Mortal Prophets is the project of New York, USA-based prolific artist John Beckmann. It’s featured on our pages countless times before, and there seems to be no let up in his release schedule.
By Graeme Smith
His latest album, Supersonic, comes within months of the last release of his we’ve featured, The American Junkie Show. While that release was a short, devastating, to-the-point EP, Supersonic is a sprawling and ambitious fifteen-track effort. It sees John take his music to places previously unexplored right from the tribal, reggae-esque album opener, Gold Dust Dervish.
The album’s overall side is disco, but not as we know it. Instead, John pushes the genre into Avant Garde new directions be it the pulsating rhythms in Ultrasonic, the dusky majesty of Late Nights, the moodiness of title track Supersonic, or the vibrant electronica and shoegaze of Sidereal. There’s so much wonder on display, it’s tempting to mention it all, but I’ll contain myself.
Inspirationally it draws from the films Midnight Express and Blade Runner and, most importantly, the work of Giorgio Moroder. John describes the album as a “love letter” to the musical pioneer. “”Moroder was a magician of the machine age,” says Beckmann. “We wanted to channel that hypnotic pulse, but twist it—bend it through our filter of abstraction, emotion, and controlled chaos.”
I know no other artist who can so easily step into so many genres and make them sound new. You will never hear disco like the way Mortal Prophets is doing it.
Supersonic is out now via Lux Astralis Music. You can give it a listen below.