Huffbunnies, this is a note from Jim on the morning of the 23rd. Click all the way through to read the whole thing.
(Audio is from Erin.)
OK, so far highlights have included the ringing of the titanium bell at Solstice Solar Noon (actually 1:17PM). The bell is the nosecone of an oxygen tank from an Apollo mission, which one of the engineers took home and made into his barbecue grill (it’s worth about $30,000, but would cost much more to melt down for reuse). The engineer eventually gave it to his daughter, who used it for a planter, and one day a visitor, the redoubtable Bruce Odland, discoverer of the Tank, asked about it. It’s a planter, he was told. No, it’s not, he said, it’s a bell. She had to gave it to him. When struck, it rings a loud, rolling bass tone for three minutes. We suspended it from the center of the Tank, and took turns ringing it with a clublike mallet. As it settled on its pendular cable, the bell hummed on and on as the Tank took up its resonance and sang it back in a hundred voices and overtones.
Then Friday night, Ryan Ruehlen, a electronics/performance artist in the doctoral program at CU, brought his Georhythmic Drift piece to the Tank. Ryan flew a drone to 200 feet in the hills above the Tank, towing aloft a cable which acted as antenna, tuning into the electrical impluses of the ionosphere, the outermost layer of the atmosphere, at 60,000 feet. The antenna broadcast the signals to Ryan’s cell phone, which sent them to Bruce’s cellphone, which relayed them into the Tank, where we had suspended a speaker at about 50 feet. From there, microphones in the Tank broadcast the sounds out into the landscape around the Tank, into a five speaker Meyer sound array. It sounded like the bubbling of a giant caldron, full of pops that were the sounds of lighting around the world, as far away as Africa, and mysterious whooshing noises, all awash in the deep, sustained reverb of the Tank. Literally unearthly.
My job here has been a blast. I’ve done everything, doing the ads and marketing, managing the artists and visitors, running staff, clearing and grooming the site around the Tank–yesterday in the dawn when it’s cool here zen-raking a load of gravel into a circular walkway around the Tank–and doing the intros and lighting. I floodlit the Tank and installed 500 feet of white LEDs string lights around it, encircling the base of the Tank and the perimeter of the lot. I’ve been obsessed. These concerts this weekend are the payoff. Good audiences, a beautiful, deeply odd facility, like a landed spaceship, and amazing sonic presentations. Tonight’s the big one, when jazz trumpeter Ron Miles performs. And tomorrow night I fly back, sunburned and gnat-bitten, having gone pretty much native here in a month. It’s a tiny town, Rangely. Strangers greet me as James in the coffee shop. Still I’m homesick for 11th Street and my Huffbunnies and ready to dive back in the sea of humanity called Brooklyn.
Huffbunnies Make Trainwrecks 
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