dublab.com

Future Roots, Inc., known as Dublab, is a non-profit music public broadcasting internet radio station based in Los Angeles. They have also been involved with art exhibition, film projects, event production, and record releases. Their broadcast is mostly electronic, noise, ambient, punk, and folk music in recorded sessions that are mixed and sampled by their DJs. Twice a year they broadcast live for two weeks to raise funds which is known as their Proton Drive. They also broadcast live every Tuesday which they call Tuesday Transmissions. Their name is a portmanteau of dubbing and laboratory for the combined meaning: a place of experimenting with sampling music. Examples of this, besides their stream, is their film production Secondhand Sureshots where they gave producers, such as Daedelus, five dollars to buy albums from thrift stores and sampling the music to create new tracks. Another in audio/visual form is Into Infinity a collaboration with Creative Commons. It is a group art exhibition of around a hundred vinyl record sized circular artworks and more than a hundred eight second audio loops. The works are randomly dubbed together and is all made freely available for others to remix and sample, even on the project's website. In January of 2008, Dublab formed a non-profit umbrella corporation Future Roots, Inc.The name comes from their characteristic style of mixing traditional music, such as folk, with electronic sounds. It also refers to the paradox that oftentimes music that is actually really old can sound very much like it was made in the present. In that theme, Dublab will often be only be written as either all lowercase or all uppercase by those familiar with the collective. There are other such characteristic writing styles such as a heavy use of alliteration. Fifty percent of their funds are raised through a bi-yearly two week long live broadcast fund-raiser and the other half are from doing shows. Their sound system and DJs have been featured at; MOCA, LACMA, Art Center College of Design, Barnsdall Art Park, CalArts, Page Museum/La Brea Tar Pits, The Getty Center, Disney Hall, UCLA, Hammer Museum, Hollywood Bowl, and El Rey Theatre. They also have extended to releasing records such as; In The Loop series, Summer, Freeways, and Echo Expansion. They also do many recorded sessions, Sprout Sessions, which they release freely as an audio RSS feed. These also make their way to record releases such as the Feathers Sprout Session. In August of 2008 they released their performance video project called Vision Version, which is also available as an RSS feed. They have also music themed group art shows such as Into Infinity, Dream Scene, Up Our Sleeve, and Patchwork. Dublab was founded by Mark McNeill and fellow students at the University of Southern California. Read more on Last.fm. User-contributed text is available under the Creative Commons By-SA License; additional terms may apply.