
This is the comprehensive collection of my digitized cassette bootlegs and field recordings that I made from 2016 on, all through my twenties. Youtube has chosen to block and restrict some of these uploads so I edited them as best that I could with Youtube's tools in order to include them on this channel (apologies if that leaves some of them sounding a little weird), or alternatively just took the loss on getting it online in this form. At some point, I will restructure and reupload this work to a different, more sensical and detailed (and hopefully academic or research based) platform, but for now, Youtube is still the easiest and most accessible way to get all of these documents out in to the public sphere. Ultimately, I'm interested in accessibility and dissemination. More or less the collection can be segmented in to three eras: my sophomore year in college at the University of Kansas in Lawrence while I was pursuing a Japanese degree and first got a personal cassette recorder and began using it regularly as well as my final year of school, graduation, and return home to Tulsa, OK (Box #2, Spring & Summer 2016, Fall 2017 to End of Summer 2018), my year living in Tokyo and studying at Sophia University as a junior and my subsequent return to the states and tour with Zov, where at this point I was recording nearly everything I went to ("Japanese Concert Bootlegs", Summer 2016 to Summer 2017, aka the gap in Box #2's timeline), and finally my time back in Tulsa after having moved home post-college graduation up to the onset of the Covid Pandemic and subsequent lockdown, I also was recording with hyper regularity at this time (Box #3 & #4, End of Summer 2018 and "on"). Though recordings trickled off with Covid, there are some outliers and special occasions that I would record to cassette as recently as 2024 that I have included. I also added a few much older cassettes of lectures, presentations, and interviews of my grandfather, Dr. James Gray Watson, who was a Faulkner and Peter Matthiessen scholar at the University of Tulsa. I would not be surprised if I wind up doing more work like that, if so they will receive their own "playlist" section. Though these documents can (hopefully) paint thorough pictures and understandings of different "underground" art and music scenes in often underrepresented, misunderstood, or overlooked areas, ultimately what you are digesting is a rather meticulous looking glass in to my life in my early and mid-twenties. If anything, this is a somewhat exhaustive sonic document of the life of Natty Gray. I apologize for the innate bias that comes with that. It's rather sentimental and nostalgic for me, so these recordings are not just "special" but highly emotional, if not volatile, pieces of plastic, haha. Things change, things die, people, bands, and scenes come and go. There are people included here who are now dead, friends that I no longer have relationships with or keep up with, bands long defunct, rare captures of short lived projects, glimpses in to the the rises and falls of larger communities, etc. etc. I hope that those who engage with them enjoy and appreciate them as much as I do, and that they can help provide cultural and historical narratives on how greater values, consumer, and social trends are shaped by the underground and ‘outsider’ art and music communities. The full extent of this time-based media project was completed over the course of two years independently with no funding, resources, or institutional backing. With nearly 300 cassettes digitized, photographed, and disseminated, the comprehensive collection contains 326 hours of analog recordings in total, and at the time of its publishing, is to date the most extensive independently orchestrated and publicly accessible live documentation of Oklahoma’s underground to ever occur and contains the sole-existing documents of numerous events and programs. The Comprehensive, Digitized Cassette Archive List: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1vTww...