I'm Dylan Thuris, and this is Atlas of Skira, a celebration. Oh my God.

Welcome to the tank.

Let me try that again. I'm Dylan Thuris, and this is Atlas Upsgira.

Today, we're going inside the tank.

An industrial water tank turned concert hall in the high desert of Colorado.

To those who know it well, the tank is nothing less than a sonic wonder of the world.

We'll meet a man who has dedicated the last 45 years of his life to the tank,

after he first found out about it through what some might call an abduction.

This big muddy truck pulled up with two beefy roughnecks in it and saying, are you that sound guy? And here I have microphones

all over me. What am I going to say? No. Yes. Get in. Okay, I got in. More after this.

Rangely, Colorado is a small town. It's home to about 2,400 people, and it's not in the snowy peaks and ski resorts part of Colorado.

Rangely is out in the desert, surrounded by rocky canyons and cattle ranches and the Rangely oil field drilling operation.

Perched on a hill above the town, there's this huge, rusted metal water tank.

The tank is enormous.

It's seven stories tall and about 40 feet in diameter.

It's got a kind of cone shape on the top.

It was originally built around 1940 and was part of a railroad's water treatment facility. In the mid-1960s, it was moved to Rangely to store water for fighting fires.

But there was an oversight.

The hill the tank was set up on couldn't support the weight of the tank filled with actual water.

This enormous industrial vessel sat there empty, abandoned, and without a purpose.

Until 1976.

My name is Bruce Adland, and I'm a sound artist and a composer, and I'm somebody who listens before they look.

...