Eric Angelo Bessel :: Illusion of an Inland Ocean
Ambient from a Mellotron, a field job in Oregon and the inland side of a coast.
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”.
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.
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.
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.
