BIO
Taraka Larson was born on Beethoven’s birthday. Raised in ashrams, she lived on black metal utopian communes, performed on beds, and lectured from pools of fake blood. An elusive poet, psychopomp, and writer of post-internet manifestos, Larson’s work transcends genres, evading categorization at every turn. As front-woman of Prince Rama, she guided the band through a genre-defying evolution, blurring the boundaries between rock, performance art, and conceptual experimentation. Signed by Animal Collective, the sister duo has become a cult phenomenon over the years, and perhaps the only band in rock history capable of inciting mosh pits while paradoxically reaching #3 on the Billboard New Age charts.
Larson’s interdisciplinary practice traverses the sonic and the visual with equal intensity, challenging the fabric of both. Her works have been exhibited internationally at institutions such as the Whitney Museum of Art, the Indianapolis Museum of Contemporary Art, CPH: DOX Film Festival, and MoMA PS1’s VW Dome.
Her latest solo album, Welcome to Paradise Lost, marks a visceral departure toward “post-edenic-grunge.” Written in isolation alongside a Sonoran Gopher Snake in a Texas gallery built out to simultaneously simulate a post-apocalyptic Garden of Eden and her teenage bedroom, the album embodies a world in flux—both unraveling and being reborn. Raw, primal, and unapologetic it offers a tender soundtrack to our disillusioned moment. In protest of the post-covid music industry, Larson declared the rock concert to be dead and kitsch and began performing exclusively from her bed, meticulously recreating her bedroom onstage—a surreal and subversive gesture that questions the meta-nature of the rock concert itself.
Now based in New York, Larson is submerged in working on a new record and poetry book. She is also the founder of the “Rage Peace Mixtape Party”, a community-driven project that manifests as spontaneous, live communal mixtape experiments—“happenings”— that explore the mixtape as a mystical vessel for post-digital ritual, collective catharsis, and a microcosm of utopian possibility.