An "environments" Deep Listening Meditation

Please Note: This limited capacity event is free with RSVP for Dublab members and ticket holders of any Plantstock event (festival pass not required). Upon arrival, attendees must provide proof of either Dublab membership or a ticket for an event on any of Plantstock’s dates. 

This event is part of PRS’s Plantstock festival, taking place 4/19 – 4/21. Tickets for individual events can be purchased via their respective listings. For information and purchase of discounted Plantstock festival passes

Join us on Plantstock’s final afternoon as Dublab and Syntonic Research, Inc. lead us in audio communion with the natural world – a field recording sound bath and deep listening meditation featuring nature recordings from Irv Teibel’s legendary ENVIRONMENTS albums.

In this hushed and tranquil listening session, free with RSVP to Dublab members and ticket holders of any Plantstock event, we will be invited to sink into our senses – attuning our ears to the sounds of our surroundings before being gently immersed in aural landscapes, sonic snapshots of nature captured in time, on tape. From the songs of birds and insects in an awakening field – as heard at dawn one early summer morning in 1969, to the afternoon melody of gentle rainfall in a sheltering pine forest, to the sounds of dusk in a remote and isolated swampland – we will bask in the beauty of the earthly symphonies which the din of the modern world so often drowns out. 

In the late 1960s, sound recordist and audio polymath Irv Teibel’s fascination with the psychological potentials of “natural white noise” led him to first record a short, high fidelity loop of the ocean at Brighton Beach. Working with a neuroscientist at Bell Labs, this recording was then processed through an IBM 360 computer in order to create a continuous, album-side long soundscape – soon after released in quadraphonic sound as “The Psychologically Ultimate Seashore,”  the first in his environments (stylized in lowercase text to convey their soothing nature) album series on his own label, Syntonic Research, Inc. The revolutionary album, one of the first commercially available field recordings, became a massive hit and something of a cultural landmark – tapping into the era’s spirit of auditory exploration and consciousness expansion. Its back cover was filled with quotes proclaiming it, “Better than the real thing,” “A gentle, subtle trip,” “The hippest record ever!,” “Fantastic for making love!,” and exclaiming, “I can’t get over how clear my thinking is.”

The pioneering series of 11 albums which followed on Syntonic Records (‘syntonic’ meaning “responsive to and in harmony with the environment”) spanned recordings of a country stream, a Caribbean lagoon, a wood masted sailboat, an alpine blizzard, and more – all the while paving the way a new way of listening which birthed ambient and New Age music. 

For this very special afternoon event, Dublab’s sound system will bathe us in the sounds of an hour and a half of recordings, selected with the help of Teibel’s daughter, Jennifer Ballow, who has kept Syntonic Research, Inc. alive and spearheaded the remastering and re-release of her father’s landmark albums.

Please email [email protected] or phone 323-663-2167 with any questions.

Event Venue & Nearby Stays

Philosophical Research Society, 3910 Los Feliz Boulevard, Los Angeles, United States