Streaming Interview on Dailysonic
Just before leaving for Los Angeles, I had the pleasure of drinking whisky and recording an interview with Dailysonic, a webzine based here in NY. Listening back to it, I shuddered at the effect whisky had on my usage of the word "like," embarrassingly making me reach "valley girl" status. Regardless, it's a short and fun spot where I talk a little about music, meditating, and sound, and you can hear some mellow sounds of mine in the background! Thanks to Aaron and Adam at Dailysonic for making it happen!
TRANSCRIPT:
Aaron Taylor-Waldman: I got the chance to speak with Caural, a world traveler and talented producer of sample based music, about his recently released album, Remembering Today. Caural, whose real name is Zak, told me about his recent meditation retreat, where he finds his sounds, and what makes his new album darker and different from his previous work.
Caural: I just did this meditation retreat and it was like, 12 hours a day of meditation, and there was no speaking, there was no eye contact, there was no eating of food other than what they gave us… There was no reading, no writing, no practicing of any other rites or rituals. So, I mean, you basically gave yourself up to three and a half days of observing your breath and then the rest of the time observing your bodily sensations - and that was it.
And, you know, I really started hearing like… I was hearing ice melt. I was hearing like my heartbeat sometimes. I was feeling the backs of my eyes and feeling the tips of my toes, and passing objects through my body. Just everything was inward. And then even sitting on the subway - coming home, you know - I was offended that people were talking around me, and I was offended at the noise of the wheels… So it's always interesting. I couldn't imagine a life where I'd have one routine in one location. I think that I would go absolutely nuts.
I play guitar, I play drums, I sing, I play a little bit of piano. And I'm an amateur didgeridoo player [laughing]. Yeah, I mean, I could play bass a bit, but yeah, I studied jazz guitar, but my first instrument was drums. And so I have a love for drums and drum sounds. And it's always the most exciting part when you're listening to music and it's this drum break and it's just like, oh!
The record that I did, Remembering Today, it’s out on P-Vine. It came out in September, and it came out on Mush, the label that I'm working with now, in December - so it's out. Remembering Today is basically a collection of the material I'd been working on for the last couple years but, for the most part, it was all done in 2003.
I finally found an aesthetic as an artist, I think, where I'm finding my own sound. As an artist that deals with sampling, it’s great sampling all these different kinds of things. And then you wind up making these really weird ambient tracks or these like, kind of more Hip Hop things, or these rock, like, on Paint, there's a lot of Shoegazer rock samples. It's so wonderful to be able to listen to an old jazz recording or just anything! And you hear… You can imagine the room that the snare drum was recorded in, or you can listen to the dust on the record and, like, buy some used record wherever. You can imagine someone else putting the needle down, and there's parts that are a little more muffled than others. And like, in the beginnings of songs on vinyl is just kind of this weird [whoosh].
You know, you build memories to the music of the first time you dated some girl or the way that you felt when you started college, or a party you were at, or walking alone in the forest and listening to Aphex Twin’s Selected Ambient Works or whatever it is. I think when you're traveling, you're taking all these things and you're making little mental collages and remembering all these activities and tastes and sounds and smells. And so when you're sampling music, you're taking the audio equivalent of that sort of library of experience and reconfiguring it, recontextualizing those moments and hopefully presenting something that's really rich.
I mean, sounds that I was using, I wanted to use those sounds. And I think that our tastes change, and records sound different from one another. And I think that, while in the past, I was drawing from so many divergent sources and things sounded somewhat scattered? Like, all my albums prior to this one, I think were a collection of tracks, whereas this one is the first one where I feel like it sounds like an album. And I think that the one I'm working on now will really sound like an album.
I've always made a melancholy kind of music, just because that's my favorite music - this really sad, like… I love Slowdive and Lush and Ride, and My Bloody Valentine's my favorite band. But just a lot of music I listen to, there's always that sort of happy/sad tug, and I've always done that, but I think this album in particular was me kind of experimenting with music while I was in that state. So it definitely has a different kind of flavor than my records have had or will have in the future. So I think it's a special record for me.
So “Summer on Cassette” was a remix that I did. I made this remix of the song, right? And it's not real Hip Hop at all - it doesn't sound like Hip Hop. And that's good - to me [laughing]. So I gave him the remix and he said, well, you know, I don't think this is exactly what Souls of Mischief fans are gonna like.
Aaron Taylor-Waldman: It's not hip hop enough?
Caural: ‘It’s not Hip Hop enough’, exactly. Basically an arbitrary title, but it was done in the summertime, and I just thought that it has this hissy, nice kind of quality. And so I just thought it was like, you know, what would summer sound like?
Aaron Taylor-Waldman: It does. And it has distinctly different percussive feeling than some of the other songs.
Caural: Yeah. It’s all old drum machines and, you know, piano, like hissy pianos and violins. Just sounds like nice, kind of like Summery… Breeze. Or whatever - that sounds really cheesy but [laughing]. Sounded like Summer. Sounds of Summer.
Aaron Taylor-Waldman: You just heard Caural with “Summer on Cassette” from his recently released album Remembering Today on Mush. In the background was “Lake” and “Mouth”.
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