MUSIC
Her Name is Rio... SOLOHAWK’S TIL WILLIS AND STEVE FACEMAN TURN SCRAPS INTO SONGS By Nick Spacek As a musician, Til Willis is nothing if not willing to go as far as possible to create his art. In November of 2014, he released two solo albums—Hackles and Tin Star—paired with a full band recording with his backing group, Erratic Cowboy, entitled Cars Etcetera. Erratic Cowboy’s 2022 album, Grinding of The Stars, was recorded in a 122-year-old barn. September 2023’s release of ox by Concrete Cedars is an improvised live recording with Willis, guitarist Bradley McKellip (the Roseline, Erratic Cowboy), and Selvedge’s Chance Dibben on synthesizers. Where do you go from there? It’s a simple answer, as in August of 2022, Willis and his musical partner, Colorado Steve Faceman, took their duo project, Solohawk, all the way to Rangley, Colorado, to record what would become their new EP, Rio Grande, at The Tank Center for Sonic Arts, a seven-story tall steel water tank. Additionally, the pair recorded the journey with video from their phones for an accompanying 15-minute documentary called Rio Grande (The Tank). It’s an awful lot to take in, but it’s an amazing sonic journey, which the documentary only makes more clear. These songs don’t simply have some reverb slapped onto them by an engineer—these are sounds crafted by the environment in which they were recorded. The whole Rio Grande project and experience came about in a dead simple fashion, says Willis over beers at the Eighth Street Taproom one December evening. “A friend of mine just shared the link on my Facebook page: ‘This seems like something you would be into,’” says Willis. “CBS Sunday Morning did a little segment on this place, and I thought, ‘Well, that’s so cool.’” Due to the reverberations and construction of The Tank Center (more on that in a bit), Willis couldn’t see doing it with the full band, so he immediately shot the link over to his Solohawk partner Faceman, who shares Willis’ love of adventurous activities. “He was like, ‘Oh, this is fucking great,’” Willis says of Faceman’s enthusiasm. “‘Let’s go ahead and make this happen somehow.’” This is not the first time Willis has recorded in a reverberatory environment. “Seed & Root,” from Grinding of The Stars, was recorded in the silo next to the barn in which the album was recorded, but this set of songs from Solohawk, Willis explains, is more than that. “This water tank is so much bigger,” he says, gesturing around the inside of the bar to indicate its size. “The story is that this tank was originally constructed for the railroad, and after it was used for a while there, it was bought by the town of Rangeley to be part of their fire defense system.” Per The Tank Center for Sonic Arts’ web-
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site, this is the story: “Constructed around 1940 as a railroad water-treatment facility, this seven-story Corten steel water tank was moved to Rangely in the mid-1960s for use as part of a fire-suppression system for the local utility company. The plan was never realized, though, as the underlying shale proved unable to support the weight of the filled tank. So it remained empty. However, the bed of gravel upon which the tank was placed bowed its floor into a gentle parabola, giving it an extraordinary internal acoustical resonance.” “And as the story goes–in the ‘70s,” says Willis. “This hippie guy was doing some acoustic research and just going around the west taking acoustic samples. And when he found out the town owned this water tank, he said, ‘Well, can I climb in it?’ and he had people bang on the outside with sticks and rocks, and he recorded it.” That “hippie guy” was sound artist Bruce Odland. Until 2013, it remained a “secret performance and recording space for a dedicated group of sound artists and musicians,” which is when the owner considered dismantling it and selling it for scrap. Said dedicated sound artists and musicians formed Friends of The Tank, and after two Kickstarter campaigns and a slew of donations, they were able to convert the Tank into a proper studio and a unique place unlike anywhere else in the world. “They keep a microphone at the apex, then they have like a stereo pair that they can float up or down, and they got another mic permanently mounted about midway down the floor,” Willis says. “And then they’ve got a binaural set that they move around, and we’ve got our close mics on the guitars and vocals.” It’s similar to a reverb chamber as one might find in the basement of Kansas City’s Element Recordings, but unlike just a reverb chamber, says Willis, he and Faceman are actually performing inside the thing. “You have to take your shoes off to go in because otherwise it would just be the whole time,” he says while shaking his hand and miming sound waves. “It’s such a long delay. I mean, it’s a full 30 seconds.” The experience of being in the Tank was such that while Willis and Faceman went in to record five songs that they’d been performing together at every show all summer long, what actually appears on Rio Grande was created there, at the studio itself. The Solowhawk pair knew they were not going to have the chance to do overdubs, so whatever they did, they needed to do live in the room. “We also knew we were only going to book one night because it’s just so remote,” says Willis. “It was all we could logistically do.”
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Til Willis and Steve Faceman of Solohawk. Courtesy images
So, Solohawk had the five songs they had written. After two passes of the first song and the remaining four having takes the pair felt pretty good about, they looked up and realized they still had three hours left in the space. “At that point, we’re like, ‘We’ve got to come up with something else to do,’” says Willis. “And so we stepped outside, cracked open a beer, sat down, and started going through lyrical scraps.” Thankfully, he and Faceman constantly keep a Google doc of lyric ideas. When it was all said and done, Solohawk ended up with enough songs for a full album. After the fact, Willis and Faceman realized that the songs written in the moment fit the room better, meaning none of the material on Rio Grande was the stuff the pair went there with the intention to record. The instrumental and vocal workout and the EP’s penultimate track, “Aves Raras,” proves it. The piece sees Faceman’s vocals and Willis’ guitar blend into each other courtesy of the reverberations in such a way that it feels like a spiritual experience. “That was 100% improvised on the spot,” Willis says. “One performance—that was it. We had so much fun doing that one. Steve just walked around the room, vocalizing. The engineer that was working there told
us, ‘Man, that’s probably the most successful duo performance in there, period. Most of the time, it just sounds cacophonous, and we need, like, one instrument alone.’” Because Solohawk’s two members are in two different states, there likely won’t be a release show for Rio Grande, but Willis is looking into alternate methods of promotion, like a Bandcamp listening party and the accompanying documentary, the latter of which really helps the listener get an idea of just how amazing the Tank is and what the process was like. “This was such a unique experience, we thought, ‘Might as well,’” Willis says. “And as it’s turned out, I think it really helps explain what people are hearing when they hear the EP, being able to see us walking around in this huge metal tank.” Not only that, Rio Grande (The Tank) captures the experience of getting to the extremely rural location. As Willis puts it, “It’s way the hell out there, but it’s such a cool place.” Just getting that brief, 15-minute glimpse from the documentary is enough to give a second listen a completely different perspective. After Willis and Faceman finished recording, the pair made it back to the hotel and were quiet for a moment and when they both started talking about it, Willis says that it almost felt wrong to be describing that experience, even shared as it was. “It’s like being abducted by aliens or a religious experience,” Willis says, not quite joking. “Nobody’s gonna know what that was like, and they’re not gonna believe us.” Solohawk’s Rio Grande EP is available at solohawk.bandcamp.com More information about The Tank Center for Sonic Arts is at tanksounds.org