Dublab rocks my Future Roots
by 
|Ok, so the guys who present the various shows on Internet radio station, Dublab, are remarkably hip. They kinda put my own living room mixes to shame. Though I’m yet to hear them work in a Flock Of Seagulls track. Yes, the 80s were so cool. Under the banner of ‘Future Roots’, the Dublab DJs throw world music, electronic, dub and garage rock together and come out the other end with a 24-hour playlist which is both fun and distracting. Who needs to work when you could be doing a spirited dubstep instead in the sanctity of your own apartment? We checked in with Dublab DJ Alexandro Cohen to get the inside word on the station’s story: past, present and future.
It seems to be a random assortment of music that the station plays. Is there a stylistic thread that runs through the various shows, or is it more a case of if it’s good, then it’ll get some airtime?
‘Dublab plays music that we like to describe as being part of the genre Future Roots music. It is something we came up with to describe music that influenced or will influence future generations of listeners, artists, creative people and musicians, therefore being the root of something that originated afterwards or will originate in the future’.
Even though musically Dublab seems to be all over the place, there’s a common ground all these styles and sounds share. Part of it is like you mentioned, “if it’s good, it’ll get some airtime”. But in many ways it goes deeper than just being good. We want to feature music that is vibrant, exciting, new, old (but still new!), and genuine. I could continue giving adjectives to describe what we play, but I think the answer is in our playlists. At the end of the day, we let the Dubstream describe what we like’.
Can you let us in on some of the initiatives the station has lined up for 2009?
‘Lots of things are lined up for 2009, but also many projects that started in 2008 are really going to take shape in the next year.
Dublab just launched VisionVersion, a new Dublab project created by a collective of visionary directors. We’re filming artists we love performing live songs in places we love in Los Angeles. These are shared with the world through the Dublab website and other video sites across the web. So far we’ve done sessions with Tom Brosseau (Fat Cat Records), Stevie Jackson (Belle & Sebastian), Rain Machine aka Kyp Malone (TV on the Radio), Why? (Anticon), Health, Baby Dee (Drag City), Ariel Pink (Paw Tracks), Over the Atlantic (Carpark Records), Don Cavalli (Everloving), Peter Walker, Alessi, Cluster, Busdriver, Adventure and some more that are coming up. We release one of these amazing live sessions every week.
Another project Dublab started is Into Infinity. This is a project sponsored and created in conjunction with the amazing folks at Creative Commons. Into Infinity is an art project that explores the idea of on and on and on and on and on and on. The project combines both sound and visuals where many artist and sound people create and inspire each other
There are many other projects coming up at Dublab. One of them is the redesign of the Dublab page. We want to make the Dubstream more accessible to listeners, and we are expanding our features and our sound archives, where you can listen to hundreds of sessions from the labrats (resident DJs), guests and live artists’.
Tagged: dub music, internet radio
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