01.01.70
Notice McNeill, co-founder of Los Angeles online radio station Dublab , chats about how he got his start in trannie at the University of Southern California, his first experiences recording audio as a kid, his assemblage 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 perpetual the student radio station at 'SC, KSCR [now KUSC], and I got involved straight when I started at USC. That was when Internet radio was just coming together, and I was able to fact-finding and get a channel online and we started broadcasting in '98 on KSCR and it was one of the at the crack college radio stations. [Dublab] came out of that and we kinda wanted to keep that strength going, and we rented a space in East Hollywood and built a studio and got a society 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 meditate on that as an early music lover—and I wouldn't say that I was real, deep, recondite into music, I appreciated music and enjoyed it, but I was listening to commercial, top-40 portable 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 flounder and sound, recording weird things from the radio. . . And emotive from there and being able to make mixtapes—being able to make mixtapes for a betrothed I had a crush on or a tape to listen to at school—there's that nostalgic connection to cassettes that is actually interesting. The cool thing about cassettes is that because it still is an affordable media before CDRs came out, the first taste and connection I had with underground hip hop was tapes.
Source: Neon Tommy