“A floor can turn into a type of door to pass through, and once on the other side, it’s no longer a floor, but a ceiling of another room. Between two spaces suspended, somehow both above and below, knowing you do not belong in this passageway. Not like this. The aching knee of memory twinges at a red light, idly, recounting that you’re here but not to forget there. The different ways things can go are always just on the other side of how it went.”
Eric Angelo Bessel, American-German visual artist and musician, continues his work of merging atmosphere with vision. Based in Portland, he conjures pieces that feel like installations, collapsing between cinema and séance. His latest offering, Scavengers, is the first single from his upcoming album Mirror at Night, releasing October 31 via Lore City Music.
“Scavengers is an homage to mind coalescence and superorganisms trying their hands at constructing lo-fi string ensembles echoing through the night, and in reverse, whenever it suits them,” Bessel explains. The music aligns with this idea: sounds moving as if guided by a collective instinct, string textures bending in and out of earshot, tones echoing with ghostlike persistence. It carries the air of ritual, performed by unseen participants in some deserted hall.
The ambient effect is eerie, dreamlike, unsettling. It feels like the mirage of a carnival that disappears the moment you arrive, or a ghost vanishing just as you approach its grave. The music is disjointed, bizarre, difficult to experience without visions forcing themselves into the mind. Cinematic, strange, compelling. Scavengers carries the experimental instincts of Delia Derbyshire and Daphne Oram, with hints of Vic Mizzy’s eccentric charm and Bruce Haack’s playful circuitry. It draws on the BBC Radiophonic tradition, summoning phantoms of broadcast-era ambience, while a wandering Mellotron line sketches visions that bloom in the imagination.
With Scavengers, the portal opens. The piece does not close so much as dissolve, offering entry into a cinema of the unreal. By October’s end, Mirror at Night will reveal itself as a collection of apparitions—twelve mirrors in which memory and imagination collapse into one surface.
Listen to “Scavengers” below:
Bessel’s work has always been tied to image. He studied photography at Syracuse University (2000–2004), then the School of Visual Arts’ Photography, Video and Related Media Graduate Program (2005–2006). His photography has appeared in Collector’s Guide to New Art Photography Vol. 2 from Humble Arts Foundation in 2010, and his first monograph, Archive {2005–2010}, was released by Conveyor in 2011. These projects share his obsession with framing transient atmospheres and binding them to physical form.
His music career began with Visitation in 2023, his debut on Lore City Music. With Mirror at Night, the label’s fifth release and Bessel’s second solo record, he expands that vision further. Lo-fi ensembles, spectral strings, and vintage synthesizers create a language of distortion and reverie. Twelve instrumental works form its body; twelve glimpses into what he calls an “in-between realm.” Past, present, and future dissolve into a still obsidian surface, where outlines blur and reassemble. The album revisits the nostalgic timbre of Mellotrons and the multi-voiced layers of Alesis synths, devices that give the music both a retro pulse and a spectral glow.
These are vignettes rather than songs, fragments that provoke imagery: artificial clouds dispersing, waters glowing with phantom light, carnival rides turning in silence before vanishing.
Listen to Scavengers below and pre-order Mirror At Night here.
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