Tellus a story

Death Is Not The End takes avant-garde LPs originally released by a New York artist-owned label and reissues them as cassettes....  Earth Libraries takes avant-garde cassettes originally released by a New York artist-owned label and reissues them as vinyl LPs.... 

TELLUS: The Audio Cassette Magazine Anthology Vol. 1 is two metallic silver vinyl discs and 36 tracks of selections from the long-running series of multi-artist tapes compiled and issued by the downtown Manhattan imprint Tellus from 1983 onwards. 

It's coming out on November 13.

Release rationale: 

"... Tellus transformed the humble audio cassette into a magazine, commissioning and publishing new works by musicians, composers, visual artists, poets, writers, choreographers, and performers who were reshaping the boundaries of contemporary art. Each issue invited listeners into a world where no wave, industrial music, spoken word, Fluxus performance, electroacoustic composition, downtown pop, conceptual art, and avant-garde experimentation could coexist on equal footing.

... The thirty-track collection has been newly mastered from the original Tellus cassette masters, marking the first time these recordings have been officially available on streaming services in their original form. Earth Libraries further celebrates Tellus' enduring legacy with a limited-edition deluxe double LP, created in close collaboration with Tellus founders Joseph Nechvatal, Carol Parkinson, and Claudia Gould....  Housed in deluxe packaging, the release includes a booklet featuring new liner notes by Thurston Moore, original artist biographies, and an 11" × 17" reproduction of an original Tellus promotional poster. 

"The story of Tellus begins, fittingly, at the Rum Runner Bar on Canal Street. There, in 1983, visual artist Joseph Nechvatal, curator Claudia Gould, and composer Carol Parkinson conceived an entirely new kind of publication. Portable cassette players were transforming how people experienced music, and the trio saw an opportunity to use the cassette itself as a curatorial medium—one capable of circulating work that traditional record labels, galleries, and magazines simply couldn't accommodate. Early recordings by Sonic Youth and Liquid Liquid sit alongside works by James Tenney, George Brecht, Takehisa Kosugi, Carol Parkinson, Y Pants, Live Skull, Shelley Hirsch, Lenny Pickett, Paul Dresher, Gregory Whitehead, and dozens of other artists whose work helped define one of the most fertile creative communities of the era.

"I would say it came out of and feeds into non-conformity," recalls Nechvatal. "This is music and art that has no place in the popular market."

Rather than viewing that as a limitation, Tellus embraced it as its mission.

"We just wanted an alternative," says Parkinson. "And we knew there were other people out there that wanted an alternative."

Produced through Harvestworks, the pioneering New York nonprofit dedicated to supporting artists working with sound and emerging technologies, Tellus became much more than an experimental music magazine. It functioned as an audio exhibition space, a publishing platform, a historical archive, and an international network connecting artists working across disciplines. At a time when access to recording equipment remained limited and independent distribution was difficult, Harvestworks provided artists with the resources and community necessary to realize ambitious sonic work, while Tellus ensured those works reached audiences willing to venture beyond conventional music.

Tellus emerged from one of the most vibrant cultural moments in New York history. Throughout the early and mid-1980s, Lower Manhattan's affordable lofts, storefront galleries, rehearsal spaces, and artist-run venues fostered unprecedented collaboration between musicians, filmmakers, choreographers, writers, architects, and visual artists. Painters formed bands. Composers built installations. Performance artists experimented with synthesizers. Genre became increasingly irrelevant and Tellus documented this world as it unfolded....

Just as important as the sounds themselves were the publication's visual identities. Each cassette arrived with newly commissioned artwork by some of the most significant contemporary artists of the period. Covers by Cindy Sherman, David Wojnarowicz, Walter Robinson, Jane Dickson, James Nares, and others reinforced Tellus' belief that sound belonged within the broader conversation of contemporary art. Rather than separating music from visual practice, the magazine dissolved those distinction entirely, creating a publication where every issue functioned simultaneously as an exhibition, a listening experience, and an archival document....

Alongside the anthology, Earth Libraries has produced a new short documentary exploring the remarkable story behind Tellus and the community that brought it to life. Featuring new interviews with founders Joseph Nechvatal, Carol Parkinson, and Claudia Gould, alongside artists and collaborators who helped define the magazine's groundbreaking vision, the film traces Tellus from its origins in downtown New York's fertile art scene to its lasting influence on experimental music and contemporary art. Through firsthand reflections and rare archival material, the documentary reveals how a small group of artists transformed the audio cassette into one of the most innovative publishing platforms of the 1980s. The film will screen exclusively at record stores, galleries, museums, and cultural venues across the country in advance of the anthology's November 13 release before becoming available online following the album's release.

Pre-order here

It’s a fascinating document of a long-ago moment of cross-town musical traffic.

Among the treats on Vol. 1 is a piece by Sonic Youth titled "Scream".

In the liner notes, Thurston Moore recalls how he and Lee Ranaldo made the piece while Sonic Youth were in the middle of their first tour of Europe:

"We had discovered, one fine June day, a magical tunnel of sound in the modest town of Rolle, Switzerland.... This tunnel reverberated every utterance and ululation into a wondrous echo. Lee and I couldn’t believe our sonic luck – we began to hum, hoot, shout, and howl, with various pitched roars, exploring and challenging the dynamics of the space, giddy to its sonorous scape as they enveloped our vibratory receptors. One of us had fortuitously recorded this impromptu improvisation on our cassette recorder which we then began to introduce into our live performances. In some ways, “Scream”, as we titled the track, was my favorite “song” our band ever created."  Upon their return to NYC, they found that they'd been invited to contribute to the first release on the new cassette label: "an audio magazine of sorts" focused on the reciprocal bleed-through "between the strictly experimental practices" at artspaces like The Kitchen and the noisier edges of post-postpunk rock festering in grungier less art-coded venues. 

Another track on the Anthology that caught my eye is "Moonlight Ride", a 1985 track originally contributed to Tellus #10: All Guitars! by Bond Bergland. 

Formerly of San Francisco industrial extremists Factrix, now transplanted to the Lower East Side, Bergland must have been in the process of forming Saqqara Dogs - a completely different proposition to Factrix, cosmic rock with tribal rhythms as the launch pad for Bond's skyscraping guitar.  

Saqqara Dogs were favorites of my set at Melody Maker.  I think Factrix-fan Jon Savage originally tipped us off about their mini-LP World Crunch.  Bond and then-partner Ruby Ray (a photographer who created the psychedelic visuals for their shows) generously let me stay at their apartment in Alphabet City on my very first visit to Manhattan in the cold early months of 1987.  

As I relate in Still In A Dream, this was going in at the deep end for a New York neophyte. They lived in what I think was a converted former body shop (it had a roll-up metal door) and was located, if memory serves, on 2nd Street between C and D.  In early '87, the vibe was much closer to the No Wave era than the gentrified area it had became by the 2000s. 

 

Saqqara Dogs make a cameo in the book itself, as my kindly hosts, but their music appears in the 50 Lost Treasures fanzine: 

Saqqara Dogs – World Crunch (1986)

Formed from the ashes of San Francisco industrial group Factrix, Saqqara Dogs could not have roamed further from their start point: World Crunch is unabashed cosmic rock, veering up out of the squalor of the Lower East Side to caress the sky. Bond Bergland’s sustained drones of celestial guitar levitate over a neo-tribal pulse of percussion and Chapman Stick bass. The nine-minute “Greenwich Mean Time” is as awe-inspiring as the Aurora Borealis. 

Bond also had a fine solo album out around this time  - I particularly love the song "Found Wonder"

The Shit Songs By _______ (a series: 1 of ?? - The Doors)

Every great band has shit songs.  

It's mystifying - you would think greatness would be like a tap, you could just turn it on and out it comes. 

You would think also that being in such proximity to greatness - having produced it - the group or artist would have the ability to distinguish achieved genius from slack shite.  But no, apparently not! 

It's not even like these great groups sheepishly poop it out hoping we won't notice or we'll forgive them. They often seem genuinely deceived as to what their own great material is. Viz, Morrissey and Marr's belief that Strangeways, Here We Come is their best album!. (And yes we'll be getting to the Smiths in due course).

I mean, why - if you've done great -  would you ever come to the table with less than "Eleanor Rigby" / "There Is Light That Never Goes Out"/"The End"/"Gimme Shelter"?  

Well, I guess there's the money, and the record company breathing down your neck, and the impatient, hungry, none-too-discerning fans to please. But also, the artist's judgement seems to wane. Morrissey genuinely thinks "Shakespeare's Sister" is a great tune! He also invariably think his latest album is the best thing he's ever done. 

For the debut edition, an inventory of The Doors's excrescences, their excrement.

Some groups are just level-pegging reliable suppliers of whatever it is they have to offer (I doubt if an inventory of Rockpile would yield a substantial tally of shitsong, but nor would there be a heap of greatsong either). But The Doors are a perfect example - perhaps even the ultimate example - of a group where there is a huuuuuuuuge disparity between peaks and plops. A yawning gulf.

I invite you to point out where I am mistaken ("that one is good, cloth ears!") and which specks of sorry shite I have mistaken for glistening gems and thus omitted from the list below

But comments such as "all of them", "every song" etc are not welcome. This exercise is for people who love, or at least appreciate, the band while remaining aware of the Doors flaws. 

Oh yes - obviously I do not count the post-Jim albums as Doors albums. The Doors= the band fronted by Jim Morrison. An American Prayer exists in an ontologically ambiguous zone (is it part of the canon of hauntology?). I like the whole album anyway, I think it's almost shitsong-free. Whereas Other Voices and Full Circle are end to end shitsong. 

Also I've not included the live albums, even though that's where (Absolutely Live) you could find the best - and for a really long time, the only - version of "The Celebration of the Lizard", Not that I would count it as a shit-song, or shit-song-suite more accurately, anyway.   I love it. 

The Doors - A Shitsong Inventory, Album by Album

The Doors

Twentieth Century Fox

Back Door Man

I Looked At You

 

Strange Days

Unhappy Girl

 

Waiting For The Sun

Summertime’s Almost Gone

Wintertime Love

We Could Be So Good Together

Yes, the River Knows

Five to One

 

The Soft Parade 

Tell All the People

Easy Ride

Wishful Sinful

Morrison Hotel 

 

Waiting for the Sun

You Make Me Real

Land Ho!

Queen of the Highway

Maggie M'Gill

LA Woman

Been Down So Long

Crawling King Snake

^^^^^^^^^^^^^

By this calculus, Waiting for The Sun and Morrison Hotel are equal-first worst. 

But then Morrison Hotel has "Maggie M'Gill", their all-time shittest song, so I would give the thumbs-down edge to Morrison Hotel. 

Mystifyingly "Maggie M'Gill" appeared on Weird Scenes Inside the Goldmine, the double album of greatest hits + deep cuts. Really stunk up would otherwise be a pretty great (if chronologically jumbled )selection, with a cool gatefold cover to boot. 

Actually I am mistaken..."Maggie M'Gill" is a shitsong, but the shittestsong ever (and it's also mystifyingly included on Weird Scenes) that was recorded by The Doors during Jim's lifetime is "You Need Meat (Don't Go No Further"). That was sung by Ray Manzarek and first appeared as the B-side of "Love Her Madly". And it's really rank. I wonder what the Willie Dixon original is like. 

^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^

I had to reacquaint myself with LA Woman to do this and I have to say, I'm thinking it might be their most overrated album.  Despite the so-so-high heights like 'LA Woman" itself, "Texas Radio and the Big Beat", "Riders on the Storm" and "Love Her Madly", there ain't arf a lotta slothful trudging blues on there, and brisker stuff that is like Booker T and the MGs with poesy on top.  But people like the narrative of "sudden twilight surge of mojo just before the End", I guess.  

In an earlier assessment, I had it like this: 

... the band’s journey from the bold entrance of The Doors (their best album, if suffering slightly from over-exposure) through Strange Days (their darkest and most psychedelic album), onto Waiting For The Sun (their most confused and least satisfying), The Soft Parade (their funniest and most under-rated) and the alleged return-to-bluesy form of Morrison Hotel (their dreariest and most over-rated, while still containing plenty of gems) before winding up with LA Woman (their most accomplished and poignant). 

movement culture people / the roads of creation

 

Bob Marley and the Wailers with the mighty "Exodus" 

I have always heard the lyric as "movement culture people" which I prefer to what I have just established is the actual lyric "movement of Jah people"

"movement culture people" expands outwards to include Neu! and all sorts, whereas "movement of Jah people" narrows to a religious meaning

Under "movement culture people", you could also file another song on this rather cool episode of Top of the Pops from 1977 -   "Roadrunner" 

albeit not a mimed performance by Jonathan Richman and the Modern Lovers but a daft but enjoyable dance routine from Pan's People, or is it Legs and Co

The song got to #11 in the UK charts - amazing. But then "Marquee Moon" was a UK hit single too, it's in the chart rundown at the start of this episode in fact.

Richman has quite a case of adenoids, but it just adds to the gawky aura of amateurism.

But wait, there is another connection between the Wailers and Modern Lovers beyond the utopian motion vision  (and the word in common - "roads of creation" in "Exodus")

For later in that same year JR & and ML would have an even bigger UK hit with the trifle "Egyptian Reggae", an instrumental. #5 in the hit parade.

Again danced with some proto-Bangles nonsense by the resident troupe at TOTP

Here's JR himself doing the sideways dance thing

Egypt - well that's where Moses is leading the chosen people out of. As the song says

(Movement of Jah people) Send us another brother Moses

(Movement of Jah people) From across the Red Sea

The very first time I heard "Exodus" was not the original but a junglized version played at a 1994 festival in Clissold Park in Stoke Newington  by deejays from Exodus, the Luton rave collective.

I'd always assumed that the track was made by someone associated with Exodus  - but doesn't necessarily seem to be so, instead it's a kind of anthem-of-opportunity

Another "Exodus"-bassed track, this time the mode of deliverance is airplane

Bouba Sacko

 

A ridiculously under-recorded guitarist from Mali

I heard Bouba Sacko on this comp

Went looking and was surprised how little there was to be found

Most of it as a sideman or accompanist to a star singer

E.g. he's on this 

Either that or he's in a group (or duo) called Bajarou, whose one album has a little bit too much of that '90s sound (canned reverb) to it (and an offputting album title 'n' all- Big String Theory)

Whereas this (one more time!) almost could be off the first Velvet Underground album

I can't work out if Sokona Sacko is the female singer or the other guitarist

Here's a little film about Bouba

A different Sacko - Ousmane

CRIzy about those Space Guitars and Synthesised Voices!

Luke Owen from Death Is Not The End has launched into a run of releases reissuing electronic music  put out by CRI  - Composers Recordings, Inc., originally co-founded by Otto Luening in 1954 and active right up until 2003. 

This is an obsession close to my heart, having picked up a lot of CRItronica as vinyl over the years, chased down others through the Cal Arts record library, and found still more on the internet. CRI put out an even larger amount of non-electronic music, 20th Century compositions that are rather astringent to my ears. But the electronic and tape-music is a bit of a motherlode.  One thing I like about the label is the record design, some of which is genuinely good while others falls into the "ugly but interesting" zone. This below is a beaut, though.

That's Allan Bryant's Space Guitars,  which is one of the first in Death Is Not The End's reissue program, and which by strange coincidence I wrote about recently in this Quietus Baker's Dozen on Reinvention of the Guitar: 

When they shoved screwdrivers and drum sticks under their guitar strings, Sonic Youth were obviously aware of John Cage’s prepared piano experiments and similar things done by composers in his wake. I wonder, though, whether –  being obscure vinyl foragers in the used record stores of Manhattan – they had also heard the handful of avant-gardists who had done that kind of thing with guitars. For instance, there’s a 1975 album called Guitar Extensions. On ‘Extensions II’ Robert Bauer uses a detuned classical guitar augmented with paper clips and pipe cleaners, creating unstrung tones not far from the decomposed guitar tones that Lee Ranaldo collated for his From Here To Infinity side project.  

But the record that seems to have most in common with Sonic Youth – while not actually resembling any of their records – is Space Guitars by Allan Bryant. A former member of the electronic ensemble MEV, Bryant here inflicts drastic modifications on his guitars and explores self-invented playing techniques. The results are deranging – yet at times as comical as they are cosmic. Which Bryant acknowledges with his track titles, like ‘Bouncing People Planet’, which he described as “a humorous image of some strange people on another planet who bounce-talk nervously and then get excited and bounce even faster”.  The original 1977 LP was expanded for a 1995 CD reissue and things get even wiggier. The  tremolo wobbles of ‘Space Storm’ induce the astronautical equivalent of seasickness. 

Talking of queasy listening, the first time I had Covid, I had some intense fever dreams. One night I woke up and I thought, “well,  I feel like I’m tripping, why waste these sensations lying in bed in the dark?” So I went into the living room, put on headphones and found Space Guitars waiting for me on my iPod. One of the more out-there experiences with music I’ve had in my life.

Another CRI fave of mine that Luke has unearthed is Charles Dodge's Synthesized Voices.

Here's the Death Is Not The End release rationale along with Dodge's original release rationale:

DINTE reissues Charles Dodge’s 1976 LP collection of synthesised speech music, 1972-1975. Using mainframe computers at Bell Laboratories, Dodge analysed and dismantled audio recordings of surrealist poetry by Mark Strand, mathematically and meticulously reconstructing them in synthetic form - resulting in these uncanny, landmark pieces that spearheaded early computer speech synthesis as a form for musical composition.

----------

The compositions recorded here are a product of work with computers in synthetic speech, song and vocal sounds and were created between 1972 and 1975. The music was realized on two different computer music systems and takes advantage of, and attempts to extend and explore their features. The system employed to realize speech songs was created at the Bell Telephone Laboratories for research in synthetic speech and speech communication. Since the system was not designed for musical purposes, its limitations were severe and its musical use a great (and often rewarding) challenge. The system used for In Celebration and The Story of Our Lives was designed with the expressed purpose of creating synthetic musical voices, and was therefore much better suited to the task at hand. As with any high technology project, there was extensive collaboration in the production of the works.

The works on this disk are called computer music because the sounds were created numerically in a computer before reaching magnetic tape and loudspeakers. The computer did not compose the music. However, it was only used as a sound synthesis and analysis medium. In order to hear the sounds which are represented in the computer as successions of numbers it was necessary to attach a digital-to-analogue converter to the computer. The converter transformed the succession of numbers into a fluctuating voltage which was recorded directly on to audio tape.

The technique used to create the synthetic voices is called speech synthesis-by-analysis. For this method of speech synthesis, only those words, phrases and sentences which have been spoken into the computer previously (via an analogue-to-digital converter) may be synthesized. First the digitally-recorded speech is analyzed by programs which extract the attributes (parameters) of the speech for short time segments (.01 sec.). From these parameters the speech may be recreated in a form which resembles the original recording very closely. But for musical purposes the parameters are most often altered before synthesis. It is possible, for example, to change the natural pitch contour of the speech into a melodic line or to change the speech speed without altering the natural pitch level.

The variety of musical patterns which may be created from the analytic parameters is limited only by the composer's imagination. Most of the speech sounds on the recording were created by changing the pitch and duration attributes of the original on resynthesis, but for a few, the resonances (the formants) of the speech were altered as well. The voice of the book in The Story of Our Lives was created by replacing the program which simulates the sound of the human vocal cords with one consisting of 64 sine tones glissandoing at different rates. All the textures in which more than one voice is heard were obtained by mixing the synthetic voices together digitally.

— Charles Dodge, 1976  

And ditto for Allan Bryant's Space Guitars

A pioneer of underground American electronic music, Bryant helped push the boundaries as a founder member of Musica Elettronica Viva alongside Alvin Curran, Frederic Rzewski, and Richard Teitelbaum. Following his departure in 1968 he continued to independently compose, record, and archive live vintage MEV sets on his own IRML imprint until his death in 2019.

During a period in the early to mid 1970s, Bryant channelled his obsession with self-made instrumentation and raw electricity into the solo works collected here on Space Guitars - originally released on the CRI label in 1977 it’s now reissued on vinyl for the first time, revised and expanded on this 2LP.

_________________

"One way to find new ideas and to make music a little different from anyone else's, is to make your own instruments. They automatically supply you with sounds and techniques you probably never could have imagined otherwise. The new instruments I use in Space Guitars produce unusual virtuoso effects that are sometimes similar to those of electronic music. They are not electronic instruments however. Aside from amplification, there are no electronics used to produce or modify the sound, and there is no tape manipulation. They might be called "bridge" instruments — something between the traditional manual ones and new electronic ones. They are amplified string instruments, each constructed in a different manner in order to make use of varying new and unusual techniques, sounds, and effects.

"That many of these effects sound electronic is probably due to the fact that I made these instruments originally for concerts that were billed as Musica Elettronica Viva (Live Electronic Music). In these concerts we purposely created electronic sounding music even when we used normal instruments. But for the last few decades a great deal of music, both pop and serious, has been electronic influenced. For serious music, the electronic influence has provided a valuable exit from '12-tone alley.' There's an entire new organisation and logic made possible with these new sounds. I consider the orchestral music of Penderecki and 2001-Ligeti to be striking examples of this; there are strange new electronic influenced effects and combinations, including blocks of sound that are held for a long time or that slide in different directions, often with a lot of internal movement, with irregular rhythms, tremolos, trills, bubbling, bouncing, waving, wobbling, etc.

"This list of effects can give some impression of what these pieces are like. Also, the titles give some clue since they are an attempt to match the sound of the pieces as well as possible with some external sound or program. The titles make space-impressionistic music out of what was originally written as just abstract music, but who knows whether something similar wasn't in my subconscious at the time? From working at Cape Canaveral for a year, I certainly have the magnificent sound of a rocket take-off still in my ears. An earlier piece in this series, Pitch Out, has a beginning that I only recognized later as an attempt to imitate that sound. I wonder how far I can go in equating titles with just finding out what was supposedly there in intent all the time? Whatever the case, the listener is free and welcome to create his or her own titles if they have more suggestive meaning."

— Allan Bryant 

There's already another CRI reissue from DINTE -  Music By Earle Brown

Can't wait to see what else Luke digs up... hopefully some things that have eluded my search so far

"underpants are naff" (nuddy not-so-slight unsightly return)

 

"Latrine lunacy"!

In the same 1980 issue of Sounds, wholly gratuitous shot of depantsed but thankfully still underpanted Judge Dredd

Ugh!

double ugh!

And from the same issue as Playmate of the Month - a dude from the metal band Vardis

In yet another issue Phil Mogg of UFO - one of Sounds frequent pin-ups - lays down the law: 

Unclear if this is an ahead-of-its-time(-for-UK) pro-boxers sentiment or simply a belief in going commando style under your spandex metalgod leggings or leather jeans 

This picture has appeared in Hardly Baked nearly as often as in Sounds at this point

UFO were on the cover of Sounds a ridiculous number of times - at least four times in end of '70s, early '80s heyday-of-sorts for the band.

Here's an unsightly bare-chested cover 

Here's quite a good cover, and Mogg is fully clothed for once

Here's another with Mogg in a striking sweater

Sounds was a pretty sexist paper (the John Peel column alone is gross - not even hiding in plain sight his proclivities, but flaunting them).

But they did seem to maintain an equal opportunity thing with the scantily dressed pix of both genders - reflective I think of an earthier sensibility than NME or Melody Maker, rooted in a feeling for rock as a below-the-belt kind of music. 

Melody Maker gets in on the underpants action

And a rare example of NMEnuddy, with Marc Almond's monster-thatch (and 'secondary pubes' in the crook of his collar bones

The Sounds of Tongue

 

And a little glimpse from Ms Grogan 

But the Melody Maker unexpectedly beats all comers with this horror: