Radiolab
2021 • Associate Producer
Before the podcast and the smartphone, there was the cassette tape and the Walkman - recordable, rewritable, spliceable, compact, and mobile tools that changed how people moved through the world and listened to voices speaking directly to them.
In five episodes from around the world, Mixtape explores how the cassette brought people together, pulled them apart, and reshaped culture in lasting ways.
Mixtape: Dakou
Oct 22, 2021
In late-1990s China, damaged scraps of Western music known as dakou tapes helped transform the musical landscape. The episode follows the historians, critics, and musicians who reimagined rock and roll through those fragments.
Mixtape: Jack and Bing
Oct 29, 2021
As Bing Crosby's influence started to fade, he turned to recording innovations rooted in wartime technology. The story traces how that shift changed media and audience habits for decades.
Mixtape: The Wandering Soul
Nov 5, 2021
During the Vietnam War, U.S. military psychological operations weaponized a Vietnamese ghost story using tape-based audio tactics. The episode explores the campaign and the long afterlife of those sounds.
Mixtape: Cassetternet
Nov 12, 2021
Experiments in the early 1980s explored broadcasting software over radio so listeners could record it on cassettes, creating analog information networks that disrupted institutions and foreshadowed modern social systems.
Mixtape: Help?
Nov 19, 2021
A three-part finale: how cassettes fueled the self-help industry, how taped history traveled across Africa with Lost Boys, and how old mixtapes still carry emotional weight as personal artifacts.
