Dystopian Pizza

Prince Rama are two sisters from Brooklyn (Taraka and Nimai Lawson), who put cosmology, tantric nudity and glitter onto almost everything they can get their hands on. They make electronic music with such a manically garish pop sensibility that it'd actually be popular as hell if they didn't mix it in with a heap of non-consumer friendly content such as ziggurats, utopia/dystopia theory and academic analysis and performance art, which, let's face it, is probably too much intellectual heavy-lifting for radio airplay. But that's also what makes them the fucking greatest.

In August, Taraka was bitten by a rabid raccoon in New York City's central park. She described the raccoon to The Gothamist as “having no centre of gravity”, a description you could describe as Rama-esque. The Music asks about her weekend instead. “I'm chilling here with my cat, I just got back from a trip upstate,” Taraka shares. “I was gone for the weekend, apple-picking. It's the first weekend of fall here, so what we do when it reaches fall is go out apple-picking. Do apples even grow in Australia?”

Prince Rama recently posted on their Facebook about a pizza party, with heaps of pictures of trendy people, so we ask Lawson how that went too. “We did this pizza DJ set, where we got basically 20 songs that kind of have something to do with fun topical pizza toppings. It had to be pretty concrete, like, Mean Mr Mustard, or something, so then you go, 'Okay, I can visualise a mustard pizza.' Or something a little more abstract, like, November Rain by Guns N' Roses, which, you know, I think about November Rain being a really sad-looking thanksgiving dinner on top of a pizza,” Lawson posits enigmatically. “But, yeah! So we gathered 20 songs of this nature and we got these metal plates, and we got a friend of ours who got a record cutter to cut the sounds into the plates, basically making a mold of the record. Instead of pressing lacquer into the record player, we started pressing pizza dough. And we're like, 'We're gonna do a pizza DJ set, where we're just DJing records made out of pizza',” she explains.

“So that's what we did, and it sounded totally insane, like, we'd just cracked open a pizza-fossil record. We did that last week. We kind of built installation stuff too, round at a gallery in New York. We created this whole pizza universe down there.”

Okay, so Prince Rama might seem a totem-pole of smug Brooklyn urbanite eccentricity, but what distinguishes the Lawson sisters is that despite being tantric-chanting mystical pop culture hyenas, they have an infectiously positive attitude about everything they do. In essence, the Lawson sisters don't really say no to batshit ideas or impulses, which in an ultra-managed, cynically Google-keyword cultural era is really positive.

In their most recent record, Top Ten Hits Of The End Of The World, they roleplayed ten different bands on an end of the world greatest hits compilation; Taraka has published a dozen manifestos on her website, spanning geometry, theology, philosophy, semantics, and mathematics; Nimai writes a relationship advice column for women for MTV, which talks about positivity and being cool and rising above needing a man through meditation.

Not all of it makes much sense, but it's still really compelling in the same way a good chemtrail truth YouTube diary is, and Lawson seems half in on the joke – they basically go for an Miley Cyrus meets Klaus Nomi meets Alistair Crowley vibe, and absurdity comes with that terrain.

“We flew out to Toronto, like, literally a few hours later,” Taraka says of the pair's movements just after their pizza disco, “and we went to the premiere of this film we were both in where we lived out on this commune in the coast of Estonia last summer – it was this island between Estonia and Finland – to make this film that an old film professor of mine made that go into the Toronto Film Festival. So it was really interesting to see that. We were both just part of the commune, we didn't know what the movie was going to be like. We assumed like a weird kind of dystopian reality show. There's nudity involved. That was fun.”

When quizzed about her plans for the more immediate future, Taraka shares: “I've got another manifesto about pop music and the apocalypse. You can't put everything into music. I know people ask, like, 'How do you do the art? You do writing, you do cooking, you do relationship advice columns… what's up with you guys?' But for us it's like none of it is really separate from the music. For us, writing is visual music.” And as for her goal during their upcoming national tour of Australia? “I just want to learn to be the best bogan I can be.”