Our Mission is to preserve, protect, and share The TANK, Rangely Colorado’s world class center for sonic arts, as a unique and transformative audio laboratory for musicians, sound artists, educators, and town residents.
How we fulfill our mission
Professional recording sessions, on-site and remote.
Twentyfour open-house Saturdays every year for you to come, explore and experiment
Free concerts plus two multi-day ticketed events every year
Artist residencies and partnerships with universities
Resident artists visit with local school students
We employ local residents as engineers, and they train local teens to take their first steps towards sound engineering
We bring visitors to our rural home town’s businesses
We rely on the generosity of donors - please consider making a tax deductible donation to our non-profit organization.
Come to The TANK
The staff and board members of the Tank are committed to creating a safe and welcoming space for everyone. We embrace and celebrate differences. We find joy in uniqueness. We are centered in love. We seek peace. Age, race, gender, ability, culture, sexuality, ethnicity, and class are all notes that add depth to our resonant space. Whether you're coming from near or far, please add your voice to our chorus.
What people say about playing in The TANK
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My first plunge into the Tank came courtesy of my dear friend Todd Barton. For his birthday, Todd skipped cake and candles and instead assembled a fellowship of sound seekers, improvisers, and frequency chasers for a three-day communion inside one of the most acoustically uncanny spaces on Earth. I had no real idea what I was walking into. I boarded a plane from New York, landed in Salt Lake City, linked up with Todd, and together we pointed the car toward Rangely, Colorado, chasing a horizon that felt part desert pilgrimage, part science-fiction road movie. I arrived carrying a small arsenal of electronics, but in the end the instruments that spoke most clearly were my voice and a borrowed metal barrel that doubled as the trash can outside the local NAPA Auto Parts store. The Tank has a way of stripping away assumptions about what counts as an instrument.
What struck me most was the sensitivity of the space itself. A whisper could bloom into architecture. A click, a breath, a scrape of metal could linger in the air long after its source had disappeared. Sound didn’t simply occur there; it revealed itself. We all seemed to instinctively become listeners before performers. Conversation dwindled to a minimum, and every gesture felt intentional, almost ceremonial. Looking back, I think of the atmosphere the way I think of entering a church before the service begins. People speak softly not because they’re told to, but because the room itself asks something of them. The Tank carried that same gravity: part reverence, part curiosity, part surrender.
Back in New York, the Tank never really left me. Its resonance lingered in memory long after I returned home, so when the opportunity came to have a piece “Tanked,” I was all in. One of the things that stayed with me from my first encounter was the way a single sustained tone seemed to hover in the air, slowly dissolving into infinity. Inspired by that experience, I chose not to record conventional chords. Instead, I recorded one note at a time, allowing roughly thirty seconds of silence between each tone. I wanted every pitch to fully inhabit the space before the next arrived. Later, in the editing process, those individual notes were layered into harmonic structures, allowing the composition to emerge from resonance itself.
As Executive Director of Willie Mae Rock Camp in NYC, I am focused on encouraging young people to experiment, listen deeply, and imagine new possibilities through sound and technology. My intention is that my piece will inspire some of our youth to create a work of their own to be Tanked, adding their voices to this extraordinary acoustic space.
My experience with the Tank reinforced a lesson I return to again and again in my work as a composer, and with young people: imagination begins with listening. When we slow down, pay attention, and remain curious, new possibilities reveal themselves. The Tank embodies that spirit. Or, in Todd Barton’s simple and profound words, “Follow the sound.”
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My connection to The Tank started back in the 1990’s when I first met Bruce Odland. I was curating music at The Kitchen then and we presented his Cloud Chamber project with Sam Auinger. Bruce’s creative work has always been extremely compelling, and I was very intrigued when I heard about his development of The Tank during its early stages.
Other musicians and media reporting brought The Tank more to my attention, and in 2023 when I was planning a tour of the western US, I contacted Bruce about a possible performance. I was thrilled to be invited to perform on the Solstice Festival in June. The Tank was my last stop after a month spent traveling, performing, and finishing my book Diffusing Music. I was particularly drawn to play at The Tank because of my involvement with ambient music, both through my own work and as leader of La Monte Young’s Theater of Eternal Music Brass Ensemble. In recent years many of these performances were presented in churches or other highly reverberant spaces, so I was very excited to have the chance to bring my music to The Tank.
Beyond exploring the interior acoustics, I was equally fascinated by the idea of the outdoor presentation through spatially separated speakers. I had previously developed a wireless sound system that distributed the live-sampled sounds of my Mutantrumpet around a lake for ambient performances. The Tank’s blend of interior and exterior listening paralleled my interest in outdoor and indoor sonic environments, a theme also central to my opera Fantini Futuro.
When I arrived in Rangely and first set foot in The Tank I begin playing acoustically, before I had set up my electronic system. What I immediately realized was that The Tank is not just a space, it’s more like a giant instrument. As I played, I was struck by how the sound seemed to spiral upward, as if the notes were ascending into infinity. I found myself listening and reacting to what The Tank was giving back in ways that I never had before. Once the electronics were added the interactivity with The Tank became even more pronounced, and I continued to hear things generated by my playing that I had never experienced previously. Stepping outside and hearing the sounds being played over the expansive landscape was equally exhilarating for me, particularly with my recent interest in the relationship of indoor and outdoor sonic spaces.
The performance was unlike anything I’ve experienced in my long career; transcendent, mystical, and profoundly moving. The upward movement of the sound created a kind of anti-gravity sensation, like floating upward on the powerful resonances that were materializing inside of the space. The dynamic sensitivity was astonishing, even the quietest sounds produced complex responses. During the performance there was a strong wind blowing outside, which emphasized The Tank’s connection to wild nature and added another powerful sonic element.The next day it was great to have the chance to meet some other musicians and community members. The openness of the exchange felt very aligned with the inclusive, expansive nature of the experience I had the night before.
My experience with remote recording at The Tank is much more limited. I had a session in early 2025 in which I recorded my Mutantrumpet and live sampling through Sonobus. Everything worked well technically, but in the virtual situation it was more difficult for me to adjust to the The Tank’s remarkable acoustics due to my own monitoring setup. The session turned out to be more of an experiment, and I plan to do another recording sometime soon in which I focus more on listening to The Tank as an active collaborator.
The Tank is a space that compels us to listen in ways that we never have before. It sensitizes us to sonic phenomena and experiences in a way that lingers long after we leave its physical presence. I greatly look forward to having a chance of returning soon, either physically or virtually.
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The black cursive Rio Grande presides seven stories above the sagebrush, a fading tattoo from The Tank’s honest upbringing as a reservoir for soft water to tend the railroad.
Once a utilitarian giant, this particular tank now serves as a sanctuary for sound arts and creative practice. Within its depths, the joyous onslaughts of musicians and audiophiles are tempered by forty seconds of natural reverb, endless echoes, and a parabola-shaped floor. Sound takes time, and The Tank just keeps on giving.
The lozenge-shaped entry looks to have been sourced from a decommissioned submarine. I hurtled through the door in a tornado of microphones, trailing wires, and dying batteries. Eight hours of icy roads had brought me to this moment, an edgy artist seeking solace in sound.
My frozen fingers gave way and the truck keys clattered down on a wood stool just inside the tank’s curved steel exterior. This careless gesture launched a sonic sparkle, reverberating through the space for over thirty seconds. Clutching an armload of recording gear, I stood motionless - a relic of my own disturbance - then gasped a frosty exhale that echoed for an eternity. What other reverberations of my thoughtlessness linger, disrupting the fabric of time and space? Attending to inattention was Tank Lesson #1.
My teacher, a 70-foot-tall COR-TEN steel cylinder, was derelict to the eyes, but beautiful on the ears. Emptied of its liquid past, The Tank looms high over Rangely, Colorado, weathering the passing sounds of human haste, occasional overflights, and the intermittent bark of a neighbor’s dog. If I wanted to listen, to truly hear, It was time to slow down. This was Tank Lesson #2.
I untangled the wires and plugged the mics into the recording deck. For the next ninety minutes, I surrendered to the lazy stretch of the Tank’s acoustic decay, launching a steady stream of different sounds and savoring the soft weave of suspended reverberations from each clip played. I drew from my own field recordings of arctic bioacoustics, fog horns, and bell buoys. These aids to navigation were rendered directionless within the softly booming bellows of the Tank.
The haunting melodies of bowhead and humpback whales, the clicks of sperm whales, and squeaking killer whales were sourced from the bioacoustic library of the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute and the New Bedford Whaling Museum. Marine mammals echoed forth, as if The Tank itself was a ship upon the sea and we were deep within that vessel. Perhaps this was the first utterance of whale language across the sage plains of northwestern Colorado.
My collaborator, the artist Mia Mulvey, brought her walrus recordings from the Arctic, and a delicate chorus of tree frogs. With her magnetized geophone, she mic’d up a chilly metal folding chair and set it in the center of the Tank’s roundness, adding yet more reverb to the 40-second echo of decaying nature sounds.
After listening for a stretch, we learned that less could be more. Launching sounds from the digital playground of the laptop was fun and interesting, but paled in comparison to the emotional depths of the fading acoustic after-image. As the October air nipped at our extremities, I found myself increasingly attuned to the space between sounds.
Here, in the elasticity of descending stillness, was a silence that was sublime, but nearly imperceptible. A calm seeped in, not through the eyes or ears, but through the skin, the immediate and undeniable sensation of being both held closely and fully liberated.
The Tank reminds us that quiet is a language of the heart, spoken in the liminal spaces between sounds. Any sudden movement - a careless breath - and we drown in a cacophony of our own self-noise. It’s impossible to discern the precise moment when sound steps in and quiet recedes, the inexplicable absence of something that was never truly present. We must settle ourselves and receive quiet fully, then patiently await the decay of our own echoes, allowing silence to permeate deeper still. Tank Lesson #3 is a practice of perpetually relearning to settle down.
I gently retrieve my keys from the wooden stool, promising a long, uncertain journey ahead. A digital tempest brews in my reawakened smartphone as winter storm warnings pelt across the screen. We are, after all, creatures of chance, shaped by unpredictable forces that come out of nowhere, typically without warning, to scare us and soothe us, reverberating through time.
So many echoes, so much to learn.
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I first became aware of The Tank from my good friend Larry Delinger, who was composing music for the Denver Center and working with composer/sound designer, Bruce Odland. Larry told me that Bruce had found this amazing acoustic space which was only known to a few underground composers and sound designers. From that moment on it was on my bucket list.
It wasn’t until April 30, 2021 when I got to experience The Tank remotely while beta testing the remote hook up from my Ashland house to The Tank, using Sonobus and my Buchla Music Easel (a semi-modular analog synth). It was a mind blowing revelation, putting my headsets on and playing a single note on my Easel and hearing 40 seconds of reverberation. As I continued to explore and improvise sounds, I thought I heard what was a hauntingly, beautiful female voice…nothing I was doing would have made that sound. It turns out Samantha Wade (one of the audio engineers at that time) had walked into The Tank and started singing with me. It was a sublime duet…or trio: Samantha, me and the Tank.
A month later in June on the summer solstice 2021 I invited to perform in The Tank. Actually being in the Tank and learning and breathing with it rewired my mind, body and soul. I learned a deeper and slower way of listening.
Just prior to my performance that evening I got to listen to a recoding of my soundcheck outside The Tank surrounded by the Meyer 5.1 sound system. Watching the sunset in Rangeley, Colorado and being immersed outdoors by the sound of The Tank was transcendent and an experience that stays with me to this day.
Fast forward to February, March and April 2022 during the pandemic. I invited 10 of my musician friends to give me 3 to 6 minute audio clips of their favorite tune or improvisation or sound effect and sent these to Samantha and Michael to be Re-Tanked. They played back the audio files from their speakers in The Tank and then recorded that from their eight microphones then gave me the eight channel .wav files. It was a revelation to hear the differences of individual instruments and how The Tank embraced and spoke with them. Didjeridoo, piano, voice, trumpet, guitar, modular synths, waterphone, shakuhachi and Taiko drum.
My next encounter with The Tank was September 14, 2024 when I invited 10 of my musician friends to join me in The Tank for a day of exploration, improvisation, and sublime sonic camaraderie. Most of these musicians did not know one another, but somehow the magic of The Tank embraced and inspired us all to a sense of play and deep listening.
I’m so honored, excited and inspired to now be on the Board of Directors with the amazingly creative and visionary thinkers and supporters.
Long Live the TANK!
Full SOLSTICE 2026 Schedule
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Sixteen Airstreams from the Colorado Airstream club parade down Rangely Main Street and to the Tank.
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FERROMANCY at The TANK. See the full description of this event, created by Alan Watts and Neal Johnson, on our Events page. An amazing, immersive sound experience.
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Gather at The TANK to greet the Solstice Sunrise. Followed by a group hum in The TANK. Yes, it is worth getting up early for.
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Open Saturday. Come visit the Tank, chat with our engineers and visiting artists, experiment in The TANK.
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Neal Johnson and Alan Watts, the FERROMANCY team, will give a demonstration.
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Join us a few miles out of town for a group swim!
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FERROMANCY at The TANK. See the full description of this event, created by Alan Watts and Neal Johnson, on our Events page. An amazing, immersive sound experience.
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Join together for an hour of singing and playing in The TANK.
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Everyone present gas an opportunity to ring our titanium bell, in The TANK, closing out our annual Solstice celebration.
These recent recordings, released in 2025 & 2026 on other labels, were recorded partly or wholly in The TANK
Summer Solstice and Septemberfest multi-day events, concerts and installations. Free concerts by TANK recording artists. Residencies of U. Colorado ATLAS composers & musicians, and events in the ATLAS B2 black box. Record release parties. Open house Saturdays May through October. +50 on-site & remote recording sessions & experiments. Some details here, and some images below.
