Colin Marshall sits down in an undisclosed Hollywood-ish location with Mark “Frosty” McNeill, co-founder and creative captain of the internet radio “future roots music” collective Dublab. They discuss founding an internet radio station in 1999, when everything sounded like a tin-can phone; the nature of future roots, where the very old meets the very new, the very traditional meets the very experimental, and everything sounds different yet retains a common undercurrent; Dublab’s mission to curate the curators, or “DJ the DJs”; his theory that all art is derivative, especially all music, but in a good way; his days doing gruntwork at USC’s classical station, and the roomful of free John Cage, Terry Riley, and Nonesuch albums it afforded him; Dublab’s early courtship by the companies of the internet bubble, and the free lunches (and nothing else) this offered; Los Angeles’ great advantages of diversity and space, of both the physical and mental varieties; what about music seems to incentivize narrow rather than wide appreciation, and how to get around that without being a pusher man; Secondhand Sureshots, the short documentary he co-directed, and what it says about the importance of repurposing forgotten and obscure sounds; whether and how the dust on a record acts as “seasoning”; and the joy of reconstructing someone’s personality by buying their record collection at a thrift store — and how he did just that by giving it a spin on his show Celsius Drop.
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