During the heyday of cassette culture, the respected home audio magazine Hi-Fi Stereo Review published one of its occasional overviews of new-model tape decks. The 1988 feature was […]
Tellus Audio Cassette Magazine: Portable NYC Art from the Walkman Era
In 1981 New York City, the artist Joseph Nechvatal obtained a compilation album called Just Another Asshole #5. Curated by the artist-musician Barbara Ess (Y Pants) and the composer Glenn Branca, it was an extension of their zine of the same name. The album’s two sides featured a total of 77 pieces by a who’s who of the art and noise scenes of the time, including Laurie Spiegel, Eric Bogosian, Peter Gordon, Phil Niblock, and Jenny Holzer. Of particular note: the three founding members of Sonic Youth each contributed a brief piece, and did so as they were forming the band.
Nechvatal was an active member of the downtown New York scene. His focus was on sound art. At the time, the Sony Walkman was transforming the notion of listening to recorded music. Formerly tethered to a home stereo and turntables, music on cassette allowed music freaks to soundtrack their commutes with sounds of their own choosing.
Inspired, in Nechvatal’s words, “by the idea that you could just bring your friends and neighbors and other artists on the scene at the moment into a compilation,” he and fellow artist Carol Parkinson launched Tellus Audio Cassette Magazine, a subscription service that produced lovingly edited mixes of music, sound art and spoken word to create hour-long compilations.
“I could give New York City a certain soundtrack depending on my emotional needs,” Nechvatal told Paul Paulun of the website Sounds Central. “We lived in a new sort of sonic vibratory environment, and it was interesting to address that as a possibility for contemporary art.”
“I wanted to incorporate cassettes into mail art,” Nechvatal told the Quietus. “The idea was we would just send something to usually a colleague or a friend or someone you wanted to exchange work with. It was just the beginning of the cassette underground culture, where people were doing similar things. Because you could not only play cassettes, you could record on the boombox and on the Walkman, so you had a production tool and a distribution tool in the same little box – and it was not even that expensive.”
The aim, added Parkinson on Celsius Drop, Mark “Frosty” McNeil’s show on dublab, was to amplify “adventurous audio that was outside the radio medium, the kinds of sounds and music that we were interested in.”
The creators behind Tellus spent the next decade regularly issuing cassette comps, in the process documenting a singular moment in New York noise (and beyond). The first tape, which came out in 1983, featured early work by Sonic Youth peers Rhys Chatham, Rat At Rat R and Live Skull alongside found sound recordings and audio collages. Here’s Sonic Youth’s entry:
“Tellus told us there were others like us,” sound artist Gen Ken Montgomery wrote of his encounters with the cassette series. As he recalled in the liner notes to a double-LP compilation Tellus Tools, “In the early ‘80s if you were working on the fringe area between art and music, without the means to have a record label produce your work, putting sounds onto cassettes and mailing them to friends was something everyone could do.” Forty years later, subscription series and cassette culture are both thriving in an entirely different technological environment, one in which we’re all tethered, by choice, to our post-Walkman electronic devices.
Both YouTube and Archives.org have listening copies of Tellus tapes, and we recommend total immersion in them. One great place to start is #12. Called Tellus Dance, it’s a miraculous mess of beats and oblong rhythms by artists including Liquid Liquid (and the group’s Richard McGwire), Parkinson, and others.
- Bill Obrecht – Untitled 0:00
- A. Leroy – Arcade 01:39
- Richard McGuire – You 04:57
- Carol Parkinson – Heavybeat 07:42
- Linda Fisher – Send Forth A Current 12:07
- Lenny Pickett – Dance Music For 4 Saxophones #3 16:43
- Anita Feldman And Michael Kowalski – Riffle 22:18
- J.A. Deane – The Beats 24:59
- Gretchen Langheld – Desire Brings You Back Again 27:47
- Bruce Tovsky – Field 32:57
- Brooks Williams – Demented Folk Tune 35:04
- Jim Farmer – Emperor’s Clothes 37:23
- Hearn Gadbois – Gaht Mayh Moh8joh3 Woykihn 41:59
- Liquid Liquid – Grove To Go 45:12
- Al Diaz – What’s In A Name 48:24
- David Linton – L’Eau D’Artifice 51:58
Here’s No. 13, which is devoted to Power Electronics.
And, finally, here’s a video by Nechvatal that illustrates one of many fascinating works that he’s created. He provides an overview of the work, which was created in 2011, in the notes: “The audio track is 15:56 minutes of Reed’s Metal Machine Music (side 4) compressed into 1 minute and 6 seconds. The money paintings, being eaten by my C++ viral-modeled artificial life software, are by Andy Warhol.”