Time in the Tank

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.