Roberta Settels (1929-2014) was a composer and designer. She was born in New York, where she received her basic art and music education at the Juilliard School of Music and The Art Students League. She composed at Elektronmusikstudion in Stockholm and IRCAM in Paris, working mainly with computer music and concrete music.

Landscape with 3 tape-recorders… comes from the album Music in Crisis, which Settels released on her own label in 1984. However, the music on the disc was composed in the 1970s. The album Music in Crisis has an overall media-critical theme dealing with the fate of Ulrike Meinhof with a specific focus on her final time in solitary confinement. Paradoxically, in relation to this theme, Settels himself describes the work Landscape with 3 tape-recorders… as a pastoral composition with a certain lyrical mood associated with nature, and that the sound is reminiscent of classical music even though it was recorded from objects in the environment and processed using electronic equipment.