Paw Tracks PAW41 CD/LP/Digital
300 dpi jpeg of front cover:
It’s 2012, and Prince Rama has made the Top Ten Hits of the End of the World. Conceived as a pseudo-compilation album, the Brooklyn duo invented ten different pop bands that died during the apocalypse, channeling the ghosts of each one to perform the various songs. Spanning genres and stylistic eras from across the globe, Top Ten Hits explores pop music’s relationship to memory, nostalgia, and the spirit world. Incorporating influences as disparate as cosmic disco, motorcycle rock, new-wave, grunge, tribal goth, Arabic pop, and ghost-modern glam, Prince Rama filters each sound through the destroyed lens of a post-apocalyptic future looking back at the wonders of its sonic past.
Tracking began with Tim Koh in Ariel Pink’s Haunted Graffiti’s studio and was then completed and mixed with producer Scott Colburn (Animal Collective, Sun City Girls, Arcade Fire) at Gravelvoice in Seattle. Top Ten Hits of the End of the World isn’t just a pop album, it’s a retrospective requiem of all pop albums ever made. Nothing like this has ever been attempted by a single band, and its residual echoes will continue to haunt this world and the next.
Bullet Points For The End Of The World
• North American Press by Nick at Life Or Death PR
• Touring planned end of 2012 and most of 2013 or until the world ends
• Multiple music videos to be recovered from the wreckage
• Limited edition Top Ten Hits of the End of the World fanzine
• LP comes with digital download card
TRACKLISTING
01 "Blade of Austerity" - Guns of Dubai
02 “Those Who Live For Love Will Live Forever” - I.M.M.O.R.T.A.L.I.F.E.
03 “No Way Back”- Nu Fighters
04 “So Destroyed” - Rage Peace
05 “Receive” - Taohaus
06 “Radhamadhava” - Goloka
07 “Fire Sacrifice” - Black Elk Speaks
08 “Welcome To The Now Age” - Hyparxia
09 “Exercise Ecstasy” - The Metaphysixxx
10 “We Will Fall In Love Again” - Motel Memory
Release Date: November 6, 2012
LP upc: 677517104110
CD upc: 677517104127
digital upc: 677517104158
PRINCE RAMA BIO
“What the hell is that?” is a question pretty familiar to the controversial Brooklyn band Prince Rama. The answer is far from simple; 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 now finished inventing an apocalypse on which to base their new pseudo-compilation album, Top Ten Hits of the End of the World, comprised 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 only four years, Prince Rama have released a prolific 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. One thing is certain: whatever it is they are, Prince Rama are constantly breaking the mold of what is acceptable to forge a dizzying universe that is wholly their own.
ALL PHOTOS BELOW by Samantha Casolari (click for high res version)
GUNS OF DUBAI
Little is known of who exactly was involved in Guns of Dubai. Strict laws against women playing music in public forced them to keep their
identities concealed from the U.A.E. government. Instead, they posed
as an obscure sector of the Al Sabh millitary regime and clandestinely
distributed bootleg cassettes in empty artillery shells. When the end
of the world came, they were shot by their own loaded guns.
I.M.M.O.R.T.A.L.I.F.E.
In the early eighties, a London sex cult infiltrated underground
discotheques based on the principle that the secret to immortality was
found through engaging in intimate acts of love. To retain their
anonymity, members went by the acronym I.M.M.OR.T.A.L.I.F.E., or
'Inner Messages Morphing Over Resonant Time, Always Loving Infinitely
Free and Everlasting'. For years, I.M.M.O.R.T.A.L.I.F.E. dedicated
itself to recording dance track hymnals that would provoke lovemaking
acts and thus prolong the lives of its members. When the end of the
world came, the group was found frozen in midst of an orgiastic
collapse. They had not slept or eaten in thirteen days.
NU FIGHTERS
It wasn't until after “No Way Back” won Song of the Year at the 1989
Grammys that it was discovered that Maxx and Midnight were actually on
America's Most Wanted list for murder on six accounts. Soon their dark
pasts began to unfold, revealing their true identities as pimps and
prostitutes, grave robbers, and cold blooded serial killers involved
in LA's shadowy underground motorcycle mafia scene. They knew this was
the end, so they fled to the canyon in a high speed police chase and
ran their motorcycle off a cliff to meet their fate.
RAGE PEACE
Rage Peace formed as a small protest band in the early 90s and before
they knew it they were the Bob Dylans of a whole generation of angry
youth. They became founding members of the Rage Peace movement, based
on the principle of nihilism as the only true order, and wrote songs
with violent messages placed in seemingly saccharine pop structures.
The band was notorious for staging organized acts of violence and
destruction, burning cars and sometimes buildings in the name of
chaos. When the end came, their bodies were found locked inside a
limousine they had set on fire. The license plate read “HEY U”.
TAOHAUS
Deep in the heart of Germany's Black Forest existed a monastery for
radical rejected architects called Taohaus. Here a whole new aesthetic
was practiced as daily meditation, marrying the functionality of
western modernism and the simplicity of eastern Taoism with the Self
as a blueprint. The music in their worship services (conducted from
within a rotting tree), exemplified this stripped down simplicity, and “Receive” became a mantra for all those wishing to clear their minds
and cast a light on their shadows. When the world ended, a bolt of
lightening struck the rotting tree temple, and Taohaus was incinerated
instantly.
GOLOKA
In the late 1960s Mumbai, the word Bollywood was synonymous with
Goloka. The sisters Latara Mangareshkar and Rasha Bahsel were the
voices of over 900 bollywood film soundtracks, often referred to as “the jewels on the crown of Indian cinema”. But unfortunately film
technology in India at the time still relied on the use of a nitrate
base, which was highly flammable. While attending the premiere of
their largest production to date, the very last frame of the film got
stuck in the projector bulb and caught fire. The sisters died
tragically of smoke suffocation, marking the end of an era.
BLACK ELK SPEAKS
Mysterious lights in the sky were the first signs that transmissions
from beyond were being sent to residents of the Oglala Sioux
reservation. Some thought they were the spirit of Black Elk himself,
others thought they were something more sinister. A few of the chief
tribesman would sit in the field and listen to the lights for days on
end, and often return with new songs for their people. The recordings
were picked up by an Austrian ethnomusicologist who published them
collectively as “Black Elk Speaks”. Horrified that the voice of their
light was recorded and being distributed against their will, the
Oglala asked the lights what they should do next. They knew the end
was coming. The lights instructed them to disassemble their tipis and
use them to build the largest fire they could and throw themselves
into it, merging with the light and burning away all their sinful
reactions. “Fire Sacrifice” was the last song transmission they
received.
HYPARXIA
Most children growing up in the Now Age era remember singing “Welcome
to the Now Age” in school. It was the educational sing along to the
Now Age manifesto, and the score of a generation of Utopic Youth. What
most children didn't know though is that the brains behind their
beloved childhood anthem were actually the products of the first ever
experiment in creating a computer generated band. Combed from decades
worth of soft rock albums and refined through countless polls of what
people denoted as “pleasant listening”, Hyparxia was created as an
effort to translate utopia into music; that is, a band comprised of
all harmony (no dissonance), and only pleasing combinations of frequencies and tones. The utopian dream ended when the computer
crashed in the Great Collapse of 2012.
THE METAPHYSIXXX
Kris and Katya traded basketballs for mirrorballs when they went from
being WNBA stars to dancercise divas. After a failed career in the
sports arena due to drug overdoses, they became pioneers of “ecstatic
exercise”, which constituted combining exercise routines with high
doses of MDMA and codeine. They gained a small following conducting
dancercise workouts at their neighborhood YMCA supplying significant
doses of MDMA in the water. When they heard the world was about to
end, they took all the ecstasy they had and jumped on the treadmill,
running until they collapsed.
MOTEL MEMORY
Groomed from an early age to be the next Miss Americas, Kim and Tina
first discovered their singing talent while competing against each
other in a song competition at the Oklahoma City county wide beauty
pageant. They may have lost the Miss America title, but they gained a
musical partnership that would last a lifetime, winning them 7 Grammy
nominations and 3 Platinum records. “We Will Fall in Love Again” held
#1 at the Billboard Charts for 9 months. The initial success came at a
tragic price for Kim and Tina, who both suffered brutally from abusive
relationships during that time, culminating in a dramatic standoff in
a Motel 6 parking lot where Tina's fiancee forced them both to shoot
each other at gunpoint while holding up a mirror. The date was
December 21st, 2012.