A native of Madison, Wisconsin, Caro (Orac Records co-founder Randy Jones) grew up in an environment just connected enough for him to receive hazy transmissions from dance music's cultural centers. The Midwest dance scene, resonating from the founding influence of the Hot Mix 5, was fiercely eclectic. "A few local DJs brought techno music to Madison. Those guys would mix genres like crazy.

On Nick Nice's night at the Cardinal bar in 1991 you could hear everything from Speedy J to Inner City to Smells Like Teen Spirit." "Around this time," tells Jones, "I started making tracks to play for friends. Since I was a kid I had always been into playing with computers and synths, but I had to be hit over the head with the whole rave scene to realize that other people might actually want to dance to my weird sounds."

In 1993, Jones moved to Seattle where he honed his programming skills and eventually found work combining computers and music. With Joshua "Kit" Clayton at the helm, he helped create the audiovisual software Jitter for Cycling '74.

Meanwhile he had never stopped delving into dance music. "I was listening to a lot of electro, new wave, Detroit techno, and this crazy techno that the San Franciscans were making." Armed with this panoply of influences, in 2000 Jones started the Orac label with partner Konstantin Gabbro, and shortly thereafter the ROBO.trash weekly, which became a focal point for a new generation of Northwest producers. At ROBO.trash, Jones honed his DJ skills playing sets as eclectic as the ones he started dancing to.

Spinning led to producing, and the alter ego Caro. His first full-length, “The Return of Caro,” follows a string of three critically-lauded 12"s which bring to mind Bam Bam as much as sleeker modern techno. Always pushing the technology forward along with his music, Jones performs live using software he has written in Max/MSP. "It's a combination of remixing the tracks with live singing and processing. Computers offer so many possibilities for performance that people are just beginning to tap into. I want my performance process to be open and as live as possible because that way it's a deeper communication. I want it to be obvious when I'm doing great, and also when I'm making mistakes."

Journalist Philip Sherburne in "The Wire":

"Seattle's Orac label is just getting better and better, thanks to the disco inversions of artists like Bruno Pronsato, Strategy, and [a]pendics.shuffle, and labelhead Randy Jones' debut full-length as Caro, after his spooky My Little Pony single, doesn't disappoint. Minimal Techno undergirds it all, but almost by suggestion alone; the music itself is overstuffed with piano vamps, Trax flashbacks, Italo indulgences, and elements of classic New York Garage. Plenty of elements will sound familiar — "Sea of Hands" dips its fingers into Arthur Russell, Jones' rhythms could drive any record on Perlon, and his revisitation of disco via contemporary means recalls Metro Area — but Caro doesn't sound like anyone else. His compositions blur the line between tracks and songs, building slowly through meticulous addition, but shaping their hooks so that they sink in deeply, in tortuous ways. "Ah, Ah, Ah" practically plays out the artist's "Eureka!" moment in stereo, morphing from a wide-panning exercise in randomized notes into a hands-in-the-air piano anthem, and all so slowly you never notice the muddied festival masses infiltrating the IRCAM studios. "My Little Castle," bristling with off-beats and dirtier than a pair of earplugs after Glastonbury, breaks down the current fascination with EBM into a quietly punishing minimal Techno track as good (and as freaky) as anything out there. Despite its fascination with '80s house, the whole thing sounds almost unrecognizably ahead of its time."

Caro's Discography