One of the many things that I admire about John Beckmann is that he is an artist in the truest sense of the word. Many musicians, I would suspect, develop a sound in their early days and are content to merely repeat and refine it through various iterations throughout their career. But isn’t that a case of the tail wagging the dog? Isn’t that a bit like a painter only painting seascapes because he happens to be good with the color blue?
No, as Mortal Prophets, Beckmann instead seems to decide on his sonic destination first, having the concept and the vision, and only then work out how to get there, rather than just going where the path takes him. Guitarworks II is the sound of that sonic adventure at work.
A pre-Columbian archaeological site is the inspiration for each piece on _Guitarworks II_— Chaco Canyon, Cahokia Mounds, Serpent Mound, Angel Mounds. These 16 ambient, instrumental tracks guide us through an atlas of places heavy with the weight of history hanging over them.
The music plays like a series of small, deliberate ceremonies, sonic rituals that draw us closer to that past, lifting the veil of time and morphing mythology into sonic reality. Understated yet rich, spacious and intriguing, these weaves of chiming guitars and drifting atmospheres, create a new musical world, less a collection of songs in the usual sense, more a portal to the what was and the what if, a set of tonal waypoints leading you through landscapes that exist both in the real world and in the realm of the imagination.
Albums take up physical, or at least digital, space, songs have a defined duration, but the music found here feels more like the sounds of a parallel dimension oozing through the fabric of reality into our world, perhaps the embodiment of an earlier time, maybe a different timeline altogether, a version and vision of the past that only exists within this music.
That’s the great thing about music: it often asks more questions than provides answers. I wouldn’t want it any other way.
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