Visual artist and musician Eric Angelo Bessel, currently resides and works in Portland, Oregon. Bessel and his wife Laura Mariposa Williams co-founded the experimental art rock band Lore City, and have put out four albums and an EP.
Bessel's first solo album, Visitation, is scheduled to be released on April 21st, 2023. Visitation is an atmospheric endeavor through psychedelic, gothic, and ambient themes made up of eight instrumental pieces. It is the fourth album to be released under the Lore City Music imprint, and presents a melancholic sound centered on an instrumental base of mellotron and ebowed guitar.
First reveal off the new album is Secret Lake, a profoundly atmospheric track that makes impeccable use of its instrumentation and conjures a domineering atmosphere with an obvious cinematic flair.
Bessel shares: “Secret Lake’s marshy voyage reveals a lo-fi chamber orchestra and choir before slinking beneath the lily pads.”
Eric Angelo Bessel's artist statement: "Looking up from underneath, there is a watery peace. A settling as the light sifts downward, refracting the sights above, now wavering into pieces of the world as it was. An accordion of a sigh releasing its weight forever. Little snow globes of living. A tin soldier army marches towards us from an unknown distance. Someday their armory will glint in the sun upon the hill, but it is not today. And the expanse is staged. Hands arbitrarily moving about in space. To grasp, to reach for atoms nodding, agreeing to be solidity. To suspend the vibration of being. A nostalgia just out of reach. Wrapped with blankets in the other room, salt lamp glowing, a little less red. To think we could ever look back on these times with such favor. A kindness, bending nearer."
ZR