Musicians play with echo in this abandoned water tank in Colorado
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RANGELY, Colo. — In Rangely, Colorado, a small town in the northwest corner of the state, nestled in the middle of the Book Cliffs Mountain Range, musicians have turned an old water tank into a performance venue and recording studio.
Simply called The Tank, the space offers a unique sonic experience, with echoes lasting up to 40 seconds in the 65-foot steel cylinder.
Originally built to store water in case of fires at a nearby electric company, it was abandoned shortly after it was brought to Rangely in the 1960s.
From an engineering standpoint, the water tank badly designed, and in fact it never even held any water. But as a music venue, it's become a dream destination for a lot of artists.
“I don't think I'm going to write music the same way ever again,” says Alan Mackwell, a composer from Boulder, Colorado.
Earlier this fall, Mackwell was an artist in residence at The Tank. The residency program started about a decade ago, after a group of musicians and Rangely locals saved The Tank from demolition. Over the years, they've been renovating it and turning it into the facility it is today: a concert venue, a recording space, and a place for musicians to experiment.
While he was there, Mackwell wrote a piece called Rail Dynamics that features a violin, a viola, and a cello, played by Jordan Grantonic, Emma Reynolds, and Peyton Magelheist, respectively.
Mackwell says that when composing the music, he had to take the sonic experience of The Tank into consideration.
“It's so hard to be able to approximate what will happen to the kinds of sounds that you make just because, you know, the acoustic properties of The Tank are so wildly different from anything I've ever experienced,” explained Mackwell.
The acoustics of The Tank mean that all sounds can be amplified, even those that aren’t part of a performance.
“Every single sound gets magnified, you know, a sneeze, a cough, a phone ringing, thank God that didn't happen. There's nowhere to hide,” said Mackwell.
One of the appeals for musicians is the echo the space offers.
“A good amount of reverb can do a lot to make a sound feel a little bit more alive,” said Mackwell.
The echo in The Tank can last up to 40 seconds. For comparison, the average echo in a concert hall is just two seconds. In a cathedral, it's around 9 seconds. The world record for the longest echo is 75 seconds.
What allows The Tank to create its unique echo actually prevented it from being able to hold water in the first place. The floor bulges upward and makes a slate dome.
“When they engineered it, they didn't put a cement pad under it, so it wasn't able to hold the weight of water on this hill,” said The Tank's sound engineer, Michael Van Wagner.
“And we think that really has a lot to do with the convection in the floor, the way that the floor is bowed up, and that's kind of happened over time as The Tank has sank into the ground. Just seems to create a longer echo.”
The Tank is now closed for the winter season and will open up again in May, 2025.
Copyright 2024 KZMU.
This story was shared via Rocky Mountain Community Radio, a network of public media stations in Colorado, Wyoming, Utah, and New Mexico, including Rocky Mountain Public Media.