In April of 2023 The TANK launched the Round Sound record label.
Silence and Space
Expected release date: September 2, 2025
Liner notes and purchase links are coming. Meanwhile, here are the bios of the extraordinary artists behind this TANK recording.
R. Carlos Nakai
Of Navajo-Ute heritage, R. Carlos Nakai is the world’s premier performer of the Native American flute. Originally trained in classical trumpet and music theory, Nakai was given a traditional cedar wood flute as a gift and challenged to see what he could do with it.
Nakai began playing the traditional Native American flute in the early 1980s and released more than 50 albums in his career (with 40 on the Canyon Records label). Nakai has sold more than 4.3 million albums for Canyon Records and earned two Gold Records for Canyon Trilogy and Earth Spirit. In 2014, Canyon Trilogy reached Platinum (over 1 million units sold), the first ever for a Native American artist performing traditional solo flute music. In addition to his solo appearances throughout the United States, Europe, and Japan, Nakai has worked with guitarist William Eaton, flutist Paul Horn, composers James DeMars and Phillip Glass and various symphony orchestras.
While well-grounded in the traditional uses of the flute, Nakai has explored new musical settings including new age, world-beat jazz and classical. His cross-cultural collaborations have included an album with the Wind Travelin’ Band, a Japanese folk ensemble and Tibetan flutist and singer Nawang Khechog on several productions including “In A Distant Place.” Nakai has earned two gold records for “Canyon Trilogy” and “Earth Spirit” and has received eleven GRAMMY nominations in four different categories and earned a Governor’s Arts Award. Nakai’s career has been shaped by a desire to communicate a sense of Native American culture and society that transcends the common stereotypes presented in mass media.
Will Clipman
Will Clipman began playing his father's drums and his mother's piano at the age of three. He played his first professional gig at fourteen, and has since then has mastered a pan-global palette of over one hundred percussion instruments in addition to the traditional drumset. Will is a seven-time GRAMMY® Nominee, a three-time Native American Music Award Winner, a Canadian Aboriginal Music Award Winner, a New Age Reporter Music Award Winner, and a two-time TAMMIE Award Winner; and has been inducted into the Tucson Musicians Museum for his contributions to the musical community in his hometown. Will has recorded over sixty albums, including over thirty for Canyon Records, where he is regarded as the house percussionist.In addition to his solo work, Will performs with R. Carlos Nakai and William Eaton, among many other internationally-acclaimed artists. Will's solo CD Pathfinder earned a GRAMMY® Nomination for Best New Age Album. His Planet of Percussion® performance and workshop provides a hands-on tour of world music rhythm and polyrhythm.
A poet since the age of six, Will has published a book of his original poetry entitled Dog Light (Wesleyan University Press) and his work has appeared in numerous anthologies and literary journals. His writing has been honored with the Whiffen Poetry Prize, the Academy of American Poets Margaret Sterling Award, the Tucson/Pima Arts Council Poetry Fellowship, and the Arizona Commission on the Arts Award of Merit for Poetry. His poem The Quiet Power is the official Dedicatory Poem of the Tucson Main Library.
Will is also an accomplished maskmaker and storyteller. His Myths & Masks® performance and workshop combines his original mask art, mythopoetic storytelling, and multicultural world music, and is now available as a DVD. Will has provided over two hundred workshops, lecture-demonstrations, master classes, full-length artist-in-residencies, and self-realization events to elementary, middle, and high schools, colleges and universities, art galleries, libraries, adult prisons, juvenile detention facilities, senior centers, hospitals, parks and recreation programs, retreat centers, spas and resorts. His service to the community as an arts educator has been honored with the Arizona Commission on the Arts Decade of Distinguished Service Award and two Governor's Arts Award Nominations.
Will holds a Bachelor of Arts Degree from Syracuse University, and a Master of Fine Arts Degree from the University of Arizona.
Slow Beethoven
On June 17, 2021, at National Sawdust in Brooklyn, NY, renowned cellist Jeffrey Zeigler led three other virtuosic players in an adagio movement, the fugue from Beethoven’s String Quartet Number 14 in C-sharp minor, Opus 131. As they played, they heard the sound of their performance resonating in the profound reverb of The TANK, in which sonic impulses may sustain for up to 40 seconds.
To allow each of the lush, Ludwiggy chords to ring out and fade in The TANK, the quartet had to slow the work radically, so that this short movement, some seven minutes long in the original tempo, took more than 45 minutes for them to play. The result is otherworldly, part Beethoven and part something entirely new. The work remains true to Beethoven’s emotions in this meditation on grief, resolution, existence itself, and these feelings may even feel intensified in this slower version.