Mark McNeill, co-founder of Los Angeles online radio station Dublab, chats about how he got his start in radio at the University of Southern California, his first experiences recording audio as a kid, his collection of unusual cassette tapes, and why he thinks cassettes are still around.

How did Dublab start?

I went to USC from '94-99. I was running the student radio station at 'SC, KSCR [now KUSC], and I got involved right when I started at USC. That was when Internet radio was just coming together, and I was able to research and get a channel online and we started broadcasting in '98 on KSCR and it was one of the early college radio stations. [Dublab] came out of that and we kinda wanted to keep that momentum going, and we rented a space in East Hollywood and built a studio and got a group of DJs together.

What is your history with cassettes?

They were one of the early ways that I was really interacting with music, because I think that as an early music lover—and I wouldn't say that I was real, deep, deep into music, I appreciated music and enjoyed it, but I was listening to commercial, top-40 radio when I was a kid—but it was the first recordable media that was easily accessible. . . As kids we had so much fun with that, playing around with cassette recorders and changing pitch and sound, recording weird things from the radio. . . And moving from there and being able to make mixtapes—being able to make mixtapes for a girl I had a crush on or a tape to listen to at school—there's that nostalgic connection to cassettes that is really interesting. The cool thing about cassettes is that because it still is an affordable media before CDRs came out, the first experience and connection I had with underground hip hop was tapes.

I still have this tape called "ultrasounds mix" and I was living in Germany in 1992 and I remember hearing those tapes and being blown away, it was the way music was cycling around. [Cassettes were] a way for underground music to exist.

Why do you like them today?

Once anybody could record on CDR that became the choice way to pass around promos and pass around new music, but tapes have a very different quality. I think I sought that saturation kinda after being saturated with something too clean with digital recording, you've got all the 1s and 0s and you've got the digital file that doesn't have that warmth, that clutter, that saturated sound, it's very fun to be able to return to that.

What is Dublab's relationship with cassettes?

We have a dual cassette stack right there in the middle of our sound station; it's central in our setup.

Our listeners are very into broad arrays of sound. . . It's all about looking at music from every angle and they like hearing all sorts of different sound mediums so we move from vinyl to cassette, digital from laptops, and live performances. I think people get a kick out of it.

I bought some Ethiopian cassettes from an Ethiopian market here and I played those the other morning.

Today I went into a Thai video store because I saw a stack of cassettes on the counter and they ended up being talks on Buddhism in Thai, I was hoping they would be music, but I'm going to record a Thai vinyl set...

I did a Cambodian cassette mix when I went to Cambodia, there's not really vinyl there, but the sad fact is the Khmer Rouge and cultural wipeout was so tragic, they got rid of a lot of the bourgeois, killed off the art and destroyed much of the film, books, vinyl, and some recordings survived and those got dubbed onto cassette, and when I was there I bought a lot of cassettes and did a DJ mix from that.

We DJ a lot with cassettes, it's not all cassettes, but some genres lend themselves to that. There is a big New Age cassette scene—in the '70s and '80s that's when it was being released to the world. There are a lot of private-pressed New Age cassettes out there. 

John Coltrane's wife [Alice Coltrane], she collaborated with him on a bunch of his albums and she released a strain of records on Impulse Records. She went into more devotional music over the years, she had a kinda Hare Krishna vibe in Agora Hills here in LA and she released three albums of devotional music and we bought some of her cassettes and did a mix to some of her music.

Have mixtapes and cassettes always been popular or do you feel like they have a growing popularity recently?

For sure, I think that some of it is just that it's being rediscovered and it's a cool format . . .but it's also affordable. I think that vinyl is great, it's amazing, but I think that cassettes are about half [the price] and it's something that you can do at home, and a lot of tape labels are pressing them at home one by one and it's instantly accessible. I think that kinda low-entry barrier and ease of creation is great.

It's not meant to be a gimmick, but it’s a tool to exploring music that doesn't exist in other forms. That's kinda the purpose to it, there's certain music that lends itself to cassette, whether because of economic reasons, or because that's what was available.

Can you tell me about Top Tape at Hyperion Tavern? 

We get a full crowd down there every time we do it, it's basically a tag-team DJ night where we invite friends down to DJ, every DJ plays three tapes—we had to go from five to three since a lot of DJs have been showing up—we have two VCRs set up with a video mixer, we project double VHS live projection [videos to accompany the music]. There are about 20 DJs per Top Tape, from brand new music straight out of the studio that they dub on a tape and bring down and old cassettes they find in thrift stores.

We've been happy to present our Top Tape night, and it's one of the reasons that I actively search for cassettes. I guess in general it's great to have outlets for things. I wouldn't buy as many records if I wasn't playing them on the radio or DJing somewhere, a lot of the DJs that come down are buying cassettes for the purpose of bringing them down and playing them at Top Tape for an audience. It perpetuates a community that gets excited about it. The more cassette labels that pop up, the more that people are inspired to do it. 

How does cover art play into the mixtape?

One of the reasons that I think that people kept their vinyl more than cassettes when CDs came around because the vinyl is a lot, kinda, sexier if you will, it's bigger, you get the full picture and it's really physical. If something's gonna be physical it might as well be really physical, I think that cassettes are a bit of an underdog because they have a small area to work with. There is real interesting packaging, it's all about getting creative with it. You can see some really interesting, weird variations of casing, its all what you make of it.

Why do cassettes stay popular when CDs and mp3s are easier to make? What benefits do they have over other media?

Anybody can record onto a CDR, but. . .to me it's almost innately uncool, it was good at the time because it was a good way to reach people, but now you can exchange digital files so easily, if it's gonna be digital, it might as well be invisible. . .

I don't think cassette is my favorite form, I like vinyl, but it has a very interesting form, you can hit the rewind button and hear the super high-pitch sound, it's like when you hear the needle move across the record, when the head of the player is hitting that magnetic tape, it's physical. I think it's really exciting, and I think that most people making cassettes are giving away their music in some digital form as well. It's frustrating to find that song that you want because it's linear, you have to zooooom [makes sound effect] to that track that you want, but its downfalls are also part of its charm.

For someone who's on the hunt for exciting music, it's really interesting because when you're out there at that thrift store going through a pile of cassettes, you are going to find home-recording tapes, you find mind blowing stuff on straight-to-tape demos. It's a one-off private glimpse into a moment. There are also tapes that have been dubbed over and you have a commercial tape but you see the anti-copy thing popped in and someone taped it over and recorded something on it—it could be anything. The search and the exploration can pay off in a big way.

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