When you think of a multi-day music festival, you probably think about dancing and singalongs, not noise performance, ambient electronica, or unhinged audio experimentations.
But those are exactly the kinds of sounds and performers that are set to descend upon Tulsa the weekend of April 5th for the inaugural One Aux Festival of Music, Sound, and Noise.
It’s the unexpected culmination of two years of Tulsa’s One Aux, a monthly open mic and independent showcase of the strangest, most left-field outsider music and performance acts, bringing together experimental artists from across the Oklahoman scene, across the country, and across the full spectrum of what can be called music.
It’s the brainchild of two Tulsa-based friends and organizers, themselves also description-defying experimental musicians: Todd Woodlan of the deconstructed ambient project A Thousand Plateaus and Carl Antonowicz of the much more aggressive and metallically noisy Open Casket Soundsystem.
Antonowicz and Woodlan launched One Aux in April of 2023 as a way to platform and spotlight the surprisingly deep and ever-growing statewide community of experimental artists and musicians from which they’ve grown their own music.
Carl Antonowicz: Todd and I are both into pretty weird stuff, like, just in terms of our own listening.
It's one of the reasons we started it, man, to sort of encourage this sort of cross pollination between different acts in the scene.
Brett Fieldcamp: The One Aux open mic-style events – prioritizing first-timers and performers from marginalized groups - caught on even more quickly than expected, and as Oklahoma has started to present itself as an important scene for experimental and non-traditional music performance, Woodlan and Antonowicz rolled that momentum into a regular slate of more considered and curated showcases alongside the continuing open mic.
Todd Woodlan: The open mics, there's minimal curation. It's basically like we do a sign-up, you know. We definitely don't curate for a sort of style or quality necessarily, or whatever, because we want people to come and be very, like, vulnerable with their work.
Then for the showcase shows, there is a little bit more curation that happens there. So we typically will put together a bill of acts that we feel work well together, so that it all feels very coherent.
Brett Fieldcamp: With two unexpectedly successful years now behind them, and with perhaps more interest than ever in spotlighting esoteric and boundary-pushing artforms, they’ve decided to bring together a host of experimental, ambient, and noise performers from all over the map for a loaded two-day festival partnering with Tulsa’s Noise Town performance space and The Riverside Studio at the Historic Spotlight Theatre.
Todd Woodlan: With the festival, we really want to just kind of show that there is a critical mass of artists here. There's a critical mass of talent. There's a critical mass of people doing really interesting stuff.
It kind of felt like we have learned so much, and there's been so many people coming out. They've been so supportive, both in terms of artists and audience and venue, just like the whole community, like every part of it, that it really felt like a moment where we could kind of put a stake in the ground, so to speak, and say like, “Hey, look, experimental music is a thing in Tulsa and in the Midwest.”
Brett Fieldcamp: With a lineup featuring nearly 30 artists and a head-spinning assortment of sounds, from the delicately minimal and cinematic to the ear-splittingly harsh and hair-raising, this inaugural One Aux Festival is about more than just music, sound, and noise.
It’s also about celebrating strangeness itself and standing to be counted among the unapologetically weird.
Carl Antonowicz: I think it is probably more important than it has been to be visibly weird and aggressively non-conforming to expectations in a public sense, to show that there is some real freaks out here and that we're not going anywhere.
Brett Fieldcamp: The first-ever One Aux Festival of Music, Sound, and Noise takes place at Tulsa’s Noise Town and Riverside Studio on April 5th and 6th.
For tickets and for more information, follow @one.aux on Instagram.
For On the Scene, I’m Brett Fieldcamp. Now here’s A Thousand Plateaus with “Reluctant Instruments.”
———————————
KGOU relies on voluntary contributions from readers and listeners to further its mission of public service with arts and culture reporting for Oklahoma and beyond. To contribute to our efforts, make your donation online, or contact our Membership department.
