’80s Downtown NYC Audio Cassette Magazine TELLUS Getting Vinyl Anthology Feat. Sonic Youth, Liquid Liquid, Live Skull, & More

Ever since the 2000s heyday of blogs and MySpace, music journalism has often come embedded with tracks for listening on demand. Before that, there were magazines that included a CD sampler in each issue, like CMJ New Music Monthly. And before that, there was TELLUS.The pioneering audio cassette magazine was a product of the same bustling NYC downtown scene that has lately been revisited by artists from Madonna to Nirosta Steel, but it leaned on the less accessible side of the city's output at the time. "I would say it came out of and feeds into non-conformity," co-founder Joseph Nechvatal remembers. "This is music and art that has no place in the popular market." His fellow founder Carol Parkinson adds, "We just wanted an alternative. And we knew there were other people out there that wanted an alternative."Launched in 1983 by Nechvatal, Parkinson, and Claudia Gould, TELLUS documented the skuzzy and forward-thinking sounds of Lower Manhattan, commissioning and publishing new works by musicians, composers, visual artists, poets, writers, choreographers, and performers from the area — all in the form of an audio cassette. It stands as a fascinating time capsule of a time when no wave...