Talk:Tellus Audio Cassette Magazine

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Besides the New York Times article, I also direct you to: http://freealbums.blogsome.com/

Twinkletellus (talk) 10:04, 30 May 2008 (UTC)

This should help: See article in the New York Times: http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9502EED71439F936A1575AC0A963948260

also —Preceding unsigned comment added by Twinkletellus (talk • contribs) 12:58, 28 May 2008 (UTC)

From: http://continuo.wordpress.com/2008/03/03/tellus-updates/

Carlo McCormick Tellus: Time Loops Our Sonic Stigmata

As one of the primary stages upon which seemingly all of the ongoing cultural spectacle comes to take a turn, it is surprising just how dismal the New York City music scene’s track record has been in terms of mainstream popular culture. Whereas in other forms of production we enjoy a certain preeminence, somehow the music we make and listen to is by and large disregarded by consensus opinion elsewhere. No matter how much it may thrill us, or even the degree of institutional and critical support it may receive, we can usually be sure that whenever we try to export it anywhere our bands and musicians will fall upon deaf and antagonistic ears. We just don’t quite get it. When everyone else wants melody, we churn out noise. When tastes veer towards the ornate, we go for a brutal minimalism, or conversely, when simplicity is the way of the day, we pile up unwieldy multiple layers of sonic overload. When love is message, we release our rage, and yet when people are finally ready to rock, we retreat into self-reflexive abstraction. And of all our commercial sins, the music out of that New York City downtown/underground/vanguard nexus is always just too damn arty, smart, experimental, self-indulgent, process-oriented, atonal, conceptual, stylized, smugly diffident and all the rest. And even if history may prove kind to such a legacy in the end, this is the stigma which every band or single performer from this town must face each time they go on tour or sit down with a record company. It is a stigma that Tellus wears exceptionally well.

When it came time to gather together some of the music we were hearing in town for Tellus in the mid Eighties, this was an unmistakable fact about which we had no delusions. We were not in the business of making pop stars then, any more so than we are today. Working in nightclubs and performance spaces at the time, I understood that there was no audience per se, just a community of participants. In retrospect, what may have seemed like a curse then, was in reality a blessing. Now, it’s hard to imagine what any of this stuff could possibly sound like to an actual audience. Perhaps the context in which this music was made is much closer to contemporary experience than it might have been in its own time. The thing with New York was that, by the very nature of this urban beast, silence was a rare commodity and linearity a near impossibility. To be at home or in the studio was to have not just the sounds of one’s own thoughts, but a myriad of street noises- cars, sirens, people yelling, garbage trucks, and radios spitting out a ceaseless pastiche of international pop vernaculars. Perhaps the neighbors would be having another fight, the kids selling dope on the corner a new brand name to extol, the television is on, as is the stereo, and you’ve not quite put that book down to pick up the phone. This overlapping, all-subsuming, surfeit sensory saturation is the condition in which much of the music here was made. And what we hear of it today is inevitably either the denial or embrace each artist must determine in their relationship to the din of existence.

Carlo McCormick

Twinkletellus (talk) 12:23, 28 May 2008 (UTC)