Backers from our successful Kickstarter campaigns sent us amazing sounds; we played them into The TANK (RE-TANKED them). We recorded the results with 4 great microphones, mixed it, and posted it here. Listen to what happens when a sound fills this 65′ tall, 40′ wide space, reflected by its 1/2 inch steel walls!
ANNEA LOCKWOOD
Chorus waves are radio waves in the 0-10kHz range, generated in the intensely radioactive Van Allen Belts in the Earth’s magnetosphere. This event was recorded by the University of Iowa’s EMFISIS receivers and NASA’s RBSP Probes. Dr. Craig Kletzing has given me permission to use this beautiful recording as one of a number of atmospheric phenomena which Bob Bielecki and I are incorporating into a sound installation, ‘Wild Energy’. The installation is focused primarily on non-anthropogenic ‘sound’ waves from outside our hearing range, infrasound and ultrasound, sped up or slowed down respectively to bring them into range: solar oscillations, hydrothermal vents, gas vents on Kilauea, earthquakes, bats, moths and ultrasound generated within trees. Like ‘whistlers’, choruses are the exception, within our range but inaudible except by radio receivers. These sound emanate from sources which affect us fundamentally and are interconnected, an inaudible web in which we move. ‘Wild Energy’ will be included in the Caramoor Festival, Katonah, New York, along with a number of other site-specific sound installations in the summer of 2014.
The California Myotis bat, Myotis californicus, unlike a number of other bat populations, is currently secure, and is found in many locations in California – rock-walled canyons with water being a preference. It is a crevice rooster and thus also found in old mines, brushy niches, buildings, even under tree bark, and is known for its slow and “erratic” flight pattern, as the BLM, California, describes it. This call is being used for echolocation and has been slowed down to bring it into our hearing range. It is an excerpt of sounds above and below the human hearing range which Bob Bielecki and I are incorporating into a sound installation, ‘Wild Energy’. The installation is focused primarily on non-anthropogenic ‘sound’ waves from outside our hearing range, infrasound and ultrasound, sped up or slowed down respectively to bring them into range: solar oscillations, hydrothermal vents, gas vents on Kilauea, earthquakes, bats, moths and ultrasound generated within trees. Like ‘whistlers’, choruses are the exception, within our range but inaudible except by radio receivers. These sound emanate from sources which affect us fundamentally and are interconnected, an inaudible web in which we move. ‘Wild Energy’ will be included in the Caramoor Festival, Katonah, New York, along with a number of other site-specific sound installations in the summer of 2014.
LIOBA VON DEN DREISCH
Thank you very much for this wonderful remix! I am so happy that I finally sent you this piece of the trio. listen to it makes me forget all the big and small trouble I have to fight with at the moment. I am very curious to hear all the other retanked sounds. The music is the middle part of the Angel Trio in the oratorium “Elias” of Felix Mendelsohn Bartholdy (1846) and the soprano is my son when he was 12 years old and a member of the “Staats- und Domchor Berlin”. Now he is 17 and the soprano is history – he agrees to the thing with the channel, too. The other two voices are me. I recorded it (with very bad equipment) for the 80th birthday of my father. Music is a very important part in my life: old and very new music – no pop. I’m a member of two choirs and play the luthe and the cello – written music the most time, but I am only amateur. My profession is media art and design and my son seems to go the same way. I live and work in Berlin – and there is the main reason why I got interested in the tank: Berlin had (has) a big bunch of rotten railways and still some spheric water tanks on very long legs. In 80 something we climbed into one (at night with a rope ladder risking life … ) with candles an some instruments and made music. The reverb in this sphere is hard to discribe, very long but everytime clear and nearest to you. I was there two times. But the sphere got lost for us (some people were to loud and the police came). So there was no question for me to help others to save their tank. The website – yes I have one but still in the state of 2004 so I give you the address from the place where I work www.medienwerkstatt-berlin.de (sorry for “german only” the english version will come soon – i hope) I hope I answered the things you wanted to know and not to long Thank you very much Lioba
ANN CANTELOW
The little re-tanked piece sounds wonderful! I’m delighted you’d like to put it on the TANKCHANNEL, that’s fine with me. Its name is The Grotto. I sent it to the voxnovus.com 2011 60×60 competition for 1-minute pieces in 2011 and it was accepted as part of the Athena Mix for women composers. ( www.voxnovus.com/60×60/2011_Athena_Mix.htm ). The piece is made entirely of sounds from my Etherwave Pro Moog theremin. I fed the theremin directly into the Garage Band program on my Mac, and chopped the sounds up and manipulated them in multi-tracks there. I studied music composition at Univ. of Calif at Davis from about 1967 to 1970. Had the good fortune to take a class from John Cage who guest-taught there one year. The possibilities in New Music seemed so vast to me in those days that I gave it up for awhile unable to decide which direction to go, and ended up with a math degree instead. I’m trying to get back to composing now, picking up pretty much where I left off, though the equipment has of course changed- even more possibilities than before. The theremin and Garage Band manipulations are so comfortable and fun for me that I’ve stuck with that limited universe for now. I live in Boulder, Colorado. www.cantelow.com Thanks for the interest!! Ann Cantelow
CARSTEN SEIFARTH / MAX EASTLY
Carsten Seifarth, a most trusted and expert curator of sound installations sent this sound, which had been recorded in his legendary soundspace, the Wasserspeicher, which, like the TANK is an water tank, this one made of stone in Berlin with an 11 second echo. He wanted the two spaces to merge into something new. He sent a marvelous recording of Max Eastley’s Aeolian harp, activated by wind on the tower, and echoing within the stone walls of the space. “In his installation “Aeolian Circles” British artist Max Eastley combines two elements: a series of kinetic objects in the interior of the reservoir and a wind harp in the exterior space. The sounds of the wind harps on the roof of the tower house are transmitted in real-time into the reservoir’s four concentric rings. The brick architecture and the reverberation times that last up to 18 seconds transform the wind-generated sounds into a dense sound texture that seems to move through the rings yet at the same time is contrasted with the concrete sounds of the kinetic objects in the space. “The installations create an architecture of sound within the architecture of brick: an echo of the Greek myth that tells of how Aeolus, God of the Winds, kept the winds in cave.“ (Max Eastley)
DAVID REIFFEL
I create music, sound, and words (both spoken and sung) for theater. I also do graphic design. I’m based in Boston. The sources of my TANKed sounds are: a book falling on the carpet in my studio; a riffle through the pages of that same book; my own breath; and a “bliss” ambient. The book sounds are from my sound design for Kirsten Greenidge’s “Gibson Girl”; the breath is from “How Many Miles to Basra” by Colin Teevan; and the ambient is originally from “Dead City” by Shiela Callaghan. The TANKed breath has already made an appearance in a production of “From White Plains” by Michael Perlman. I sent the breath to be my surrogate until I can make it out to the TANK in person. David Reiffel. www.davidreiffel.com
DAVID REMEDIOS
Dave Remedios is a composer and sound designer working out of Boston.
“Thanks for these, they sound very cool! What a treat to hear the Tank in action. I guess I could call this “Pre-Honeymoon in Prague,” since I recorded most of the sources when Karen and I were there last Thanksgiving, and where we found our wedding rings, before getting married last December. It’s an amalgam of 4 sources: an HVAC ambience in a visitor center in Petřín Park, churchbells at the Strahov Monastery near Prague Castle, a hurdy-gurdy player playing and singing in a town square in Staré Město, and an older source from 2009 of rug weavers working their looms in New Mexico (another of our favorite places). Your lessons of listening for and recording unusual sources are never far from me. Hopefully I’ll get to hear the Tank in person someday! Dave Remedios
www.remediossound.com/
ELEN FLUEGE / THOMAS KOCH
Elen and Thomas are sound lovers living in Berlin. They met through the Sound Studies Master program at the University of the Arts, Berlin, and have enjoyed making noise together since. The track is a short composition for the (Re)Tanking occasion. The violin (Elen), was layered with tuned down recordings of the same instrument, edited and mixed mostly by Thomas. Elen has written on the subject of Personal Sound Space and made installations, such as Breathing Room. Her main interest is sound in city environments, and the acoustics of everyday human habitats; she is especially curious to know how people listen to their private environments. (more on works at
personalsoundspace.com/ ) Thomas main interest is in the capturing and reproduction of ‘3D-Audio’. He currently works in this domain as a Reserach Associate at Fraunhofer HHI and as a lecturer in the Sound Studies Department ‘Auditory Media Design’ at University of Arts, Berlin
DAVE SEIDEL
T(h)anks a lot, Bruce! I had used Audacity to stitch together a stereo mix from the six tracks, but yours sounds a little more organic. Just curious, did you give the three stereo pairs roughly equal amplitudes relative to one another? I made the sound using Csound. It’s based on binaural beating, where two oscillators are panned hard-left and hard-right, one slightly sharp of the intended pitch, and one slightly flat, which gives an apparent acoustical beating pattern at the frequency defined by the difference between the two pitches. So for example, if I want to make a sound at 60Hz that beats once every second, I tune the left channel to 59.5Hz and the right channel to 60.6Hz. The sound I submitted consists of nine of these binaural pairs of oscillators. They are all based on 60Hz with each pair tuned to a different “beat”, ranging from 15 cps down to 0.05859375 cps. I used a synthetic waveform built from harmonics from the first eleven prime numbers. Of course, I didn’t expect the result to actually be binaural or to preserve the beating effect precisely, but I was curious to see what would happen to it in the tank. I’m pretty happy with what came out. – Dave
ERIC SLUYTER
I am a composer and sound artist. These sounds are part of a piece I am working on that explores natural and mechanical imagery with digitally synthesized sounds. The drone is a waveform made using bitwise operators on a number sequence. The “whooshing” sounds are filtered noise moving through simulated space and convolved with the call of a loon. Eric Sluyter @
sluyterrific
KENNY JAMES
The clip is and authentic Afghanistan National Army Soldier singing…uh, something. Not sure what he’s singing but he was in such a good mood while he and I were doing tower guard together one day during my combat deployment that I had to record him. He sang for about five minutes straight so this clip is only a very small sample. So glad I was able to record it. By his expression while he was singing I’m thinking it was spiritual in nature but I could be WAY off. It was recording in Kandahar, Afghanistan with my cell phone believe it or not in either 2010 or 2011. I think the re-TANKED clip will be used either as a standalone transition between songs on the full length release or somehow I’ll be able to use it within one of the songs I’m almost finished with. Either way, the name of the “band” is A BEAUTIFUL CURSE and it will be used in the full length release called “A SCAR IS BORN” coming out hopefully by summer of 2014 (fingers crossed). As the release is a collection of songs that I wrote during that year in Afghanistan, it seemed only fitting to have his voice on it.
www.abeautifulcurse.com
ROBERT BOOLE
Hello. You’re more than welcome to use my sound on your site as I’m pleased with how it came out, especially given the short amount of time to play with and the guesswork involved in preparing it. I don’t usually say much about things I record as I don’t want to take away the chance of a listener having their own, and quite likely better, ideas. In this case that’s not such a problem as this was made up specifically for the Kickstarter reward with practical rather than artistic aims in mind. Mainly that of avoiding a muddy mess building up for as long as possible. Hence short low thuds to set off bursts of reverb and long high frequency sounds to ring round. The guitar part is from something I did 19 years ago and not having played it much since then is my excuse for the rather wooden playing! The rest is mainly samples I’m afraid. The throat singing at the start from a Simon Stockhausen library and much of the remaining from Soniccoutre’s sampling of an instrument I’ve long been fascinated with but am unlikely to ever get near, a Cristal Baschet. And of course I couldn’t resist and big smash and a crash at the end to really set things off (for a bonus 24 seconds!). I’ve only ever pottered about with sound and for lack of a coherent explanation of my approach am going to have to fall back on an old quote by Thomas Beecham to give an inkling of it, “The English may not like music, but they absolutely love the noise it makes”. Which does give away partly the answer to where I’m from and indeed where I live, Horsham in Sussex in the UK (generally pronounced ‘Orsham by us yokels). I usually chuck things I’m mucking around with on my Soundcloud page
soundcloud.com/zatapathique/ which is a bit swamped at the moment by old tracks I finally have the knowledge and equipment to spruce up a bit. All roads lead from there to my other internet ports of call. The recording was a lot easier than coming up with a title. Well I like puns and would also prefer something ambiguous but that perhaps gives it a sense of age so how about ‘Man Of Arun’. Man of Aran was a 1934 fictional documentary about life on the Aran islands off the coast of Ireland which the band British Sea Power did a soundtrack for a few years ago. There are also quite a lot of ‘man of…’ in the UK for example The Old Man Of Hoy in Scotland. And I live in a town through which the River Arun passes so I think I’ve covered all the criteria. How’s that? Rob
KYLE FERREL
I had my good friend Reed Weimer help me record the antique Tibetan Singing Bowls that I have collected. I would love to just hear what they sound like playing them in the tank someday. They even sound amazing in my ranch house in Denver.
MATT OTTO
Matt Otto is a composer and sound designer in New York “Last time I saw Bruce he handed me a purple CD-R with just my name and a drawing of the tank reverberating. I didn’t know what it was at first but I knew it was unique. It wasn’t until I listened to my RETANKED track did I fully understand how unique it truly was. My piece was a simple electronic music song for marimba I created in Ableton Live, by assigning different notes different weightings and letting the computer choose which note it played. It was a fun experiment. The RETANKED version is like nothing I ever heard before. The texture the tank adds transforms the piece and takes it to places I did not know it could go. Every time I listen to it my jaw drops to the floor stunned; I just sit and listen to the song play on loop and every time I explore new reverberations and resonance; taking me underwater, to outer space, to an entirely different plane of existence. The RETANKING is a wonderfully singular gift. Thank you Bruce for this change of mind this turning around. ”
www.mattottosound.com
KEVIN GERZEVITZ
I am a musician, a composer, a teacher, living in the SF Bay Area. I am a multi-instrumentalist with a strong background in jazz and classical piano. I enjoy playing accordion, violin and baglama in a Greek Rebetika band called The Disciples of Markos:
disciplesofmarkos.com I also occasionally perform hillbilly bebop boogie country Americana on piano and accordion with Jimbo Trout and the Fishpeople:
jimbotrout.com The song, Azima-O, was taught to me by a friend who said it came from the Dagara tribe of Burkina Faso. It is a song of celebration – the celebration of creation, of life. This performance was crudely recorded on an iPhone, on moment’s notice, by a team of men with whom I circle up twice a month, to play ultimate frisbee and then share, connect, and process what’s happening in our lives. We ritually sing this song when we meet. This recording was made after a day of prepping a campsite for an event our team helps put on for young men each year – a young men’s rite of passage called Young Men’s Ultimate Weekend:
www.ymuw.org I approach [listening] it as a way to “see”. I like to visualize sounds as I hear and process them. Rhythm and pitches and form can become concrete shapes and colors for me, measurable with spatial depth, and pleasurable in their continuously evolving dance of impermanence. [I’m from] Ann Arbor, Michigan [living in]San Rafael, California
reverbnation.com/kevingerzevitz
MELANIE HEDLUND
NEIL JOHNSON
My re-tanked file sounds AWESOME! I’ve performed in large spaces all over the country including one of the grandest cathedrals and no space I’ve ever been in rivals the remarkable tone and presence of The Tank’s reverberation.
Your dedication to maintaining this wondrous resource is greatly appreciated. I’m so glad I could help in some small way through your Kickstarter campaign.I’d be delighted to share my sound on TANKCHANNEL. I’ll draw up a little info about myself and will share that and a version of the final sound that mixes in some of the original dry signal. Neal Johnson Washington, DC @
vanwinkletunes
NOAH LAPOOK / PHILLIP ANASTASSIOU
Thank you so much. The recording sounds INCREDIBLE! I can’t imagine how cool it must be to hear it live. Best, Noah Hi Bruce, My name’s Philip Anastassiou, a friend of Noah, and I wrote the music/lyrics of the song he sent you. It’s called “Juvenile Love”. Thanks a bunch! Philip
