The chapel is the work of two remarkable Australians. The composer and sound artist Georges Lentz dreamed it; the architect Glenn Murcutt - the only Australian to win the Pritzker Prize, architecture's highest honour - gave it form. Their solution was elegant and odd in equal measure: cast a five-metre concrete cube in situ inside the ten-metre disused tank, set loudspeakers into its four walls, cut an oculus in its ceiling to the sky, and frame the entrance with a pair of five-by-five-metre walls. Twenty years passed between conception and completion. The result is neither concert hall nor gallery nor church, yet somehow it is all three - a space built for one purpose, to hold a piece of music and the silence of the desert around it.

The music is Lentz's String Quartet(s), a vast digital, surround-sound composition some 43 hours long, recorded over more than two decades by the Sydney string quartet The Noise. It was inspired by the outback itself - the immense, empty land and, above all, its night skies, where the stars crowd down with a clarity city-dwellers forget exists. The piece does not loop in any ordinary sense; Lentz speaks of the whole chapel as music, a single "digital string quartet," with the very proportions of the building tuned to rhythmic patterns in the sound. Solar power keeps it running. It plays to whoever happens to be standing inside, and to no one at all in the small hours, with equal devotion.

Look closely and the chapel reveals its influences, layered like the music. There are echoes of Aboriginal dot painting in its sensibility, and the visionary art and poetry of William Blake - a Blake inscription is set into one wall. Lentz even left room for the graffiti already scrawled on the old tank, and for passages of AI-generated sound woven into the whole. The chapel's blue corner windows are the work of Sharron Ohlsen, a Cobar Indigenous artist, grounding this global, experimental work firmly in the country where it stands. It is a deeply collaborative thing - a composer, an architect, a quartet, a poet two centuries dead, a local artist, and the desert all speaking at once.

Why "chapel"? Because of what the place does to people. Visitors describe stepping inside and falling still, the music rising around them, the disc of sky overhead shifting from blue to black to a scatter of stars. There is no doctrine here, no service, no congregation - only sound, concrete, and light, and the sense that you have entered somewhere set apart. The international press took notice, the New York Times among them, drawn by the unlikely image of a soul-quenching sanctuary built inside an abandoned tank in one of the most remote corners of New South Wales. It is the kind of thing that should not exist this far from anywhere. That it does is the whole point.