MySpace a place for friends

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Caural is Zachary Mastoon, a multi-instrumentalist and producer originally from Chicago. Musically "born" in the basement at age 6 with his best friend and neighbor Stuart Bogie (currently a saxophonist for the Antibalas Afrobeat Orchestra & TV On The Radio, among others), he's written and performed music throughout his life in both Transmission (now based in San Francisco), and the group who became the backing band for fellow Chocolate Industries' emcee Diverse.

After studying jazz guitar and improvisation with Anthony Braxton at Wesleyan University, Indonesian Gamelan and Southeast Asian music aboard the Semester At Sea program and experimental electronic music at NYU, Caural briefly returned to Chicago in 2000. His debut CD, "Initial Experiments In 3-D" was released on NY's boutique label Toshoklabs (now available on iTunes), and was followed by two EPs and a critically-acclaimed full-length for Chocolate Industries, "Stars On My Ceiling."

Once back in NY, Caural finished remixes for artists on Plug Research, Sound In Color, Buttermilk, Delic (Japan), Consumers Research & Development, Level Plane, Audraglint, Subtractive, Organik Rekordings, Lens Records and Chocolate Industries. He has been lucky to DJ or perform live with such contemporaries as James Lavelle, Prefuse 73, King Britt, Antibalas Afrobeat Orchestra, Nightmares on Wax, Dntel, Edition Terranova, Daedelus & John Tejada.

In the beginning of 2006, he teamed up with LA emcee Busdriver to develop a live set and, after a successful initial tour opening for Aceyalone and RJD2, accompanied him around the country and abroad supporting such diverse acts as Pigeon John, Deerhoof, and CocoRosie.

2006 saw the release of Caural's newest full-length for Mush Records entitled Mirrors for Eyes, and he is currently working on a number of new projects for upcoming release!

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Check out some visuals:::

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TAMBOURINE SOLO: TAKE ONE from cody hudson on Vimeo

Live in Brooklyn:::

"Camphor" live at Metro (Kyoto, Japan):::

Fun with Amen: live with Busdriver at the Great American Music Hall in San Francisco, on our tour with Deerhoof:::

the Supernature (aka Sean Capone)'s video for "Lake," off of my album, Remembering Today [P-Vine/Mush]:::

the Supernature (aka Sean Capone)'s video for "The Plain Silvery Side..." off of the Suicide/Krylon Psychology 7" [Consumers Research & Development]:::

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Recent Interviews:::

Modart Issue no. 19

Zachary Mastoon is also known as "Caural" and his musical creations are legendary in the Hip Hop, Beats, and Downbeat scenes. He makes lush tunes with a totally unique edge to them. Unlike a lot of the wash of downbeat that is around, Zachary manages to inject personality into his tracks and even give them an age.

He's opened gigs for James Lavelle, Daedelus, RJD2, Aceyalone and many more, along with racking up a massive discography of his own. He also has a large amount of remixes under his belt.

We haven't heard from him in a while and I wanted to introduce him to the readers of Modart both for his music and visual art. I think you'll be pleasantly surprised.

Let's talk...

Q: How did it all start for you?

Whether it was my dad playing Herbie Hancock and Stevie Wonder records when I was 3, or my infatuation with early 80's bands through MTV (I'd record songs off the television with a Fisher Price cassette recorder), I just fell in love with music immediately. My cousin Andy got this Casio PT-80 keyboard and, primarily out of jealousy, I got one too. We started recording music together when I was 4 years old or so, and I can't find the tape for the life of me! Anyway, my across-the-street neighbor Stuart Bogie and I began working together on some music soon after that. I had a sparkly blue drum set, an acoustic guitar, and that keyboard: For a six year old, I brought the heat! Stuart would rap on top of it, and I actually put one of those early songs on my first album, Initial Experiments In 3D. Things progressed from there, and I still work on music with Stuart to this day.

Q: How is the industry NOW compared to say the era when the PAINT EP was out in 2001?

Well, it's sometimes hard to separate how I *felt* about the industry at such a young age from how it actually was outside of my wide-eyed and naive perspective. Back then, the internet wasn't as robust in terms of getting music out there. There wasn't a Myspace; I don't think file-sharing was as popular and mainstream as it is now; And I feel like everybody and their mother wasn't a "producer." In the last ten years, the way that technologies have emerged has irrevocably changed the industry and kind of leveled the playing field, and I suppose that is both a blessing and a curse. While it's wonderful that music software and social networking sites can turn anyone into the next big thing, it also bleeds a torrential amount of fucking garbage into cyberspace and makes sifting through it something I have little desire to do any longer. I am still a fan of music, and I still love creating it, but I really couldn't care less about the industry side of things any more.

Q: Your recent "Sorry Underground Hip Hop Happened 10 Years Ago" track contains how many "Yo's" from various hip hop records?

It's hard to say exactly because some of the individual samples have multiple "yo"s within them, but there were roughly 450 samples stiched together to create the final piece.

Q: How long did that take?

Including the time it took to listen through my rap collection and actually extract and edit the audio, I'd say the entire process took me in excess of 4 months. Granted, I wasn't working on it every day... If I had, I would've driven myself completely insane! Nearly every single hit or chord within each bar was from a different record, and so a lot of it was determining which snare sounded best next to which kick drum or hi hat. And then of course you needed to take into consideration incidental noises and/or tones within the samples, and sometimes that would make or break a small passage. It was the most tedious thing I've ever done in my entire life, but I felt compelled and excited to finish it nonetheless!

Q: It's not a track one could particularly rock a club with ... why make it?

That's a ridiculous question, but I think it is indicative of what a lot of people look for in electronic music nowadays. My fascination with sample-based music - and music in general - has nothing to do with making people dance or have a social experience. Instead, I want to evoke an emotion or a thought. "Sorry, Underground Hip Hop Happened Ten Years Ago (for Regan)," was meant as sort of a bitter joke and a mindfuck, but ultimately it is a tribute to what rap music was to me.

Q: You're living in Chicago, correct? How is the scene there these days, it's a pretty legendary city for music?

Well, I just moved back to Chicago from Brooklyn and, to be totally honest, I've never really been part of any specific scene here. There are a lot of amazing musicians, and there's definitely a lot to take in. Right now, I've been most interested in listening to live jazz and improvised music; Next to the Blues, I'd say that is one of Chicago's richest scenes.

Q: What's on the horizon for you in the near future?

Instead of making a proper new Caural full-length, I've been investing time in different sorts of pieces and really challenging myself over the past year. I made a sound piece as part of Cody Hudson's gallery installation in Los Angeles, and hope to do more work along those lines. I have been finishing new material with a friend of mine here - a side project called Boy King Islands - and we hope to have a record finished within the next few months. There are a slew of remixes and compilation appearances slated for release, and I am going to begin work on a new Caural record very soon... After nine years of using a hardware sequencer, I've started seeking some new ways of making art, and so the next record may be a complete departure from what I've been doing thus far... That's the way it should be.

Q: Have you enjoyed yourself here at Modart?

Yes, and thank you!

Zachary Mastoon aka Caural

(INTERVIEW BY JON KENNEDY)

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Lo Down Magazine

BOGIE NIGHTS

A FRIEND OF MINE RECENTLY TOLD ME I WAS "POST-DEEP"

Open space is still the place, some argue, be it Outer or Myspace. But as more and more people remain indoors in order to roam the ridiculous depths of avatarian surface tubes and alt-worlds, some still carry that old school flag and pursue their travels on (at least more) real grounds. So does Caural, aka Zachary Mastoon – at least most of the time. The soon-to-be 29-year-old Chicago native, who recently made his move from Manhattan to Brooklyn, seems to be constantly going places, viz,: he likes to hit the road, get rollin’, hit new cities. That is, when he’s not on Myspace himself (where he’s pretty aptly filed under Experimental-Shoegaze-Hip-Hop). Yet, neither his endless touring with the likes of Acey, Daedelus, Rjd2, or CocoRosie, nor his neverending backseat arguments about musical (non-)taste with Busdriver (who digs They Might Be Giants a li’l too heavily, if you ask Caural) will lead you to the sonic core of his individual journey: Cuz in fact Caural’s trip is inward bound, meaning he ventures both into his archived snap-shot past, the computerized present, and hip-hop/electronica’s sample-based future. There’s a reason why he’s into Vipassana meditation. With his latest Mirrors For Eyes (out on Mush), he finally pulls the fine art of bedroom-based headphone production out of the oversized hard drive and rubs it softly but steadily into your sweetly stirred gut. Together with lesser-known vocal friends like Hrishikesh Hirway, Paul Amitai, and MC Racecar (oh yes, step on it, boi!), Caural perfectly balances his melodical manned mission between spaced out beat production – there are significant layovers and even lovely delays at PRF (Prefuse), FRT (Four Tet) and the more mellow BBP (Boom Bip) on his flight schedule – and organic nods to the more naïve, more grassroots, more contemplative and meditational side of the instrumental spectrum. “I included a lot of my close friends on this album, and either asked them to play on something, or used a recording they had made as source material. In the end, I write everything myself through the editing.”

So what you get to see in those Mirrors is colorful and bipolar caural riffs and reefs, chanced upon in the pursuit of loops, that are either in full bloom, or being dominated by the sweeping forces of nature: “Well, I’m really a person of extremes: I can be very outgoing and extroverted, and alternatively want to stay in and look at photo albums or read old journals alone.”

Checking out old journals, though, he’s bound to undust little notes about his former neighbor and surrogate older brother Stuart Bogie (now of Antibalas Afrobeat Orchestra) who first got him under way with the drum set and some Fisher Price gear: “He was my absolute first friend. Stuart was a leader." 15 years later, after he’d learned to stand on his own two feet and had left Chicago to study jazz guitar and improvisation at Weseleyan U and NYU, Caural became a full-on multi-instrumentalist, sample wiz, and mile collecting frequent flyer. It was in-flight that he first learned about the different kind of dangers out there…

"Jet Blue flight 292 last September was a pretty crazy event in my life, in that it was the one that brought me closest to death – my own anyway. When we took off from Burbank, the plane’s landing-gear didn’t fully retract, leaving the wheels perpendicular to the runway and making a regular landing impossible. In reality, this sort of a malfunction had happened in the past and pilots are trained to land after such an event, but it was little consolation to the other passengers and me up in the sky. I was genuinely frightened for a short time, but when the guy sharing my seat row offered me his smuggled bottle of vodka tonic, I accepted there was nothing I could do and grew less and less afraid."

True you saw TV news on what was going on while still in the air?

"Yes, and that’s what made it terrifying! I mean, we knew there was a problem, OK, but when you see the image of your plane hovering ominously in the small seat-back television in front of you – and on every major network! – it lets you know it’s pretty serious. I’ll never forget the pilot coming over the loudspeaker and saying, 'It looks like we made the news – sorry about that!' Here are these reporters describing us flying in circles to burn off fuel, discussing all the potential things which could go wrong in our incipient emergency landing, and we’re helpless listening in the sky, eating Terra Blues or fucking Chex Mix! It really made things exponentially worse."

Would you say that this was the scariest thing you ever went through?

"No, actually. Why? Because – no matter what happened – it was out of my control. I think it’s the experiences we initiate ourselves – taking drugs for instance – which prove to be the scariest since there’s always that feeling of responsibility and ensuing guilt. Don’t get me wrong: I used to love taking LSD or eating mushrooms, but if and when a bad thought entered my head and I let it stay, well, it was absolutely mortifying!"

It might be indebted to this notion (entering his head) that self-inflicted dangers are more startling than others, which led Zak to concentrate on more collaborative efforts lately. In collaborating, he can minimize the dangers of being too much in control, so that right after Mirrors For Eyes, he’ll release an album he recorded together with his ex-roommate Jason Hunt (as Boy King Islands), and will then return to his first musical influence ever – the leading Mr. Bogie.

"After just over 20 years, I am still collaborating with Stuart Bogie, and as a duo we call ourselves The Original Ultraviolets. We are working on a record together which is very poppy – poppy for me anyway – with vocals, guitars, out-of-tune pianos, and whatever we can borrow from friends to record with in Brooklyn."

Well, maybe the tangible hood is still the best place after all. Way better than My- or out-of-reach spaces. I mean, who could help you out with sugar, an egg, or keyboards in the digital or orbital realm?

(INTERVIEW BY RENKO HAUER)

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