Born worshipping vinyl through his parents’ living room stereo, Caural (born Zachary Mastoon) based temples at his sparkly blue drum set at 3, the Casio PT-80 at 4, and guitar at 6.

He was soon skinning his knees skateboarding with childhood neighbor Stuart Bogie (Arcade Fire, TV on The Radio, Antibalas Afrobeat Orchestra), and capturing youthful interpretations of early 80's Hip Hop, new wave and pop radio hits together on cassette. Playing an amalgam of jazz influenced punk in their early teens, they went on to co-found Transmission in 1991, a group which later took a more experimental turn with the addition of saxophonist Colin Stetson.

Equally in love with rap and shoegaze, Mastoon clarified his voice with avant-garde giant Anthony Braxton at Wesleyan University and an around-the-world gamelan orchestra aboard Semester At Sea; however, it was during his final year at NYU in 1999 that he began fusing his disparate influences quite literally with a Yamaha SU700. A CD-R of his first four compositions was slipped from his coworker at the turntablism-pioneering Asphodel Records to the head of Toshoklabs, and the first Caural album had found a home.

A critically acclaimed catalog of original material and remixes for Chocolate Industries, Mush, Plug Research, Sound in Color, and other early foundation builders of the "beat scene" followed.Touring the States and Japan beginning in the early 2000s, he teamed up with LA emcee Busdriver in 2006 to perform internationally with artists and bands such as Aceyalone, Deerhoof and Bonobo, and made his mark in major music festivals such as Coachella, CMJ and SXSW, often bloodying fingers and accidentally tearing knobs off his sampler on stage.

In April of 2009, Mastoon was invited to speak at Princeton University for Paul Lansky's Composition Colloquium, and detailed the arduous process of creating "Sorry, Underground Hip-Hop Happened Ten Years Ago (for Regan)": a track painstakingly created out of over 400 samples of the word "yo".

After recording three albums of psychedelic shoegaze as Boy King Islands, Mastoon released Handmade Evil in 2015 (a collection of improvised live recordings spanning 2006 - 2009) and soundtracked his wife Alex Mastoon's award-winning debut short, Word Is Bond, which premiered at the Chinese Theater in 2019. Since then, he has returned full-time to the sonic bricolage of Caural, releasing a series of EPs, a collection of his remixes from 2003 - 2008, his first techno-oriented work from 1994, and a track on Leaving Records' compilation, Staying.

He is currently working on his first full-length LP as Caural since 2006 Mirrors For Eyes.