is an interest in sound as a physical event rather than a song. Gong Slayer works with the long decay of metal; Beachpriest works with electronics and rhythm; Silkroad works with sustained harmonic texture; Inside.Gator works with the overload of the signal itself. Put them on the same bill and you get a survey of what "experimental" means in the southern plains right now, from the meditative end of the spectrum to the abrasive one.
Noise Church's own framing leans into the religious language deliberately. The event description invites attendees to "join us in worship of sound" and promises a sampling of sonic textures meant to "cleanse your weary soul and raise your wavering spirits." It is a joke and not a joke. The monthly gathering functions the way a church does for its regulars: a recurring appointment, a familiar room, a shared hour with people who care about the same obscure thing.
The practical details are as unpretentious as the premise. The show is at Resonator Institute, 325 E. Main St., Norman, OK 73069, on the first Sunday of the month. It is general admission, with no reserved seating and no tiered ticketing. For anyone who has spent time in the Oklahoma experimental scene, that is the normal arrangement; for anyone who has not, it is an unusually direct introduction to it. Four acts, one room, one hour, and a town that decided a decade ago that it wanted a place for exactly this.