GUITARWORKS II is Mortal Prophets’ Album Out Now
Good Day Noir Family,
With GUITARWORKS II, John Beckmann—under his Mortal Prophets banner—once again proves that his work exists in a space where music is not merely entertainment, but a vessel for exploration.
GUITARWORKS II is Mortal Prophets’ Album Out Now
Every track title feels like an entry in an ancient atlas, each hinting at a place, a story, or a fragment of history.
The attention to detail is evident—not just in the conceptual framing, but in the tonal colors and textures carefully chosen for each piece. This is instrumental music with intention, built to evoke images, places, and emotions without a single lyric.
The journey begins with Chaco Canyon, a dreamlike drift of chiming guitar notes and airy reverb, creating a sensation of traveling through a boundless, star-flecked expanse. The follow-up, Cahokia Mounds, grounds the listener with a more nostalgic, harmonious arpeggio—still spacious, yet intimate, like watching the sun set over ancient stone.
Bighorn Medicine Wheel tilts toward experimentation, using unexpected tonal shifts that feel like glimmers on a distant horizon—flashes of light in the dark. Chimney Rock introduces a darker, more mysterious atmosphere. Its gradual build feels like a slow, hypnotic pull, carrying the listener as gently and unpredictably as a leaf on the wind.
With Wupatki, Beckmann leans into electronic textures, conjuring the sensation of intercepted radio waves from a distant future—an alien transmission searching for connection. Petroglyph becomes a study in sonic tension, layering shifting rhythms and ghostly motifs that appear and dissolve, like memories fading before you can hold onto them.
The closing track, Angel Mounds, is perhaps the most striking synthesis of Beckmann’s approach—swampy Americana guitar tones refracted through a sci-fi prism. It’s as if a cosmic bluesman were playing to a campfire on a distant world.
GUITARWORKS II is a map to imagined places, a meditation on sound as both memory and discovery.
GUITARWORKS II is Mortal Prophets’ Album Out Now!
Transcendent!
Based in New York, The Mortal Prophets is the shape-shifting musical project of artist and producer John Beckmann, known for his genre-blurring explorations of sound and atmosphere.
The album blends American transcendentalist ideas from Thoreau and Emerson with the legacy of ambient pioneers like Robert Fripp, Jon DeRosa, and Brian Eno. Inspired in part by Eno’s collaborations with Cluster, it channels sparse, drifting, and emotionally resonant soundscapes, reimagined through Beckmann’s electric guitar.Each track on GUITARWORKS II is named after a pre-Columbian archaeological site—Chaco Canyon, Cahokia Mounds, Serpent Mound, Angel Mounds, and more—forming a kind of sonic cartography of sacred, forgotten places.
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About Edgar Allan Poets
Edgar Allan Poets is a noir rock band built on the literary universe of Edgar Allan Poe. For over a decade the band has explored Poe's psychology, Gothic aesthetics, Victorian darkness, and his influence on modern culture — through music, writing, and this archive. Their album 555 and store collections translate Poe's darkest visions into sound and design. Read more about the band →
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