Environments 4+

I was fortunate and thrilled to snag all 11 of the original pressings a few months ago. This is a superb series and the record quality would be excellent if recorded today. The fact that these are mid-century field recordings is stunning. At first I was convinced they were foley. In any case, I got the records before I knew they were on streaming as well as their own app, but I wasn’t disappointed. The app is very well developed. I often gift it to friends who enjoy my record versions, though I’ve recorded those to tape by now to mellow the tone on some of them and to enable loop without using my phone. But the app is convenient especially if I’m not home. The remasters are fine, seems that they mostly compressed them to satisfy consumer grade earbuds. The app does not replace the records, but it’s nice to have.

If you’re like me, silence is deafening. I can’t fall asleep at night without some sort of white noise/sfx type thing playing. During the day, i need the same sorts of thing to quiet my mind. This is the best app of its kind, hands down.

Besides having hours and hours of beautiful, natural sounding audio recordings of unique and varied environments (hence the name of the app), as well as a few new age and proto ambient pieces, the interface is dead simple to use. Make playlists of your favorite sound recordings (each one over 30 minutes long), play any one recording on a loop, and get the background behind this unique collection of recordings (all made on analog equipment back in the ‘70s). All that and more for one low price, paid one time, and then you have an ad-free app to enjoy for as long as you’d like. I cannot recommend this app enough!

I gotta hand it to the Numero Group, this app is great. When acquiring the Environments series, rather than doing a CD/Vinyl/Download reissue like their other releases, they had the thought to update for the 21st century and make an app.

22 long form, stereo analogue audio recordings of nature await you here. Is this fewer than other white noise apps? Yes, but what those lack is length, and quality. Also included here is a brief history of Irv Teibel, and the Environments series, which is nice (but if you’re looking for more, check out the Atlas Obscura article. Turns out the Environments series was one of the first audio recordings to be edited on a computer. A big analogue mainframe one, but a computer none the less).

I have two small nitpicks:

The audio mix on the recordings is a little hot. As I write this I’m listening to “A Country Stream”, and have my volume at roughly 15%, and it’s still really loud.

A recent update adds front and back LP cover art scans, which is fantastic, but sadly there’s no way to make the pictures larger to read the original write ups for each recording.

But really that’s it. It’s a phenomenal app.