replacing Hardly Baked whose feed is broken for reasons unknown. Original Hardly Baked + archive are here http://hardlybaked.blogspot.com/
^^^^^^^^^^^^^^"Really awful is more interesting to listen to than pretty good" - Eno
Music by Daphne Oram - it is actually a varispeeded version of Sandy Nelson's "Teen Beat"
So she invented Plunderphonics ahead of schedule - i.e. John Oswald's approach where your collage is sourced entirely from a single other work.
Indeed before he got hold of a sampler, Oswald used a variable speed turntable on Dolly Parton's version of "The Great Pretender"
(Actually there are some other composers who did the musique concrete piece based on a single pop cultural source thing quite early - James Tenney might have pipped Oram there...
This is later I think but pre-Oswald
Then there was this from 1969 - don't know if it's based on a single Laura Nyro or fragments across her discography
Earlier "now it's Siberia" post. Based on the best thing I have seen on TV all year - and like "Snow", it's from 1963 - a report on the Big Freeze that brought Great Britain to a standstill, looking back from only a few months after.
Geoffrey Jonesmade another film about trains:1975's "Locomotion". This time the score was radiophonic music composed by Donald Fraser and played by Steeleye Span of all people.
In 1974 Geoffrey Jones was asked to submit proposals for a film to celebrate the 150th anniversary of the Stockton and Darlington Railway, and, having already been commissioned by Edgar Anstey to report in detail on the whole of BR’s film archive, he jumped at the chance. Anstey asked for three treatments of different durations. A 15 minute version was chosen, since the film was to be part of a travelling exhibition and a greater length would have meant unacceptable queues.
Again, a pilot film was made using library footage, much of it from one of BTF’s earlier productions Giants of Steam, cut to a music track that Geoffrey had arranged himself and electronically processed. A successful screening to a panel of BR officials clinched the support needed to get the film off the ground. Locomotion features over 400 separate images woven together with a strong continual accelerando arranged by Donal Fraser and performed by members of Steeleye Span. It combines traditional instrumental and compositional techniques with state-of-the-art, electronic synthesis. There then followed a period of hiatus until Geoffrey was appointed producer/director at the Thorn/EMI Video Productions Ltd. The company only lasted a few years, but during this time he made a pilot film, Season’s Project, with Donald Fraser and the English Chamber Orchestra still yet to be completed. In 2003 Geoffrey Jones received a grant from the Arts Council of Wales, enabling him to create A Chair-a-Plane Kwela and A Chair-a-Plane Flamenco from material he had shot nearly 50 years earlier. He refers to these two resulting films as ‘notes in the use of digital editing’. Geoffrey Jones has opened our eyes to the rhythm of film.
Actually Jones did yet another film on this subject, Rail - and this was in between Snow and Locomotion. It came out in 1967 and is said to also involve Daphne Oram's music, although it doesn't sound very electronic to me.
The spirit of peak-nuddy Sounds rematerializes in the current issue of The Wire with this "relaxed" shot of cover star Mike Watt at home in the seeming starkers.
If you peer closely then it becomes clear that short shorts or at least boxers are on - but the angling seems almost deliberately designed to create the opposite first-glance impression.
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.
"... 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.
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"
