Dakou refers to the serendipitous and systematic rescue of hundreds of millions of discarded “cut-out” cassettes shipped in scrap barges to China in the late 80s and early 90s. Instead of reaching their certain death as recycling, teams of people transferred the magnetic tape from inside their sawed shells to re-sell in the underground, introducing music previously forbidden by the communist government to its public on a grand scale. 

This same period (ironically Hip-Hop’s golden age of sampling) saw a young Zachary Mastoon aka Caural spotting sounds from his father’s jazz collection on Yo! MTV Raps, wearing out tapes of deep house mixes and underground college rock from hometown radio airwaves, and recording flanged and distorted guitars in a suburban basement with friends. This teenage fusion was the primary foundation of Caural’s sound to come. There was no genre - just influence - endlessly collaged and reflected back.

Most active at the turn of the millennium on progressive heavyweight labels Chocolate Industries and Mush, Caural toured Japan, in Europe and the States, and performed in festivals alongside Sonic Youth, Amy Winehouse, Nightmares on Wax, James Lavelle & Deerhoof before social media could make it all “real”. But soon after, Mastoon left New York City, and killed Caural. 2011’s “Die Before You Die” was a suicide note completed years before, and 2015’s “Handmade Evil” drew from his last live performances with high school pal K-Kruz (2006 - 2009) on a sampler eventually stolen from his west loop loft. Quietly putting out four shoegaze inspired albums as Boy King Islands in between, it wasn’t until 2019 that Caural was reborn in a score for his filmmaker wife Alex Mastoon’s award winning debut “Word Is Bond”. Later that year, he produced two brand new tunes for a split EP with Teebs.

And now - like Dakou - Caural’s back with the first in a series of long-awaited releases for 2023.

Visualized and produced between Los Angeles, the Catskills and South Florida over the course of the pandemic, these songs share the journey through his changing sense of here and now with its geography mapped in sound. That same spirit inherent in his nearly twenty year old discography is renewed as Caural draws deeply from his Fluxus-esque recognition of all things as art - all sound as music.

Through the lens of the “new normal”, we’ve all uncovered everyday beauty taken for granted; facing such abundant death, we more fully digest the richness of life. It’s as if an entire, hidden catalog of experience has arrived to be saved and cherished - just like those cassettes in southeast China.

And in this new era of digital saturation, for Dakou’s cover, Caural worked with Chicago-based design studio Someoddpilot to re-imagine the vinyl LP - another medium somewhere between the graveyard and the garden - as a surrealistic memorial to its progenitive power; after all, physical media is what made Musique Concrète and of course Hip Hop possible. In this way, Dakou both memorializes what’s been lost, and celebrates what’s inevitably always found: redefinition and rebirth.

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Watch the Official Video for Beach Channel: www.youtube.com/watch?v=E0fp1tgIumA