In April of 2023 The TANK launched the Round Sound record label.
Silence and Space
Release date: September 2, 2025 - Pre-order Now
Liner notes:
In 2018, virtuoso of the Native American flute R. Carlos Nakai and percussionist Will Clipman performed an extraordinary concert in the TANK, a venue in a famously resonant empty water tank in the high desert of northwestern Colorado.
R. Carlos Nakai is the world’s premier performer of the Native American flute. Of Navajo-Ute heritage, Nakai was first trained in classical trumpet and music theory and began playing the traditional Native American flute in the early 1980s. His first recordings 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.
Will Clipman has received seven GRAMMY® nominations, including one for his solo world music album Pathfinder. He is a three-time Native American Music Award Winner, a Canadian Aboriginal Music Award Winner, a New Age Reporter Music Award Winner, a two-time TAMMIE Award Winner, and has been inducted into the Tucson Musicians Museum.
Silence and Space presents Nakai’s playing, along with Clipman’s spare and thoughtful percussion, in a context with great gravitas and dignity. The deep reverb of the Tank slows, uplifts and enlarges the music.
The TANK Center for Sonic Arts is an unusual arts venue, dedicated to an empty seven-story Corten steel water tank that was discovered in the 1970's to possess extraordinary acoustic resonance, a reverberation as long and rich as any in the world.
Today the TANK is a fully equipped recording venue and concert site, as well as a 501(c)3 nonprofit arts organization. The place has become a haven for the local music community and a unique destination for artists, sonic explorers, and curious visitors who learn to listen in a whole new way.
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.