One chilly October evening in 1972, in the High Sierras of California, a group waited around a fire for an elusive sound. They had set up camp at 8,500 feet on a forested hillside above a small spring and creek. Fifteen feet uphill, they had taped a Sony TC-126 recorder[…]

Letters flooded into Irv’s Flatiron Building office. Some fans thanked him for subduing their ails or offered suggestions of what to record next. Others questioned the claims on his record jackets. There are eleven pages of listener quotes from just 1977. These people were captains in the army, postal clerks,[…]

What’s in a name? Everything to Irv Teibel. In 1968, as the environments series was in its infancy, Irv began drafting names for an organization to dispense these “instant environments,” as he originally called them. These sounds would be “heard rather than listened to,” harkening back to Erik Satie’s notion[…]