Time has no meaning when listening to Eric Angelo Bessel’s new album Visitation. It’s music to accompany footage of interstellar space travel or undersea footage of strange wonders lurking in the inky blackness in the deepest parts of our oceans. It’s no surprise then that Connecticut-born Bessel is a visual artist as well as a musician. He is also one half of the group Lore City with his wife Laura Mariposa Williams.
This is the music of the spheres and, as the listener, we become like SETI, scanning the galaxy for signs of life. The chord progressions, such as they are, are deliciously glacial and, in the way that high-speed photograph captures fast moving things to slow them down, Bessel’s camera captures slow moving things and slows them down even more. Only a few tracks give more to grip onto such as ‘Secret Lake’ with its rotating bell sounds bouncing around and never quite settling or resolving, ‘Less Red’ which has a simple but super-tuneful motif that slides in and out of the mist of synthesiser washes, and ‘Kindly Rewind’ which sounds like time being reversed.
Listening to Visitation means giving yourself over to it and letting it carry you away in its soporific embrace and if you read my review of PAL’s Leisure Forever these two albums are perfect sonic twins and would easily bliss out your Sunday, especially if you are someone who likes to spend half the day luxuriating in the bath. I’ll give the final word to the text that is included on the Bandcamp page; a set of words that, like the music, is free-floating and conveys an impressionistic not explicit meaning.
“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.”
Eric Angelo Bessel / Lore City socials: Twitter | YouTube | Bandcamp | Website
Review by Paul F Cook
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