Sonic Youth and Liquid Liquid feature on a Tellus cassette zine vinyl set

TELLUS, the audio cassette magazine that ran out of downtown New York in the 1980s, is being collected as a vinyl anthology. The set draws on material from the artists who appeared across its issues, among them Sonic Youth, Liquid Liquid and Live Skull.

The premise now sounds ordinary and was not at the time. Music journalism today arrives with the music embedded in it, a habit that goes back through the blog and MySpace era of the 2000s and, before that, to magazines that shipped a CD sampler with every issue, CMJ New Music Monthly among them.

TELLUS came before all of that. It was a magazine whose format was the tape itself, which meant its editorial choices were audible rather than described, and it circulated through the same downtown network that produced the bands now being anthologised.

The names attached give a sense of what the series was documenting. Sonic Youth were early in their run, Liquid Liquid were working the intersection of post punk and dance music that later fed hip-hop through Grandmaster Flash's White Lines, and Live Skull belonged to the same no wave descended New York scene.

Moving that material to vinyl changes what it is for. A cassette magazine was disposable by design, produced cheaply and passed around, and an anthology turns a set of ephemeral objects into a catalogue release that can be shelved beside the albums those bands went on to make.

Stereogum's item on the anthology was truncated behind a registration prompt, so the tracklist, label and release date were not available at the time of writing. Archive projects of this kind have been steady this year, including Rough Trade's second 7 inch singles box set and a reissue of Charanjit Singh's foundational acid house album. Details will appear on the release calendar as the rock set is confirmed.