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IRON CAVE: The Tank Session

by A Handful of Earthstars: Lorena Babcock Moore

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    Includes unlimited streaming via the free Bandcamp app, plus high-quality download in MP3, FLAC and more.

    BONUS ITEM with Download: PHOTOS!
    1: All instruments on this album: fretless banjo, sheet steel rattle, steel pipe rim-blown flute, copper recorder, sideblown beargrass flute, flint ocarina.
    2: Lorena B. Moore in the Tank (photo by Daniel J. Moore)..
    3: Collage of 4 photos: Canyon Pintado, CO.
    4: Collage of 4 photos: The Tank, Rangely, CO.
    Purchasable with gift card

      $7 USD  or more

     

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Copper Flute 01:29
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Magic Bird 12:30
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Iron Soul 05:57
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about

The Tank is a recording studio and performance space in an old cylindrical steel water tank in the small town of Rangely, Colorado. In this unique place, sounds echo, swirl, and reverberate in beautiful and unexpected ways. Notes float to the high, shadowed ceiling and circle like elementals, their echoes bouncing off each other and creating new notes that drift down from the tiny circular skylight. Near the floor, light and air pour in from the circular Portal. The Tank is spacious and deeply patient, inviting the visitor to slow down, focus, improvise, and enter into a dialogue with this mysterious sonic being.

The string instrument on six tracks is the North Carolina style fretless banjo that I purchased from the maker, Ralph Dellinger, in 1985. It is Appalachian curly maple with a natural rawhide head. It has lived in the Arizona desert for 20 years. I have restored it and patched the cracked rim with iron and silver as it dried out. It has evolved into a unique instrument.

FLUTES: Copper recorder, steel pipe rim-blown flute, flint ocarina (carved by Whittaker Freegard, 1995), and a side-blown flute made from a beargrass flowerstalk; the bore and single sound hole were created entirely by a carpenter bee.
RATTLE on the last track is made from sheet steel fragments.
More information on the instruments is included with the individual tracks.

Although I recorded some of these tunes on previous albums, the versions created in the Tank are slower and more improvisational.

For more information on the Tank: www.tanksounds.org

credits

released September 24, 2021

All music, text, and photos by Lorena Babcock Moore.
Recorded by sound engineer Michal Van Wagoner,
The Tank, Rangely, Colorado. September 10, 2021.
Edited and produced by Lorena B. Moore and Daniel J. Moore.

I would like to thank the James Paul, Executive Director of The Tank Center for Sonic Arts, for arranging the session, and Michal Van Wagoner, who was our guide and recording engineer that day. I would like to thank all the Tank staff for their dedication, hospitality, expertise, and professionalism. For several years I have wanted to make the pilgrimage from southern Arizona to experience the Tank. The reality exceeded my hopes in every way. Thank you!

I wish to dedicate this album in memory of my father, Homer Curtis Babcock Jr. (6/03/35-9/20/21). He played highland bagpipe and several other instruments, and encouraged all musical interests in his children and grandchildren. He was an engineer, artisan, musician, teacher, historian, and outdoorsman with an abiding love for the landscape of his native Virginia.

Lorena Babcock Moore, 9/21

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about

A Handful of Earthstars Arizona

Lorena Babcock Moore: Artist, geologist, desert banjo player, maker of bells, flutes, and rattles.

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