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# Eric Angelo Bessel :: Illusion of an Inland Ocean
- URL: https://www.hwaelmag.com/eric-angelo-bessel-illusion-of-an-inland-ocean/
- Published: 2026-10-25T15:00:27.000Z
- Updated: 2026-10-25T15:07:12.000Z
- Description: Ambient from a Mellotron, a field job in Oregon and the inland side of a coast.
- Author: Hwael Mag
- Tags: Album Reviews, 2026, Ambient

### Eric Angelo Bessel made music after work, following days spent on energy-efficiency outreach across Oregon. By his third solo album, the titles suggest a roadside notebook: “Cistern”, “Downed Power Line”, “Microplastics”.

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*Illusion of an Inland Ocean*, out on 30 October 2026 on Lore City Music, the label he runs with his wife Laura Mariposa Williams, collects eighteen tracks in just over sixty-seven minutes. It is his longest work, yet no piece runs longer than the five minutes and twelve seconds of the opener. The album grows by number: eighteen pieces spread across the four sides of the double LP.

[Illusion of an Inland Ocean by Eric Angelo Bessel](https://lorecity.bandcamp.com/album/illusion-of-an-inland-ocean?ref=hwaelmag.com) 

Bessel has said that almost every track he makes begins with the Mellotron’s cello sound: a recording decades old, stretched into a drone to which each later layer responds. Since he bought his first Mellotron in 2017, the guitar has gradually lost its central place. That cello carries its own temporal distance into the music, before any processing or overdubbing takes place.

The titles, by contrast, point towards precise objects and places: a cistern, an inground pool, a downed power line, a beach lit by artificial light. The landscape they suggest is crossed by infrastructure, labour and maintenance. Bessel’s photography, which supplies the covers of his own records, reflects the same attention to place. The ocean of the title can then be read as a presence imagined inside places that seem far from the sea.

LISTENING NOTES / 01 

01 02 03 04 

"Microplastics"

The sound sinks lower. Low frequencies arrive in successive waves, slow as rising pressure, and the echoes stretch until their source becomes indistinct. The album turns darker here, folded into recesses where the sound bends with an almost lysergic drift. In 2019 plastic fragments were found in amphipods from the Mariana Trench, nearly eleven kilometres down: the track carries its title all the way there, where the residue arrives before the people who made it. 

"Inground Pool"

The aquatic resonance of the previous track continues within a smaller enclosure. Concrete, tiles and still water make a space where sound has little to absorb it. The drones settle in layers against those walls with no way out, and the resonance builds until it becomes a roar. The water that was sinking is now held in a basin, echoing back on itself. 

"Book of Astrology"

In the original Mellotron each key had its own strip of tape: pressed, a roller pushed it against the head and played roughly eight seconds of strings or voices; released, a spring pulled it back to the start. The sounds Bessel uses descend from those tapes and inherit their short breath. Reverb and manipulation stretch the tails beyond their natural length. Over a sustained drone, a melody builds through overlapping notes, almost forms a complete phrase, then falls away. 

"After 8PM"

Music for coming home late. A drone saturated with echo fills almost the whole spectrum; beneath it, the piano repeats small oscillations that the mix rarely lets surface. They are heard less than they are remembered: after a few minutes the ear follows them even when they disappear beneath the drone. Simone Weil described attention as a suspension of thought, a waiting that gives up searching. The rest the track offers takes that shape: the mind stops chasing the piano and waits for it. 

Written, played, recorded and mixed by Bessel, with additional production by Jason Powers and mastering by Carl Saff, the record extends a body of work carried out in the gaps of a working life. In a 2023 interview, Bessel named the returning listener as the person his music is for. Eighteen short compositions invite exactly that test: which details resurface, which resemblances turn into relationships, how much the landscape changes on a second pass.

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