Mixtape Memories is a new weekly podcast hosted by early NYC-based music bloggers Matt Heart Spade & Jinners. Incorporating stories about mixtapes in the ‘90s that influenced them and their wild times during the aughts, Matt & Jinners will rewind and talk about their favorite artists, albums, concerts and general musings from their formative past. New episodes debut on Mondays.
About Hosts:
Matt Heart Spade was born and raised in Brooklyn, NY within walking distance to Coney Island. As a kid, he would use his allowance to purchase bootleg Top 40 cassette tapes from shady vendors at outdoor flea markets. At the age of 13, he became obsessed with alternative radio, MTV’s “120 Minutes” and his first pair of Doc Martens. He attended university in the DC area and frequented the famed 9:30 Club and Black Cat on a near-weekly basis. Also during that time he became a college radio DJ where his tastes grew well outside of the mainstream. On summer and winter breaks, he interned in the marketing department of Astralwerks Records (Air, Basement Jaxx, Chemical Brothers, Phoenix, Sondre Lerche, etc). He ran two successful music sites, consecutively – The Music Sl*t from 2005 to 2010, and A Heart is a Spade from 2010 - 2018. During that 13-year span, he curated showcases, DJed events around Manhattan and Brooklyn, photographed and reviewed performances, and blogged multi-daily. These days, he’s a music publicist representing a range of international acts and acclaimed venues. His very first concert was Radiohead and Alanis Morissette in the summer of ‘96 at Long Island’s Jones Beach Amphitheater – he’s still bummed that he missed the encore, including “You Learn” and “Ironic,” in order to beat traffic leaving the space.
Jinners started her music blog at the tail end of 2002 because there was no mainstream outlet at the time covering the music she was listening to. She went out almost every night to local NYC shows that were a bit more underground and had no place to chronicle her outings. Thus Jinners was born, right at the advent of music blogs. She grew up with mixtapes from friends influencing her musical taste, full of '90s indie rock, which set her up perfectly to be in tune with what was going on in Brooklyn and the Lower East Side in the early aughts. Her blog served as a diary about her nights out in now defunct clubs like Luxx, North Six, Lit, Death by Audio, Sin-e, Rothko and Brownies to other clubs that are still kicking but have evolved in other more commercial directions like Mercury Lounge and Bowery Ballroom. Jinners has had many lives throughout her career: working in marketing and helping to sign indie rock artists to ASCAP, throwing showcases under the Jinners and On the Moon Music moniker, independently managing bands like Dirty on Purpose, Cheeseburger and Gabby Glaser of Luscious Jackson before moving on to talent buying and promoting shows at Union Hall and Bell House. Now she works as a booking agent and producer representing a variety of innovative artists in comedy, social justice, drag, dance, musical improv and more.