Last month we introduced Visitation, the debut solo album by Eric Angelo Bessel coming later this spring on Lore City Music. Having grown to know Bessel’s work as part of Portland, Oregon duo Lore City, we’ve come to recognise the way he he plays with our understandings of reality, presenting a version of physical existence which bends toward the esoteric. Visitation continues such a style by drawing on ambient, gothic and psychedelic influences, leading to a record which might originate from some grounding in the physical world yet ultimately pushes through to another plane entirely.
“Single ‘Secret Lake’ invites us into the world of the record,” as we described in a preview. “Its slack drift like some sitting bogland but soon deepening into something more. A depth alluring in its own way, beautiful and strange in the manner unique to hidden spaces, allowing the listener to descend through its column while refusing to give anything away freely.” This intuitive yet opaque tone is indicative of Eric Angelo Bessel’s sound across Visitation—where the present moment is complicated by forces of nostalgia and expectation, made strange before we have even passed on through.
Latest single ‘Kindly Rewind’ offers another glimpse into this mood. A spacious soundscape loaded with the weight of reflection yet simmering with a certain foreboding too, the past and future weighing on the present as shadows, echoes emerging from within a granular fog. As Bessel describes, “’Kindly Rewind’ undulates with the hazy granular flutter of an old tape machine, dotted with sonar beacons, reversed splices, and echoes of an overdubbed orchestral choir.”