www.mortalprophets.com

“Anyone having trouble getting to, or staying, asleep should proceed with caution when playing The Mortal Prophets’ debut album around bedtime. The demonic intentions implied by the album’s name and defined by John Beckmann … coil each selection in menacing directions, bringing fresh, often frightening twists to these standards. Be aware - when you engulf yourself in these riveting, uncompromising performances. They are not for the squeamish.”
- American Songwriter

The Mortal Prophets: John Beckmann’s Cinematic Descent Into the Electric Psyche

In the sprawling constellation of modern music, The Mortal Prophets occupy a shadowed corner—less a “band” in the traditional sense than a living, breathing séance conducted by John Beckmann. Across a series of albums, Beckmann has been excavating the strata of Americana, dream pop, blues, and avant-garde minimalism, folding them into a fever-dream narrative that feels like it was beamed from a late-night pirate radio station somewhere between the Mississippi Delta and the outer rings of Saturn. 

Beckmann, who founded New York’s Axis Mundi Design before turning his obsessive creative drive toward music, approaches songwriting like a visual architect—each track a space you inhabit rather than simply hear. His arrangements have the tension of architectural blueprints: precision married to instinct, steel and stone softened by ambient light. In GUITARWORKS II, the most recent installment in a sprawling instrumental odyssey, guitar tones unspool like distant telegraph wires, calling to mind Robert Fripp’s collaborations with Brian Eno, or the glacial drift of Cluster’s experimental soundscapes. It’s profoundly cinematic, yet never ornamental.

If Beckmann’s earlier releases (Stomp The Devil, Me and The Devil, Dealey Plaza Blues) reached back into mythic Americana—the open road, outlaw ballads, acid-washed folk visions—his more recent work tilts toward the abstract, replacing narrative with mood. This is music that understands how memory works: fractured, impressionistic, prone to bleed between truth and hallucination. The Mortal Prophets operate in that liminal space where you’re not sure if you’re dreaming, or just remembering wrong. 

Vocally, when Beckmann steps to the mic, it’s with a delivery equal parts Leonard Cohen confession and Bowie-esque theater—half-smirk, half-sermon. Lyrically, he trades in arcane symbols and sly allusions: 19th-century mystics rub shoulders with dive-bar drifters, and romantic longing flickers like neon through a rain-soaked windshield. He’s not afraid of obliqueness; in fact, he seems to revel in it. Where many contemporary songwriters flatten their work into algorithm-friendly hooks, Beckmann builds labyrinths. 

Part of The Mortal Prophets’ magnetism lies in its refusal to settle. One album might summon the humid ghost-blues of Junior Kimbrough refracted through a loop pedal; the next might drift into synth-heavy dream pop worthy of an early-’90s 4AD release. Beckmann’s collaborators—rotating players drawn from both avant-garde and roots backgrounds—expand that sonic palette, giving the project an almost shapeshifting quality. 
In a cultural moment where genre boundaries are largely performative, Beckmann treats them as haunted ruins worth spelunking through. His songs feel like dispatches from parallel histories of American music—histories where psychedelia never died, where blues never got sanitized, and where experimentalism didn’t have to hide in academic halls. 

The Mortal Prophets may never break into the Billboard mainstream, but that’s hardly the point. Their appeal is in the slow burn, the intimacy of discovery. Beckmann’s work isn’t built for quick consumption; it’s built for listeners willing to linger, to decode, to wander down the long corridors he constructs. In an era obsessed with speed and surface, The Mortal Prophets offer the opposite: a deep dive into the echo chamber of the self, scored by a man who seems to know exactly how to make the walls sing.

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