Remix Magazine Interview - Issue 173

CAURAL’S NOTE: some things got lost in translation, so the original interview (in English) appears below the translation of the Japanese.

Caural

Another Heart-Tugging Downtempo Masterpiece

Translation: Yoko Asazawa

Remembering Today is exactly the kind of record that suits this time of year, when summer has slipped away and you find yourself already nostalgic for it.

This summer, about all I managed was taking my daughter to the neighborhood pool. Somehow that left me feeling strangely sentimental. At times like that, I put on Coral's "Red Sunshine." Somehow it clears my head and leaves me feeling a little more positive.

Caural—Zachary Mastoon—first attracted attention as one of the new generation of artists born from the post-hip-hop/electronica movement after releasing his debut album on Prefuse 73's label. But that wasn't just a passing trend. He has continued making music steadily. Three years after his previous release, having moved away from Chicago, the city that had been his base, and moved to New York. His third album once again delivers music that gives your heart a bittersweet ache. As with the previous record, his meticulous approach to collage remains intact. As autumn evenings begin to arrive, there's probably no better soundtrack. It's a wonderful downtempo album.

— It's been three years since your previous album, Stars on My Ceiling. What have you been doing during that time?

Caural: I've been involved in a lot of different things. Starting with the Chocolate Industries compilation, I released an EP called Blurred July, and I was also working on making a full-length album.

I was involved with Boy King Islands, an ambient-psych project inspired by the early-'90s shoegaze scene, and I also worked with Stuart Bogie, who's a member of Antibalas Afrobeat Orchestra, on some of his projects.

Then there was Blurred July. My mother's health began to decline around 2002, and she passed away early the following year. After that, I moved to New York.

— The title Remembering Today sounds rather surreal.

Caural: After my mother's death, leaving my family's home in Chicago... the last three years of my life have really felt surreal. Lately I've been experiencing déjà vu all the time in everyday life. Rather than déjà vu, it's more like remembering things before they happen—as if my future self is looking back at my present self. That's what "Remembering Today" is. It has this feeling of drifting away from who I am now, a kind of nostalgia. I think that feeling is throughout this album.

— Your collage techniques haven't really changed, but compared to Stars on My Ceiling, this album has a noticeably stronger sense of song structure.

Caural: Right. I think that's because I wasn't as interested in making the collage aspect the main focus this time. I wanted to write more songs. The collages are still there, but they're functioning more as part of the songs rather than existing for their own sake.

I also spent more time thinking about arrangements. Before, I'd often build tracks by layering fragments together until something emerged, but this time I had a clearer idea of where each piece was supposed to go.

— The atmosphere feels warmer than your previous work.

Caural: I think moving to New York had a lot to do with that. Chicago is a city I love, but New York has a completely different energy. Being around so many people making music and art every day had a big influence on me.

At the same time, I wasn't trying to make an upbeat record. There's still a melancholy running through it. But I wanted that sadness to feel comforting rather than oppressive.

— Did the move change your working methods?

Caural: Definitely. In Chicago I mostly worked by myself. In New York I ended up collaborating with people much more often. Even if I was still making music alone, just being in that environment affected the way I thought about what I was doing.

— I see. So what kinds of source material did you collage together this time?

Caural: I make music out of the sounds and records I encounter every day. In a way, I'm trying to recreate the feeling of those moments.

Take the first track, "I'm Too High." Whenever I hear it, it reminds me of two different experiences.

One was seeing a dub band in Milwaukee. I was completely wasted, but somehow I had the presence of mind to call my home answering machine and let it record the show. That recording became the foundation of the track.

The other goes back to when I still lived in Chicago. I got an advance, leaked promo copy of the Madvillain album before it officially came out. The audio quality was awful. I hardly smoke weed anymore, but back then I was incredibly high, and listening to that distorted CD just felt better and better. I couldn't understand a word MF DOOM was saying, either (laughs). I ended up sampling that recording exactly as it was.

I've always loved glitch sounds—errors and digital malfunctions. I was especially into Oval's records on Thrill Jockey.

— Even with all those noise collages, your music still has that heart-tugging, bittersweet quality

Caural: I've always liked music that's a little melancholy. But not "I want to die" sadness...

Well, I like music like The Smiths and Joy Division too, but I especially like that feeling you get with My Bloody Valentine or Boards of Canada—it's beautiful and happy, but also somehow wistful.

A little while ago I bought the first three Dinosaur Jr. albums again because remastered editions had just come out.

I also listen to Fennesz a lot. Endless Summer is a really beautiful album.

Maybe I don't actively chase after new music as much these days. I've been going back and listening to things I loved in junior high school.

I'm a nostalgic person (laughs).

That said, there are still great new bands. I really like TV on the Radio. They're based in Williamsburg. I hate that neighborhood, but they're cool (laughs).

I also like The Walkmen. Though they're another Brooklyn band.

— It sounds like life in New York is treating you well.

New York is fascinating because, unlike Chicago, so many different people, cultures, music and art all overlap.

Art doesn't come out of nowhere. You don't get ideas by sitting alone in a completely empty white room. That said—and I know I keep saying it—I really can't stand Williamsburg (laughs). It's become the first place people move when they leave the Midwest and decide they're suddenly cool. The whole neighborhood feels like one giant fashion show. It's full of couples in their early thirties who probably used to be "bad kids." They've all got tattoos, weird piercings, vintage clothes, and they all walk around looking vaguely annoyed. Meanwhile, the Dominican families who actually lived there first just look at all this and seem to be thinking, "What on earth is going on?".

The main street is lined with designer furniture stores and tiny boutiques, and it's like someone said, "Every neighborhood needs a Thai restaurant with a decorative pond in the middle." The whole place has become incredibly fake.

Below is the original text interview submitted for this article. Nowhere is me shit-talking Williamsburg strangely:

1. It's been three years since your last album "Stars On My Ceiling".  Has there been any big changes in yourself and around you for these 3 years?  Why did you move into New York from Chicago during this period of time?

I can't really determine if life has always had this many major changes or- if in the last three years- I have just learned to become more aware of their impact on me. The year Stars on My Ceiling was released was a very significant one in that I had decided to finally move back to New York and leave Chicago behind- I missed New York City terribly and felt Chicago was a city belonging more to my past than to my present. I almost moved to Savannah with a friend who was pursuing her graduate degree in visual art in the fall of that year (2002), with plans to move to NY the following fall; either way, I knew I wanted to leave. I had been making mental preparations for that to happen, but thankfully- in July- three things happened that made me stay one extra year: the friend with whom I was to move to Savannah decided not to leave, a room opened up in my friends' apartment for me, and my mother was again diagnosed with cancer. The last thing was obviously the most important of these, but each made things work out the way I feel they were supposed to. My mother passed away in February of 2003 and her death induced the most monumental change in my life: I lost my closest friend. We shared an intensely spiritual relationship, and her amazing passion and zest for life became an energy I adopted and of course still embrace to this day. In moving back to NY, I found myself the most confident I had ever been, and I watched as everything slowly fell into place.

2. You have done a lot of remixes, and performed with numbers of artists since the last album.  Can you tell us about your memorable works, shows, and artists?

The first remix I did last January was for Adventure Time, a side-project of Daedelus'. I had just moved from Brooklyn into an apartment in Manhattan, and hadn't yet bought any furniture- not even a bed! I had set up my sampler on top of its cardboard box on my floor, and had my laptop elsewhere on the floor as well. Actually, the first four remixes I did (Adventure Time, Take, GB, and DJ Dren for Delic Records in Japan) from January through April or so were done in this way, with me sitting on top of a couple comforters and pillows and mixing on the fucking floor with headphones! I was working 2 days a week for a label here in NY called Coup D'Etat, and my boss Howard actually gave me a mixing desk and monitors! Soon enough, by May I had a comfortable set-up to compose music, except I still hadn't bothered to buy myself a mattress! I was lucky to do a mini-tour with Adventure Time on the west coast, and in playing with Daedelus and Frosty, I was just so struck with their work ethic- they're two of the hardest working people I know!

Most of the year was spent doing remixes, DJ sets and a few live performances here in NY, but I was also returning to Chicago every couple months to visit my family and record a vocal- and guitar-oriented project called Boy King Islands with my friend Jason Hunt. Jason and I had been playing music together since the beginning of high school- even working together in Diverse's back-up band before both he and I signed to Chocolate Industries- and it was through this project that I became increasingly comfortable with making very personal music. I was also working with my childhood friend Stuart Bogie (a saxophonist for Antibalas Afrobeat Orchestra) on music at his place in Williamsburg. I had been doing so many remixes and things over the year that my own music became less of a priority, and I think these two projects gave me the space I needed to be able to return to it with that much more inspiration.  

3. What type of artists do you feel the same vibe currently?  Also, what recordings/albums do you recommend funs of your works to try listening?

This is a question that I can't answer too easily, because I rarely listen to other producers that create similar music. Of course there are artists who make work I love- Jay Dee, Madlib, Dabrye, Daedelus, and many others- but I am much more interested in listening to music that has very little to do with sampling! I have found myself returning to a lot of albums I used to love years ago; I think I've become overcome with nostalgia... I bought the re-issues of the first three Dinosaur Jr albums on Merge, downloaded My Dad Is Dead's album "The Taller You Are, The Shorter You Get" from his website, and have been revisiting Swervedriver, Slowdive, The Smiths, and many other bands I have been listening to since junior high. I work on so much of my own music that I don't actively seek out other artists' so much- my friends recommend records to me, or I listen to my friends' music a lot as well! If I'd have to recommend some of the albums I loved listening to over the past year, I'd have to say TV On The Radio, The Walkmen's album "Everyone Who Pretended To Like Me Is Gone," Bowery Electric's album "Beat," Fennnesz' "Endless Summer," and Madvillain. 

4. About your latest album, does the title "Remembering Today" have any particular meanings?

Yes, "Remembering Today" deals with the feeling of re-experiencing the present moment, i.e., "deja vu." I have always had these moments of recognition but, over the past few years, they have become more and more ubiquitous in my life. When things feel more than familiar, and when they have an almost humbling and mystical quality to them, that's what I am referring to in the title. I like to look at my life as something that has already happened, so there's less to be afraid of as it unfolds... 

5. The overall sound of this album dedicatedly beautiful compared to the last album, but at the same time there are complex, sensitive feelings in that sound.  This is how I feel, though, do I misinterpret?

The music on the album- for the most part- is the music I finished after the last EP I did for Chocolate Industries, "Blurred July," so really, it's just a progression from my earlier material. A few of the songs, however, are actually quite old, and I included them among the others to both have people hear where I came from, and for the songs to be heard in general ("Mouth," "Insect Headphones," and "Non Art" were all done before Stars On My Ceiling!). So, in answering your question, I am not sure the music is any more or less beautiful per se, but I'd hope that a greater complexity has become apparent in my work over time. 

6. Can you pick some of key tracks in "Remembering Today", and tell us about these tracks please?

Each of these songs has its own story, but I'd say a couple of the more interesting ones are with "I'm Way Too High," "Summer on Cassette," and "Insect Headphones."

"I'm Way Too High" was made drawing from two main sources. I was in Milwaukee a few years back at a small bar called The Social, watching a dub band called The Superpowers perform. I remember being pretty drunk- whether I was high or not I can't remember- but I tried calling my roommates to share with them the music I was hearing. When our answering machine started recording, I held my little Nokia cell phone in the air and recorded a six bar passage from them. When I got back to Chicago, I set up a microphone near the speaker to record the message to my computer.

Around the same time, my roommate and friend Keith (K-Kruz) had gotten a copy of the leaked Madvillain record- the original version that differed from what Stones Throw wound up releasing the next year. Anyway, the CD-R it was on was totally fucked, so the CD player in our studio had difficulty playing it. One night I got really high and tried listening to it, but it kept skipping and it just started to piss me off. Well, when I tried getting to the next song by scanning, I realized how much I loved the sound that made! So, I patched the CD player through the mixer, and recorded about ten minutes of just that: me scanning through the damaged CD, back and forth, sometimes creating little rhythms and pauses by pressing the buttons like I would a trigger on a drum machine. I burned myself a CD-R of the result, and on it scrawled "I'm Way Too High" with a Sharpie permanent marker... So, in combining the two recordings, the album's opening track was made. 

"Summer On Cassette" is a song I have been passing around for a couple of years. Seven at Chocolate Industries asked me to remix Souls of Mischeif's song "Spark" from the Urban Renewal Program- originally produced by RJD2- and of course I flipped it completely differently. Well, I suppose- fearing that it wasn't Hip-Hop enough (thank God!)- it was scrapped and he got Edan to remix it for the 12". Meanwhile, I had been rocking it in my live sets -vocals and all- and passing it around to friends, including the excerpt of the Astrud Gilberto song "Corcovado (Quiet Nights Of Quiet Stars)" that the hook was made from (you can even hear Astrud's breaths and ends of consanants in the piano chords I chopped from it). I had kind of forgotten about the track otherwise, but then Carlos Nino (Ammon Contact, Hu-Vibrational, etc.) got in touch with me and asked for the instrumental. Well, he played it in a mix he did for the Gilles Peterson show in the UK where it was called "Spark Remix," and it found its way onto United Airlines radio programming. Plans for its release as a 7" on Chocolate Industries were made and then abandoned, and recently made again (!), but here it is in all of its glory!

Finally, "Insect Headphones" is a remix I did for some guy named John whom I haven't talked to since 2000. I had just moved back from NY after graduating from NYU, and he had gotten in touch with Nate Harrison at Toshoklabs about me remixing his material. So, this one day we met at a record store, and he took me around in his crappy car and played me his even crappier music. Honestly, I was not feeling his shit whatsoever, but I wanted the challenge of remixing him anyway. Just like I did the Madvillain CD, I wound up skipping through it and based the remix on that: varying the pitch of me skipping through the material and layering it all with subs and other sounds. This was a story of someone getting a lot of people to remix their material and never putting it out (this has happened to me three fucking times!), so I am putting this track out myself! 

7. What equipment do you usually use for your recording?

I do all of my sound editing and design on my laptop, and then make sample CDs for myself to chop up on my hardware sampler/sequencer: all of my programming, fades, level changes, etc. are all done by hand! Although this makes the process a lot more time consuming than it probably needs to be, I prefer this approach. It makes composing music a lot more tangible than it is moving little blocks of audio on a computer screen! Most everything is finished as it leaves my sampler using a simple stereo output, but sometimes I overlay extra sounds and ambience in the final mix. 

8. You are also working on other project 'Boy King Islands' and 'The Original Ultraviolets' side by side.  Can you tell us a bit about these projects?

Like I said, Boy King Islands is a project that I finished with a friend and former roommate Jason Hunt. My friend Rob Sevier who helps run the Milwaukee label Wobblyhead contacted me about doing a My Bloody Valentine cover for a seven-inch series he was working on back in 2002. Signaldrift had done a version of their song "Nothing Much To Lose" for the A-Side, but I couldn't really choose one song of theirs to do. I decided instead to write an original song in that style, and had no trouble doing that. I was living with three friends from high school with whom I played music, and so we recorded all of the parts in our apartment. There was something like 12 or 15 guitar tracks, I sang 4 vocal tracks, recorded drums, and then my friend Jacob recorded bass. This song was released on the seven-inch as Caural, and was called "The Girl With the Stained Glass Eyes." It was so much fun that Jason and I decided to do an entire record. Either he or I would write a chord progression, and then I'd write lyrics and we'd track it in at our apartment together. Of course, I moved back to NY, so then he started sending me ideas and we went back and forth over the phone with them. I came to Chicago three or four times last year to finish mixing the record, and all together, it was recorded in 5 different studios in Evanston, Chicago, and New York!

The Original Ultraviolets is Stuart Bogie and me. Stuart is my oldest childhood friend, and he and I have made music together all of our lives. One of our first songs was recorded on a Fisher Price cassette recorder in my basement when I was 6 and he was 9. We called ourselves the Ultraviolets, and that song was renamed "1984" when I stuck it on my first album, Initial Experiments in 3D. Anyway, when I first moved back to NY, I stayed at his apartment while he went with Antibalas on one tour after another. When he was in town, it was only natural that we wrote music together. He had set up a small studio in his room at the time (which was a railroad to the kitchen!) with a Tascam 8-track recorder, and we started making recordings. Again, Rob Sevier approached me for his second seven-inch series, and I proposed that instead of using a Caural track, he should use something Stuart and I had been working on. I checked the internet to see if The Ultraviolets' name had been used and it had... I was pissed and we tried thinking of new names, but in the end Stuart said, "we've been around much longer than these guys- we are the original Ultraviolets!" So, the name stuck. Working with Stuart has been wonderful. Unlike Boy King Islands in which there was a lot of audio editing on a computer, this project is all analog and really raw. Even the instruments we use- everything we record- we have lying around: piano, guitar, a Univox drum machine, some old crappy keyboards, and things around the house! It is really fun, but unfortunately- due to his and my schedule- things have been moving at a snail's pace... This winter, the seven-inch should be released and will have a very early recording called "I'll Turn Cold" on the A-Side and the first song we recorded together in Brooklyn a couple years ago, "Deserted," on the flip.

9. Lastly, can we have your message to your fans looking forward to your new album not only in Japan but also all over the world please?

I am just so grateful to be releasing music and sharing my evolution as an artist- and as a person- with all of you. "Remembering Today" is just one more step forward in that process, and I hope it can become a soundtrack for events in your life just as it is in mine.

Zachary Mastoon aka Caural

8.24.2005