Former Prince Rama frontwoman Taraka announces debut solo LP & shares “Psychocastle” video

Welcome to Paradise Lost was conceived while Taraka (pronounced like maraca) was living in solitary confinement in a hot Texas gallery with a live serpent in an attempt to return to a pre-internet Eden. She was without a band, without a label, without a future, and had vowed never to make music again. Disenchanted with the world, she sat in her trashed simulated Garden of Eden smoking mapacho and listening to old school punk, grunge, and obscure psych records that excited her as a teenager in a small redneck town, learning to skateboard and discovering her first power chord.

One night she picked up an electric guitar and hit record. The songs started pouring out– pep rallies for total failure, hymns to binary code, love songs to walls– most recorded in one take, sometimes as she was channeling them in order to capture that primordial electricity of creation, a feeling of “making out under the bleachers with infinity.” Her pals Ryan Sciaino (Spank Rock, Prince Rama, Win Win) and Tim Koh (Gang Gang Dance, Conan Mockasin, Haunted Graffiti)  later helped flesh them out, pimp them up, and eventually Welcome to Paradise Lost took form like the intricate layers of a fucked up Bosch painting, or collaged jingles for a lost 1970s cult children’s TV show that split off via the mandela effect.

Taraka realized perhaps paradise is nothing but another empty societal construction– a mirage-like prison of perfection– and the moment it is lost, we are left with the glow of some inner forgotten freedom. The kind of freedom once found in the piss puddles of a Beatles concert or the face of Buddha winking inside the mud of a fossilized Dr. Martens footprint in an abandoned mosh pit. There is a playfulness here, but a lurking poetry as well. Some of the first lines of the album begin with the fall of humankind:  “I ate forbidden fruits and with their seeds I grew a silhouette…” and maybe this is where the magic of Welcome to Paradise Lost truly begins; not some shallow resurrection of past nostalgia, but a dangerous and sometimes absurd spiritual quest for freedom, rebellion, and that awkwardly honest place within us all that defies logic and authority so urgently needed right now.

Press photos and video by Matthew Hoffman