A MUSICIAN has recorded a full album in an old oil tank built during the Second World War in the Highlands, which holds the world record for the longest reverb in a man-made structure.
Commissioned by the Navy in 1938 and completed in 1942, the Inchindown oil tanks are a secret underground storage facility built into the hillside of Invergordon that consists of six colossal tanks, which could cumulatively hold around 30 million gallons of fuel.
The complex fuelled warships at the Royal Navy’s base until 1987, when they were drained, decommissioned, and left dormant for more than 30 years.
In 2014 Trevor Cox, a professor of acoustics at the University of Salford, went to Inchindown and measured the length of the reverberation from a starting pistol fired in Tank 1, which came in at an outstanding 112 seconds, smashing the previous world-title of for the longest echo in a man-made structure of 15 seconds.
Brighton-based artist Thom Isaacs discovered the underground fuel depot by accident while he was studying music performance and production at university and became “completely enamoured with them”.
Isaacs said he had a “simmering desire” to visit the structures and to record inside them ever since he learned about their incredible reverb.
He applied for a master's degree and pitched his thesis to record inside them, and once his application was accepted, there was no turning back for the 27-year-old.
Isaacs said he reached out to the people who look after the tanks, saying: “I've been obsessed with this place for ages, I'd really love to record music in it.”
He added: “They were like, ‘sure’, because they had suspended tours because of the pandemic, so they had a lot of like availability, and they were like, ‘as long as you wear a mask’ and that's fine with us.
“I think they get a lot of requests like that, and I was the only person to actually follow through on it because within a couple of weeks, I was on a plane to Inverness.”
Isaacs first travelled to the tanks in 2021, where he described his first experience “interesting but also kind of terrifying” as he had hauled his equipment up a hillside and across an overgrown path just to reach the entrance.
From there, he travelled through a long, dark access shaft to get to the tanks, while having to lug his equipment and himself through a 45cm diameter pipe, which was the only ingress or egress from the facility.
“That was kind of terrifying the first time,” Isaacs said.
“When I tell people about it, that turns them off and they're like ‘I could never do this in the pipe’.”
He added: “It's one of those things where I never felt unsafe, but it's objectively kind of scary and also just a logistical nightmare.”
Once inside, Isaacs described the experience as “unbelievable” and that the recording “doesn’t even do it justice”.
There is no natural light in the tanks, which each measure 237 meters (778 feet) long, nine meters (30 feet) wide, and 13.5 meters (44 feet) high, so are in complete darkness.
Isaacs had to cover his equipment, which included a guitar, synthesizer, amplifier and microphones with tarp and plastic as the tanks were covered in residual oil.
“I tried to do it justice on the album, but there's nothing that can kind of really compare to it,” Isaacs said.
“It’s all encompassing, any sound you make in there stretches out for almost two minutes and it's unlike anything else in the world.”
Isaacs said the recording experience was nothing like he had ever experienced before, as when he was singing, it was like a “duet with himself” due to the long-lasting echo effect.
He added that as a singer, he is used to only being able to sing one note at a time, but the tank “unlocked the superpower” to be able to play chords.
“It felt like it turned my voice into like a whole choir, which was a really, really powerful experience that I'd only ever really experienced in a digital simulation before,” he said.
The musician spent the first visit experimenting with the sounds in the tank, but later returned twice in 2022 to record his full album, once with a friend and a second time by himself.
He explained the brief moments of fear when he was “locked in” the tank for hours at a time so he could record his music.
Isaacs said he also at one point turned off all the lights and torches he had taken with him so he could be completely engulfed in the darkness to “see what it felt like”.
“Unless you've got a full lighting rig, you can't completely light the tanks, so any torch that you take in there is just swallowed up by all the empty space,” he said.
Isaacs added: “There was one point where our torches almost ran out of battery and that was really scary.”
The recordings were part of his master's project, which he admitted he rushed to hand in but decided to take more time to fully release his album, You and Your Absence, which came out officially last month.
He said he felt “overwhelmed” with the feeling of accomplishment when he finally released his album and admitted he felt a little apprehensive about what people would think once it was released.
However, despite his feeling of anxiousness, Isaacs’s album has been widely well-received as videos of him playing in the tanks on Instagram have already surpassed a million and a half views on social media.
Isaacs (above) said that he has more projects like the Inchindown oil tanks lined up in the future, as he would like to experiment more with environments and sound.
“I want to see about doing some screenings up in Inverness,” he said.
He added: “I am very thankful. Inverness was so welcoming about this random guy from the south of England coming and kind of using their military infrastructure.”
Click here to listen to You and Your Absence.
