Unfortunately, there is no way to succinctly describe the work of Natty Gray

Not even in a pretentious or dramatic sense, there’s just literally a lot to talk about. However, if you’ve found yourself on this site, you are probably seeking information on him and won’t mind the excessive blither that is to come nor the excess of photos, so please follow along as best that you can as we try to appropriately and concisely embody the life and times of multimedia artist and underground urchin, Natty Gray. Thank you for your time.

Starting with the formalities, the basics, the less exciting stuff, Gray was raised in Tulsa, OK and attended the historic Booker T. Washington high school. Afterwards, he would enroll at the University of Kansas, graduating in 2018 with honors and a BA in East Asian Language and Cultures with Japanese Language and Literature concentration. Post-university, Gray’s day job experience would fall primarily in to two areas: education and formal arts work. Immediately following college, he would work with the literacy intervention nonprofit, Reading Partners, subsequently moving in to full time arts work by means of assisting and mentoring under artist, Nathan Young, as well as being hired as the Program Spaces Technician for the Tulsa Artist Fellowship. He would also help manage the experimental record label, Peyote Tapes, and experimental curatorial platform, Tulsa Noise, for a number of years. Gray would even briefly return to Booker T. Washington in the Spring of 2024, acting as the interim Japanese teacher in a bizarre full circle moment.

Established in 2015, Natty Gray is a founder and co-director of the Tulsa, OK based 501c3 nonprofit Cult Love [Sound Tapes], a syndicate “committed to the platforming, preservation, and proliferation of underground communities and culture”. Essentially acting as a fluid art collective and cassette label, Cult Love’s practice is as broad as its founder’s, spanning sound, video, and photography, fashion, physical format media, immersive installations, and events, archiving, curation, written word, and more. A staple of the DIY movements of the Midwest and Midsouth, Cult Love has been an independent backbone of the underground Tulsa art and music scene since its inception, influencing and helping shape the region’s greater cultural, social, and artistic trends while advocating for underrepresented creative communities.

DIY is a word inextricably intertwined with Natty Gray, as corny as it may sound. It is his means of action and lifestyle, his ideology and philosophy, as well as his personal fascination and study. As perhaps a veiled means of exercising his deep rooted, neurotic, hoarding tendencies, Gray spends much of his time working as a “DIY archivist”. This entails the acts of physical and digital documentation as well as digitization, preservation, and dissemination; primarily working with materials from his own life and experiences with the intent of accessibility and education in order to build a larger cultural and historical narrative to how greater culture, consumer, and social trends are shaped by the underground and outsider art and music communities. His scope and specialty lies in contemporary underground Japanese music as well as the outsider music and art scenes of so-called “Flyover Country”. Gray’s work is largely available for free on his Nadzwatson Youtube account.

Naturally, with interests in archival work, Gray is also a writer. He is a feature journalist for legacy heavy metal and hardcore punk music outlet, Lambgoat, a culture writer for new outlet, Move On Up Music, and also runs his own anonymous blog reviewing and critiquing art and music in Tulsa. His published writing spans cultural analysis, bilingual interviews, art and album reviews, and think pieces. He also does more formal business, marketing, and management writing that encompasses electronic press kits, copywriting, press releases, artist statements, descriptions, and bios, grant writing, and project proposals. Gray has also written for a number of miscellaneous contract projects, such as working with the Robert Mallary Estate and Archive reviewing translated language and associated literature related to their 2025 Art Golden Gai exhibit in Tokyo, Japan.

Natty Gray grew up in the hardcore and punk scenes of Oklahoma before finding his way to experimental and extreme music in his mid-teens through net label, Grindcore Karaoke, fringe media such as Kingdom of Noise, and artist-rapper, Lil B the Basedgod. This catalyzed a profound obsession with physical media and formative chain of events for young Gray who quickly immersed himself in the worlds of extreme and experimental sound art, or better known as, harsh noise. An avid performer and listener, pressing Gray about his greater practice would invariably result in some sort of central spiel about “sound”. His solo audiological work embodies themes of obsessive compulsion, intrusive nostalgia, memorialization, and documentation. He has performed vocals in the noisecore band, Bullshit Market, is a member of audio-terror duo, Beachmaster, the vocalist and lyricist for cybergrind/nintendocore project, Kizumono no Hanako, and a regular collaborative AV composer with enviro-artist, friend, and Cult Love co-director LoDrum. He is an avid concert bootleg-er and field recorder, has produced and engineered bands and albums such as Crackrock’s debut full length, “Liquorgate”, as well as scored films, performed hours long meditative pieces, and crafted sound installations for various gallery exhibitions. Along with Cult Love, Tulsa Noise, and Peyote Tapes, he has also directed and managed the net label, Fresh Yabai Ongaku, and bootlegs & pirated media label, Shadow Sounds Ltd.

Of course, because of Gray’s upbringing in the world of live music, he boasts a rich history of experience in public programming, production, and curation of all varieties. He has managed two house venues, presented numerous workshops on noise, sewing, and screen printing, managed artists and bands, given lectures, talks, and served on panels, as well as, organized multiple tours, including a debut US tour for Tokyo noise rock band, Zov, in 2017. He regularly books shows for local and touring acts at DIY spaces, bars, and house venues, however, more notable concert related work of his includes organizing digital music festival, Cyberfest, noise event, Tableflip: A Harsh Noise Flea Market, multimedia art and music series, Cult Love Community Conference, being an organizer of the highly collaborative annual “community growth opportunity”, Cbeat aka Community Beat, the infamous, Tulsa Noise Fest, and supporting Kansas City Noise Fest. His formal curatorial work has ranged from selecting and facilitating the installation of floor-to-ceiling murals from nineteen artists in a midtown, century old Tulsa home (Cult House v 2.0, the original and highly influential Tulsa art house), to creating Best Of’s and retrospectives, to curating the installation of sculptures by artist, Richard Zimmerman, for the Terrain Biennial, the photography in Roy Lee’s book, “Bring Earplugs”, digital AV performances for the Tulsa Noise covid series, fashion line debuts, and more.

Natty Gray is also an accomplished videographer. As an analog fetishist, his work often revolves around the use of physical media such as Video8 and VHS-C, however, he is also well versed in digital formats. As is a reoccurring pattern with him, his video work is thematically and stylistically broad, spanning sensory ethnography and documentation, as well as, music videos, art films, and promotional content creation. As everything in his life is deeply interconnected and plays off each other, the video projects of Gray are often married with his audio work. His liminal horror art films, the Transience and Texture Trilogy have been screened at the Queen Rose Art House Gallery and the Nightmares Film Fest. His Cult House Documentary has been screened at the Second Line Film Festival. And his teenage art film with George Christ, JAN 1ST 1200 AM, was screened at the Tulsa Overground Film Fest.

Going hand in hand with videography, Gray is also a prolific photographer. Continuing his interest in obsolete media, he has a special love for APS film, though it is not unusual for him to utilize y2k era digital cameras as well. Unsurprisingly, his topics primarily focus on the documentation of underground DIY music and art scenes, with accents of spatial and textural concern. He has documented numerous concerts, shows, and live events, as well as public and private art shows, installations, rehearsals, and more. He also has been employed for promotional shoots with bands, artists, and clothing brands.

Finally, Natty Gray is a fan of all things fashion. Gray sews by hand and on machine, screen prints, and employs varieties of digital and alternative printing. His textile work is literally and metaphorically patch heavy, thematically rooted in DIY cultural narratives, documentation of history, and his theory of “manifestations of the audible in the physical realm”. He embodies and wears his theoretical practices literally on his sleeve, frequently using textiles and clothes as alternative means of actualizing his work with sound, video, and photography in the material realm. For example, crafting outfits out of patches depicting images of stills from his VHS-C art films; analog to digital to tangible to wearable. He has worked on and created a variety of capsules, lines, and commissions solo and collaboratively. His work has been featured in fashion shows for Living Arts, he has performed at VFILES during New York Fashion Week, and created one of one pieces and clothing lines for artists and businesses such as Blind Equation, Yatika Fields, Dillon Rose Fine Jewelry, and Rachel Rector.

In a time where art lingo has been abused and overused to the point of non-meaning, the story of Natty Gray is one that truly and timelessly epitomizes the expressions of “multimedia”, “multidisciplinary”, and “interdisciplinary”. A personification of the underground, a spearhead of outsider art, and a manifestation of DIY music and culture, Gray has committed his youth, life, vigor, blood, sweat, and tears to the pursuit of spiritual and communal liberation through so-called “creative practices”. While culture, authentic experiences, and Tru™ art and music are under attack from an increasingly diluted, rotting onslaught of co-opters, grifters, and superficiality, in spaces overran with radical censorship, nepotism, social media catalyzed culture-sucks, and utter disconnects from any sort of real, grass root movements or communities, Gray leads a tide of resistance, waving a rallying torch of change and professing a gospel of hope. A testament to all that is still real in art, music, and culture, an embodiment of the so-called “creative lifestyle”, and practitioner of inherently radical, timeless acts.