Category: STORIES FROM THE TANK

I am so excited about your tank project, even though I might never be able to visit The TANK in real life. It is now about eleven years ago that in a magic moment, a group of 9 acoustically experimentalist like-minded people met by coincidence at the same party in the unprobable city of Bielefeld in […]

What is The TANK? To the welders who built it and the railroad men who set it in place, it was just a cylinder of steel. To several generations of Rangely high school kids, it was a secret club, a place to do those things kids do behind their parents’ backs. To the musicians who […]

The Epitaph of Seikilos and its Reverberance in The TANK.  Estimated as probably being created in the first century, C.E., the Epitaph of Seikilos is one of the oldest (if not the oldest) complete pieces of notated music ever discovered. Etched on a cylindrical tombstone found in southern Turkey, it is a monophonic melody set with […]

Here you are!  The Flinching Eye Collective, a group of media based performance artists, had the privilege to visit The TANK last year. We were on a mission to both support the development of this burgeoning new art center, as well as attempt to engage with it as an acoustic collaborator. What we discovered was a […]

First Encounter During my first Tank trip in the early 1980’s with Bruce Odland, Elton Norwood, and Brian Waters, my previous relationship to the practice of music was fundamentally obliterated.  The Tank’s powerful and responsive, reverberant voice quickly made it clear that making sounds in there was not going to be about me, my ego, […]

In The TANK: Some kind of total alteration of the sensibilities happens in that space … your hands collect the pulse of what is there, and what has been there. It’s as though the rhythm takes over Full Body and it is hard to discriminate between your own hands, what they are doing, the hands […]

 …By listening to “Leaving Eden” on good headphones or excellent speakers, all the way through, uninterrupted, you will not hear sounds or music the same way for at least 3 days! It impacts the the ear, the brain and the Soul – deeply!!It transforms you! The TANK and the music created in it can do […]

Although I’ve worked with a number of Friends of the Tank in musical situations over many years, I’ve only once been to the portal. As it turned out, much of what was recorded over the three or four days I was there — with Michael Stanwood, Bruce Odland, Mark McCoin, and briefly, Bob Drake and […]

Now, my first actual adventure to the TANK begins with a 5 day raft trip on the Yampa with “the boys” (Bruce, Mho, Bruce’s son Max, Mark, and Steve) and culminated with a full-moon trip to the TANK.   I’d heard stories of this acoustical wonder for over 10 years.  My intention was to play […]

  I found sitting outside the Tank, for twilight medical celebrations, to be enchanting.

In the fall of 2001, under a harvest moon on the last weekend of September, three weeks after the bombing of the World Trade Center, a group of musicians and artists of various sorts gathered in Rangely, Colorado for an extraordinary event. I drove up from Santa Fe, New Mexico, on the invitation of my […]

Upon the recommendation of my friend and collaborator, Mark McCoin, I journeyed to the Tank with a crew of complete strangers. I was told that time in this distinctive place was an education like no other; a notion which would prove to be much more true than I could have imagined. My introverted nature kept […]

To get a cello through the ~18″ portal into the Tank, I had to use a Knilling “Portacello” that I’d purchased in Hollywood decades ago to enable me to practice quietly in an apt. there. It’s a skinny, rectangular version of a cello that looks like something Picasso would’ve painted in Cubist fashion. I had […]

The tank has been in my life since I was a kid. The musicians that would play unusual and magical instruments inside would come over to my grandmother’s, Barbara Wade, and visit with my family and I until night fall when we’d all go crawl through the portal of the tank, and awe at the […]

So, here is a Tank story from the early 90’s. A musician friend wanted to follow his dream in San Francisco, and his wife wanted to continue her life here [in Colorado]. On a Friday night, our two children, my wife, and myself got into the Volvo station wagon (its back setup as a bed […]

Sound Artist and Sonic Thinker Sam Auinger has been Bruce’s artistic partner in o+a since 1987. In 1991, Sam made his first trip to the TANK.

  [vimeo src=”//player.vimeo.com/video/61842760?title=0&byline=0&portrait=0″ width=”100%” height=”300″ /] “The discovery of the TANK: an exciting tale of abduction and two-by-fours.”                                                 – D. Reiffel Back in 1976, during the Colorado BiCentenial, I went with 60 artists on a tent tour of small towns in Colorado to transform these communities with art. I’ve been going back to Rangely, Colorado […]

The tank taught me a lot about sounds, and not in a book way. Overtones, too. I play only one note at a time. Have always loved stairwells, parking garages, etc. for their resonance, even wooden dance halls that grab the woodwinds and roll the sound around the walls. The tank was like a candy […]

Free Yampa 20 years from Mho Salim on Vimeo. Images from the Yampa river. Brother Massoud took most of these pictures during his first trip down Yampa (May 2006). There are a couple of pictures by Marc McCoin and also a couple by Mho Salim. The background music are two pieces by Bruce Odland. The […]

For a long time the Tank has been a friend and teacher to me and to many other musicians who have made the trek out to play in the extraordinary sound chamber. Indeed, there is magic in hearing a note decaying for forty seconds and seeming to go some place. You are in a numinous […]