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All Music Guide:
Brooklyn-based psychedelic rock trio Prince Rama (formerly known as Prince Rama of Ayodhya) formed in 2007 around the talents of Michael Collins and sisters Taraka and Nimai Larson. The trio members, who were raised in a Hare Krishna-centric Florida community, met in high school and began their musical journey as a straight-up punk-pop outfit, but a year in a Boston art school, as well as a steady diet of Amon Düül, Animal Collective, and Gang Gang Dance records, helped them make the transition from wannabe skatepunks to cosmic purveyors of tribal, mantra-heavy, lo-fi psychedelic pop. The groups debut collection, Threshold Dances, appeared in 2008 on the British-based Cosmos label. Zetland arrived in 2009, followed in 2010 by Shadow Temple, which was co-produced by Animal Collectives Deakin and Avey Tare. The Larson sisters, Taraka and Nimai, pared Prince Rama down to a duo for the group's fifth album, Trust Now. It was recorded in a church with producer Scott Colburn. The building provided the perfect environment for their new hybrid of pagan and new age sounds, witchy textures, and ambient spaces. In February of 2012, Prince Rama issued the single "Utopia = No Person" b/w "Exorcise [Chopped N Skrewed R.E.M.I.X.]," and followed it in November with the full-length, Top Ten Hits of the World.
Wikipedia:
Prince Rama (previously Prince Rama of Ayodhya) is a two-piece now age psych-dance band based in Brooklyn, NY. Sisters Taraka and Nimai Larson have lived in ashrams, worked for utopian architects, written manifestos, delivered lectures from pools of fake blood, conducted group exorcisms disguised as VHS workouts and have recently finished inventing an apocalypse on which they based their most recent pseudo-compilation album, Top Ten Hits of the End of the World, composed of ten singles “channeled” from fictional deceased pop bands. Their often unpredictable live shows incorporate elements of psychedelic ceremony, performance art, and dancefloor initiation rite, and when Animal Collective’s Avey Tare discovered them in a Texas dive bar in 2010, they were equipping the audience with handmade shoes clad with broken chimes. They signed to Paw Tracks shortly thereafter, and have since released Shadow Temple and Trust Now, which peaked at #3 and #6 on the Billboard New Age Charts respectively. In four years, Prince Rama have released six albums and toured in four of the seven continents, recording with members of Animal Collective and Ariel Pink’s Haunted Graffiti. Taraka recently published a manifesto on the “NOW AGE” that puts forth Prince Rama’s aesthetic and metaphysical philosophies, which has been met with both hatred and praise from art and music worlds alike.
