Something — no one can quite say what — is happening on a sandy hilltop.
Here stands a rusty, 65-foot cylinder once built to store water, emblazoned with an old railroad logo and graffiti from over the years. Inside there is a young woman with long, jet-black hair in Victorian dress and a young man with plain garb and a scraggly beard.
They do not wear shoes, because the epoxy paint must be preserved, he explains. “Because it makes people slow down, mostly,” he says. And because one does not wear shoes in a sacred place.
Samantha Wade and Michael Van Wagoner are making music. But this is unlike any music you’ve heard.
His guitar is familiar, but the notes are not. Each chord emits a transformed frequency that careens across the curving steel and up to the steel cap, where pink and blue fixtures softly stream through the darkness. Wade’s flute similarly reverberates. She adds to the pulsating cadence with a voice that has been called angelic.
“Transcendent,” says an admirer sitting nearby, Heather Zadra, whose slightest whisper is amplified into more echoes. “Otherworldly.”
These are “ethereal vocals” by Wade’s description. They are hums. Incantations without words. High and low tones from a ringing diaphragm. And they swirl and soar and dance with her still-fluttering flute and Van Wagoner’s endless, eternal guitar.
There is something terrifying about the effect, in the way that things overwhelming and mysterious are terrifying. Also, there is something that makes you want to cry. That’s what happened to one performer here; he read poetry, rubbed metal against the walls and wept.
Welcome to the Center for Sonic Arts. Or simply the Tank, as this impossible sanctuary of sound has come to be known on Colorado’s remote desert, perched atop the oil fields about 90 miles north of Grand Junction.
It has come to be known among experimental musicians as an ultimate laboratory and among curious audiences as a one-of-a-kind concert venue. This summer, a revered “synth wizard” from Oregon performed, along with a string quartet from Brooklyn. Not knowing what to expect, members’ eyes widened as they began playing.
The Tank defies expectations. Magical, some have said. Alien. Mind-bending. Disbelievers look for some hidden microphone or device responsible for the trick.
But no. Resident engineers say it’s something about the thick, rounding walls. Something about the dimensions. Something about the Tank’s place over a bed of gravel, and something about the concave roof. Something about the isolation, the barrenness. And something, too, about the desert climate; sounds waves are more “excited” in heat.
No one can quite say what.
“It’s just the space,” Zadra says. “The space is so giving.”
Visceral discovery
Zadra sits on the Tank’s nonprofit board, which formed after 2013. That year, there was worry the structure would be lost forever.
Wade, who grew up nearby, learned that the landowner was thinking of selling for scrap metal. This sent her into a panic.
“I actually really prayed and prayed and prayed, because I felt like it just could not happen. It just felt like a violation of my soul,” she says. “And luckily by then, so many others experienced it to where it was far from just me.”
Locals had known about the intrigue for decades, since a company’s ill-advised water storage plan had been abandoned in the 1960s.
Before the submarine-like door was installed, youngsters cut the lock on a drain hole and crawled into the darkness to flirt and giggle at the echoes of smashed beer bottles and stereos. Graduates filled the space with triumphant whoops and left their marks in spray paint.
The Tank became something of a cult phenomenon after 1976.
Bruce Odland was fresh out of Northwestern University in Illinois, where he studied composition and conducting. He found himself in Colorado that summer for a traveling arts festival with fellow avant-garde types exploring the boundaries of consciousness.
In Rangely, Odland was roaming the oil fields to create a collage of mechanized sound.
“And then this truck drove up,” he recalls. “Two burly oil workers come up to me in a big truck covered in mud, and they ask me if I’m the sound guy. They said, ‘We’ve got something to show you.’”
At the end of a bumpy, disorienting ride, Odland reluctantly agreed to crawl into the hole, fearful this was some dastardly prank. The men banged two-by-fours against the walls and tossed rocks.
“And when they stopped, it rang and rang and rang,” Odland says. “I’d never heard anything like it.”
Never in some of the world’s grandest soundscapes he’d visited up to that point and thereafter. “It’s 10 times the effect of stepping into St. Paul’s Cathedral,” he says.
Though, the experience was indeed religious in the Tank, minus the images and sermon.
“The Tank has the great luxury of being free of all of that,” Odland says. “You’re just in a very perceptual experience, where you’re not being guided to any particular conclusions. Everybody feels there’s some kind of spiritual connection going on in there, but nobody’s describing it for you.”
After his introduction, he showed fellow festival-goers later that night to the Tank. He remembers the ensuing event accompanied by instruments as “shamanistic in a way.”
They went on to their homes around the country. But they returned year after year to the Tank — pilgrims to their Mecca.
‘Power of the Tank’
After Odland’s discovery, album titles tried to capture the Tank’s essence. “The Soaring Bird,” one was called. Others were “Leaving Eden” and “Ray of Life.”
Michael Stanwood titled his after the crawl hole, “Portal,” and described the Tank as this: “a vessel where serendipity is always alive, patience is rewarded, trust is sustained, and surrender can at times give way to a sense of grace.”
Ownership of the Tank came under Stanwood. He collected donations from Odland and fellow “tanksters” to pay taxes.
But like other owners before him, Stanwood grew wary of liability. By 2013, he told friends he was considering an offer to sell.
Thus began the nonprofit to be led by New York-based Odland. Friends of the Tank, they called themselves from around the country — “an eclectic group of artists, sonic explorers and practical minds bound by common experience.”
And they weren’t all outsiders. Wade hung flyers around her hometown informing of the mission to reclaim the Tank and formally open it to residents and visitors.
In a conservative town lacking artistic outlets and more proud of hard work, common sense, pig roasts, hunting and off-roading, Wade always saw herself as an outcast. “I was the weird one,” she says.
But she always felt at home in the Tank. Opening it to others, she believed, could lead to mutual understanding and deep connection. Zadra, another local, felt the same way.
The Tank “shows us where we have common ground,” she says. “You come into a space like this, I don’t care who you are, I don’t care what your background is, I don’t care whether this becomes something you come back to. But we all experience the power of the Tank.”
With funds raised, savvy locals offered support to help bring the Tank up to code. One offered to build a proper road up the hill. Another offered electrical expertise. A local restaurant added a Tank pizza to the menu, with sales benefiting the nonprofit.
The experimental concerts of recent years don’t appeal to most of Rangely, Zadra admits. But between events and recording sessions, locals often mingle in the Tank with outsiders — country people and city hippies exploring sound together.
“I’ve had groups of strangers go in, and one will start humming, another will start humming, and in about 10 minutes, they sound like a celestial choir,” says James Paul, the Tank’s executive director.
He adds: “There’s something to be said about an experience that takes you out of yourself and takes you away from our ordinary concerns. That’s one of the reasons the Tank has transcended politics I think. And in this moment of American history, that’s such a delight.”
Finding harmony
Odland sees the Tank as confirming his big theory of sound.
Essentially, he says, we don’t listen enough.
We listen to TV and radio. We listen to our movies and music.
But do we listen to our surroundings? Odland asks. The sounds of nature that please us, for example, and the sounds of traffic that don’t? Do we listen to what the world is telling us? Do we listen to each other?
Society is “overly visual,” Odland explains, distracting and quick to stir emotions. “I think sound has an important message that’s largely ignored.”
The Tank has a message.
Talk over someone, for instance, and the sound is muffled, echoing cacophony. Talk too fast and too loud, and the result is the same. Groups here consistently find they have to slow down, locate each other’s sound, then pair with it.
There is a certain balance to accomplish here. A certain way of harmony.
“I think anybody who steps in there gets their ears woken up,” Odland says. “And when they walk out of there, their ears are still woken up.”
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This story was written in partnership with the Denver Gazette, through a collaboration powered by COLab, the Colorado News Collaborative — a nonprofit formed to strengthen local public-service journalism in Colorado. KSUT joined this historic collaboration with more than 40 news organizations to share in-depth local reporting to better serve Coloradans.
Mark Duggan provided online production of this story for KSUT.
