Charmaine Lee / Godseye / White Boy Scream + Sarah Ruth Alexander
Drifters Theater
October 13, 2025
“Melancholia is, I believe, a musical problem: a dissonance, a change in rhythm.” —Alejandra Pizarnik
When my editor reached out to me about a last-minute opportunity to cover a noise show at Drifters Theater in just a few hours, I was already grabbing my earplugs and notepad before I even read the whole email. Going to Drifters, a music and event venue that Dylan Aycock opened earlier this year, has been on my to-do list for a while and this was the perfect opportunity to check it out. To sweeten the deal, I knew the lineup was going to be something extra special, with local group Godseye making a return after 15 years, Tulsa Artist Fellow White Boy Scream teaming up with Texas musician Sarah Ruth Alexander, and Charmaine Lee coming to town as part of her dizzying “65 shows in 50 states” tour. So, like so many in the Tulsa music scene before me, I finished up my shift at the coffee house as fast as I could, got in my economy hatchback, and made the pilgrimage to Owen Park.
Parking my car on a steep hill (e-brake from 2006, don’t fail me now), I walked up to the softly lit and inviting former Owen Park Baptist Church. The scene inside was already busy, with gear being moved in, local beers being cracked, and folks finding their seats in rows of pews. The slanted floor gently pushes you towards the two-section stage, one close to ground, another raised against a beautiful painted background of a forest. Red and black curtains, candles, and a church atmosphere absent of any Christian aesthetic invoke a ‘70s psychedelic cult classic film vibe, something with a killer soundtrack and obnoxious fans. The atmosphere made me feel underdressed in my usual barista fatigues. (I knew that was the day to break out my maroon velvet cape: rats.) A crowd of about 25-30 gathered to see three noise-genre-related acts that each brought a completely different sound and atmosphere to this tiny church.
Godseye took the stage first, their gear lining its entire length. This group—whose members include an Osage Nation archaeologist (Eden Hemming), a former Delaware Tribal Council Member (Nathan Young), and the founder of Foxy Digitalis and co-founder of The Bird House micro-gallery (Brad Rose)—created an incredible, earthy, angry, yet comforting sound alongside multidisciplinary artist Warren Realrider (Pawnee/Crow), who joined them for this performance marking their return to the stage after a 15-year hiatus.
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As Hemming read poems by Alejandra Pizarnik and Elizabeth Bishop with a methodical clarity, Young, Rose, and Realrider began to play slow, quiet accompaniments that soon descended into sonic strangeness. Modular synths, microphones, a bowl clipped to microphones—all ravenously tore through the lines of poetry, invoking a slow-moving glacier tearing through ice age plains and old growth forests. Organic rocks and metal bells clinked and chipped against a bowl used by Realrider, punctuating the works of Pizarnik and Bishop. Mirroring the pulsing modular synth, vocal modulators ripped, echoed, and emboldened Hemming’s reading of the poems. Wires twisted and curled like tree roots out of and around the synth boxes, anchoring the poetic imagery to the stage floor they spilled down to.
Themes of death and decay wandered through the set, with tales of strange, foreign lands, labyrinths, exile, connection, and empathy disappearing behind the jagged and abrasive sound developing around it. The noise ended slowly as the last poem reached its zenith, and Hemming’s voice calmly concluded the last stanza as the musicians faded their instruments into a gentle rolling wave that receded back to whence it came.