‘Stomp The Devil’ by The Mortal Prophets | EP Premiere
Today, The Mortal Prophets (John Beckmann) share their anticipated debut EP, ‘Stomp the Devil’. The band’s brand new debut EP was produced by David Sisko and features collaborations with Gary Lucas (Captain Beefheart).
Said Beckmann of their brand new EP, “With this first EP ‘Stomp The Devil’, I was looking for songs that had a timeless quality, that were deep and soul-wrenching, yet would be possibly open enough to a new interpretation. I distinctly remember the effect of the compilation album – ‘American Primitive, Vol. 1: Raw Pre-War Gospel 1926-36’. Had on me when I first heard it. It’s 77-minutes of gut-bucket, early gospel from the collections of Gayle Dean Wardlow and John Fahey. I wanted to tap into that early sound but create a new landscape that was a collision with German Electronica, with groups like Can, NEU!, Harmonia and Cluster, with a No-Wave electronic edge. You can think about the project in this way: In his introduction to, ‘The Raw and the Cooked’ (1964) French anthropologist Lévi-Strauss writes of his confidence that “certain categorical opposites drawn from everyday experience with the most basic sorts of things — e.g. “raw” and “cooked”, “fresh” and “rotten”, “moist” and “parched”, and others — can serve a people as conceptual tools for the formation of abstract notions and for combining these into propositions, or as the surrealist André Breton discovered the singular phrase that became foundational to the surrealist doctrine of objective chance: ‘as beautiful as the chance encounter of a sewing machine and an umbrella on an operating table”.
John Beckmann and his evolving band of genre bending roustabouts dig deep into America’s primal scream. Beckmann channels pre-war blues legends such as Lead Belly, Blind Willie Nelson, Charley Patton, Robert Johnson, via the experimental ethos of German Electronica, groups such as Neu!, Cluster, Harmonia, Brian Eno, David Bowie and Suicide.
The Mortal Prophets’ forthcoming debut LP is out later this year.
The Mortal Prophets Official Website / Instagram / YouTube / SoundCloud
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