Watch "Heartwork" Premiere on Under The Radar!
Remember when it was still possible to live between the real world and the one turned on and off on screens?
Thanks to Caleb Campbell & the team at Under The Radar for premiering my official video for “Heartwork”
Full piece preserved below.
Premiere: Electronic Musician Caural Shares New Video for “Heartwork”
New Retrospective Collection Aura is Out Now
Producer and musician Zachary Mastoon has spent over two decades making sample-heavy electronic music, pulling from hip hop sampling traditions and musique concrete sound collages to create music that is densely textured, immersive, and adventurous. Mastoon debuted under the moniker Caural with his 2001 album, Initial Experiments in 3-D, and released a handful of subsequent albums under the name before pivoting towards psychedelic shoegaze with a trio of albums as Boy King Islands.
In 2019, Mastoon returned to Caural’s left-field fractured sampling and abstract beats, releasing a pair of EPs in 2023, Dakou and Thank Your Demons. He’s also been diving into the archives, sharing a remix collection, an unreleased 1994 mix, and Aura, his new collection of unreleased and compilation-only tracks dated to 1999 through 2003. Today, Caural is sharing a new video for one of the highlights from Aura, “Heartwork,” premiering with Under the Radar.
“Heartwork” is a heady work of bleary sampledelica, layered with meditative rhythms, looping vocal samples, and dreamy guitar arpeggios. It all works together to entrancing effect, sounding both fluid and tactile. Mastoon’s vintage textures hiss and pop as the samples fade in and out, turning the track into the aural equivalent of scrambled TV channels bleeding together. Similarly, Mastoon’s accompanying video shapes “Heartwork” into a commentary on both the era when the track was created and the reality we now inhabit. He flips through the saturated images that defined cable TV in the late ‘90s and early aughts, weaving them into a single overwhelming visual input. The resulting video draws to mind the same overstimulating blur of information you can find while rapid-scrolling through social media today. The visuals have changed, but the dizzying effect remains.
Mastoon says of the video, “Remember when it was still possible to live between the real world and the one turned on and off on screens?
While cable was introduced in the 50’s, its explosion at the turn of the century changed not only entertainment and advertising, but humanity’s relationship with - and dependence on - both. The Disposable Heroes of Hiphoprisy’s 1992 warning was true: we went from ‘one nation under God’ to ‘one nation under the influence of one drug.’ And while its technology was simpler than the one following close behind on ‘the World Wide Web,’ the message was ultimately the same: buy, believe, and fuck.
Blending rap concert footage forgotten on VHS with the visual zeitgeist from the time - daytime soaps, scrambled porn, Saturday morning cartoons and late-night 900 number girls (oh, and of course our entry into the so-called ‘War On Terror’) - I wanted to celebrate the precipice of reality’s implosion into screens. Because, even though we now hold the center of an algorithmically-curated universe in the palm of our hands, everything about it is still lying to us.”
Check out the song and video below.
