The Thousands

Prince Rama hearts Sun Araw. Sun Araw hearts Prince Rama. The two bands are currently on tour together sound-tracking the summer of 2012. If you remember it, you weren’t there. Taraka Larson from Prince Rama has been kind enough to spare some time from Hare Krishna chanting to review Sun Araw’s latest album. Thanks, Taraka! We owe you a happy one.

Taraka Larson: If architecture is frozen music, then Ancient Romans is a sonic testament to the inverse; that music is a process of slowly unfreezing architecture.

There is a melting, a churning, a trans-mutating of stone to song, of song to sand, of sand to dust, of dust to ashes, of ashes to fire, of fire to smoke, and smoke to sunlight. At times, the clanging drums chisel away at the limestone slabs, the features of an unknown beloved slowly taking form in the petrified world of immortality. At other times, organs wash over the stonework, smoothing over any features that cling to identification, polishing their surfaces clean ’til they shine with a brilliance only the sun could inhabit.

The camera lense is tilted straight into the sunbeam, and each song draws the bright burning sphere closer and closer into focus. Look now and behold the eternal light but be blinded forever. Look away and be doomed to see only a stadium full of shadows. The choice is yours, and Ancient Romans does not presume to carry the answer. The needle passes over the record as the sun passes over the temple’s oculus, igniting the interior in luminous resonance. Statues melt into song. Columns melt into golden silence. The record spins on the sacrificial altar, a lost lense.