dublab: Future Roots Radio

dublab: Future Roots Radio bends time and space through sound. Founded in 1999, dublab has been streaming far-out music since the dial-up age. We travel back to the dawn of Internet radio—a pre-podcast/smartphone/ social-media era with infinite potential and flash forward for premonitions of other worlds, other sounds.

Rising from the fertile Los Angeles landscape, dublab enlisted the city’s visionary musical minds to broadcast to the world. This ever-growing collective of deep music heads are at the heart of the station’s algorithm-free, human music experience. The book-length 20-year retrospective details dublab’s adventurous radio experiments and examines its grassroots approach to building an international arts radio network. Readers who approach the book with open ears will undoubtedly enhance their own adventures in the music frontier.

dublab’s airwaves have provided an early platform for emerging artists, such as Flying Lotus, Animal Collective, and Julia Holter, while hosting legends like Van Dyke Parks, Linda Perhacs, Egyptian Lover, and Lee “Scratch” Perry.

dublab: Future Roots Radio springs to life with scenes from sad music parties, all-night ambient happenings, and multi-sensory underground events. Stories of sleepwalking DJs, thrift store album alchemy, and sizzling circuit boards fill these pages. Wise elders, optimistic youth, and receptive listeners share their sonic worldviews. By offering an alternative to mainstream music, dublab aims to encourage rich life experiences through deeper listening. This book is a door to your destiny. Crack it open and ride these waves.

Edited by Mark “Frosty” McNeal & Jeremiah Chiu

Designed by Jeremiah Chiu/Some All None

260 Pages, Hardcover 

8.5 x 11.5 in. | 21.59 x 29.21 cm. 

Spring 2023