This mixtape is an improvised hour using only vinyl records. I picked out the records I really like and did not prepare a structured playlist. 

The tracks were selected very spontaneously in the moment, and I kept changing my mind, which made the transitions quite stressful! However, it turned out quite fun and I learned a lot. For the next mixtape, I want to experiment with a different approach.

Share the mixtape if you like it and leave an honest comment if you feel like it!

(The mixtape is a WAV-file recorded with a Tascam DR-05X)

A Normal Day at the Office! / Vinyl Mixtape by Smashana

In this episode, Kirk and Paul visit the great Commonwealth of Massachusetts to talk about mostly Boston bands but one or two others from elsewhere in the Bay State.

Music Raygun

162: Massachusetts

“Ik ken jouw soort. Je houdt van seks maar alleen als je een erectie hebt. In tijgerbalsem gedoopte speerpunten
categoriseer je als hartverwarmend. En ja o ja, men verwijt je hardvochtigheid maar toen diana stierf was je de eerste om uien te pellen tot het huilde.” Andy Fierens dicht licht in een muzikaal bed met #JoopVisser #KeesTorn #Roland #AlJarreau #RonaldGoedemondt #RaymondVanHetGroenewoud #TotoCutugno #JacksonBrowne #Santana #JJCale #DireStraits #BruceSpringsteen #JonathanRichman #MathildeSanting #ZjefVanuytsel #Mira #HansDeBooij #JanDeWilde #FrankBoeijen #ChetBaker #TootsThielemans #Sofie&SoFour #FreddyBirsetJanMuesQuartet #TheRollingStones #AlainMazijn

DE DRUPPEL

druppel 215 13 oktober 24

MUSICIANS
John Beckmann: all music, lyrics, and production
Lawson Mars: vocals and backing vocals
Lux Astralis, New York: recording studio

LYRICS
Burn it, yea, turn it up,
Burn it, yea, burn it up,

Let the music take you,
Where ya wanna go,
Let the music take you,
Where ya wanna go,

Turn it, yea, turn it up,
Burn it, yea, burn it up,
Feel the bass, 
Feel that beat, 

Burn it, yea, turn it up,
Burn it, yea, burn it up,

Let the music take you,
Where ya wanna go,
Burn it, yea, turn it up,
Burn it, yea, burn it up,

Turn it, yea, turn it up,
Burn it, yea, burn it up,

Feel the bass, 
Feel that beat, 
Can you feel my heat?
Can you feel our heat?

CAN YOU FEEL OUR HEAT?

MUSICIANS
John Beckmann: all music, lyrics, and production
Lawson Mars: vocals, and backing vocals
Lux Astralis, New York: recording studio

LYRICS
What do you say when the heartache sets in and night keeps stretching on although
Breath soft words drift through the lamplight, then befo it blooms in the sun.
Oh, love, such tender divide, where hope flows full and wide.
Tide be guide for heartache, will throw that nave in and drown.
Every mile between us glows, painted as embers on the snow.
Oh, love, such tender divide, where hope flows full and wide.
Oh, love, defiance day disguise, and finds the light.

A TENDER DIVIDE

MUSICIANS
John Beckmann: all music, lyrics, and production
Tanner McGraw: vocals and backing vocals
Lawson Mars: backing vocals
Lux Astralis, New York: recording studio 

LYRICS
You stood by me
when no one did
Past, I know, didn't say much
Still, I got it
It's just us, no big stage
No perfect lines, no spotlight fame
But when you laugh
I lose the world
It's just us
And that's enough
You don't try hard to impress
Still, somehow you do it best
And I still show up
It's just us, no big stage
No perfect lines, no spotlight fame
But when you laugh
I lose the world
It's just us
And that's enough

IT’S JUST US

MUSICIANS
John Beckmann: all music, lyrics, and production
Tanner McGraw: vocals and backing vocals
Lawson Mars: backing vocals
Lux Astralis, New York: recording studio 

LYRICS
Mirror on the wall, it's a little bit wild.
Lipstick tube with a wicked smile.
Cherry red, like a secret spell.
It looks like magic, can you tell?
My heart's doing cartwheels,
in this drugstore light.
I press my lips, I feel something new.
Like I'm glowing inside.
Cherry shine, I crossed that line.
One swipe, I'm walking sky high.
Blush bloom, it's my debut.
In this shade, I'm someone new.
Cherry shine.
Cherry shine.
I blow a kiss to the world outside.
Lip print on my soda, and I don't hide.
A little color, a little brave.
Something sweet I get to save.
Cherry shine, I crossed that line.
One swipe, I'm walking sky high.
Blush bloom, it's my debut.
In this shade, I'm someone new.
Cherry shine.
Cherry shine.
Just a girl
in Cherry Shine.
Stepping out into a time.

CHERRY SHINE

MUSICIANS
John Beckmann: all music, lyrics, and production
Tanner McGraw: vocals and backing vocals
Lawson Mars: backing vocals
Lux Astralis, New York: recording studio 

LYRICS
You said “forever” with sunscreen in your eyes
I laughed, lit a sparkler, and watched it die
Poolside promises, cherry-stained lies
Another summer love, deep-fried

Endless July, yeah, we’re such a cliché
Kissing like we mean it, then drifting away
Plastic hearts in a heatwave high—
A perfect fake in endless July

Told the moon all our secrets, then forgot
Your name tastes better when it’s not
Slow-dancing with nowhere to be
You said “this is real”… ironically

Endless July, yeah, we’re such a cliché
Kissing like we mean it, then drifting away
Plastic hearts in a heatwave high—
A perfect fake in endless July

Maybe we’ll mean it next time
Or maybe just lie…
Like always
In endless July

ENDLESS JULY

MUSICIANS
John Beckmann: all music, lyrics, and production
Tanner McGraw: vocals and backing vocals
Lawson Mars: backing vocals
Lux Astralis, New York: recording studio

LYRICS
I’d really like to see you,
I’d really like to see you,
One of these days,
One of these days...

One of these days,
We’ll meet there,
Where the crossroads
Kiss the sky,
Too bold to say goodbye,
Too shy to say I love you.

One of these days, I’ll find you,
Through the cracks of time’s refrain,
In the echoes of old laughter,
That washes away the pain.

The wind will whisper secrets,
The stars will light our way,
And all the words unspoken,
We'll have a fire gently burning.

One of these days, we’ll meet there,
On roads the restless paved,
Where the wild wind knows our names,
And the stars write their confessions.

I’d really like to see you,
I’d really like to see you,
One of these days,
One of these days...

ONE OF THESE DAYS (Alternate Version)

MUSICIANS
John Beckmann: all music, lyrics, and production
Lawson Mars: vocals
Tanner McGraw: backing vocals
Lux Astralis, New York: recording studio

LYRICS
It was the best of times, or so we said
Raspberry lips and a half-made bed
You sipped White Claw like it was wine
Told me I was yours — “for now” was implied

You were my high, you were my mess
Glitter tears and your mom’s red dress
Velvet lies in borrowed lines
The best of times, the worst of times

We kissed like films we barely knew
Your playlist skipped right when I said “I do”
You wore my hoodie, I lost my pride
Guess love’s just branding, redefined

You were my sky, you were my drain
A White Claw toast in the summer rain
Still hurts to laugh, but it ages fine
The best of times, the worst of times

So here’s to us — a TikTok blur
A broken song, a midnight slur
One more sip, one more decline
The best of times, the worst of times

THE BEST OF TIMES

Each episode of Music Raygun explores a different musical artist, topic or concept. Hosts Paul Ciampanelli and Kirk Pynchon watch and discuss related music videos, TV clips, commercials, interviews and other pop-culture ephemera on YouTube.

Smashana is a Norwegian artist based in Berlin. Since she began DJing and producing music in 2019, she has been an active presence in both the Oslo and Berlin electronic scenes, performing at notable venues such as Watergate, Anomalie Art Club, RE:MISE, Renate Berlin, Oxi Club, ÆDEN, and The Villa Dancing in Oslo, among others.

Her music—mostly self-released—moves across diverse sonic landscapes, blending genres with a deeply personal and intuitive touch. Smashana is driven by a desire to create and perform in ways that feel alive and unpredictable, tuning into the energy of each space and audience. She listens closely to the present moment, allowing it to guide her movements, sounds, and emotions—an interplay between inner rhythm and shared experience.


Contact: 
sma.shana096@gmail.com

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.

satire, parodie, sit down comedy en poëzie: radio prostaat, waar het om gaat:  Vlaamse wereldradio, voor de rijpere luisteraar.
Alain Mazijn (Oostende 1960) is mede aanstichter van radio stad in Antwerpen in 1981.
40 jaar maakt hij geen radio meer.
Als jonge cabaretier is hij samen met Hans de Booij het muziektheaterduo CIRCUS STUPIDO.
Als horecaman start hij in Antwerpen tussen 1980 en 1991 de stadskroeg, het swingcafé en grand café salto mortale.
Als festivalpromotor van het Nederlandstalige lied organiseert hij tussen 1988 en 2007 het festival pop Vlaanderen op 10 en 11 juli op de groenplaats in Antwerpen.
Vanaf 2007 maakt hij muziek en teksttheaterproducties voor het productiehuis BLAUW VZW, muziektheater.be
In het coronajaar 21 start hij radio prostaat op:
de Vlaamse wereldradio voor de rijpere luisteraar.
DE DRUPPEL is zijn wekelijkse radioshow met chanson, jazz, satire, parodie, sit-downcomedy en poëzie. De rest volgt. ;)

New tracks tagged #jonathanrichman