On his second solo album, Mirror at Night, Portland-based artist Eric Angelo Bessel moves further into the liminal zones he began mapping on last year’s Visitation. Spread across twelve instrumental vignettes, the record is like a series of portals opening and closing, each track a fleeting glimpse into a world that seems just barely within reach.
The palette is deceptively simple: the nostalgic tones of the Mellotron and the layered, multitimbral nature of early-2000s synths. But in Bessel’s hands, these become something more spectral. The sounds hover like artificial clouds, refracting against surfaces of bioluminescent water. At times, the pieces shimmer with a quiet radiance; at others, they seem to dissolve into a still, obsidian silence, where past, present, and future blur into one reflective surface.
Listening to Mirror at Night is like wandering through shifting architecture. Floors become doors; ceilings transform into thresholds. One moment you’re suspended between spaces, above and below at once, sensing you don’t quite belong in the passageway. Then, like a sudden memory pricking at a red light, you’re reminded of another time, another place, the ghost of what could have happened instead.
It’s in these in-between states that Bessel excels. His compositions don’t resolve so much as they linger, circling around absence and possibility. If Visitation was about entering a haunted space, Mirror at Night is about living in that haunting and finding the beauty and strangeness in the echo of what never quite was.
The record carries a deep, haunted undertone, beginning with the opener, “Tendons.” It unfolds like mist rising in the mind’s eye, its spectral synths humming and grinding with a metallic resonance. Later, “Scavengers” evokes a sense of cinematic unease. Its brooding textures wouldn’t feel out of place on the Donnie Darko soundtrack.
Other standouts include “Moving Walkway,” which drifts into darker ambient terrain. “Coming Around” envelops you in a dense wash of nocturnal textures, like being submerged in a night tide. The album closes with “Aphotic Zone,” a descent into calm waters that are no less enigmatic.
Bessel’s background as a visual artist—his photography and video work often concerned with atmosphere and perception—clearly informs the music. Each track is a vignette suspended in time. And while Mirror at Night may be ambient by definition, its true weight lies in the way it reshapes memory, asking the listener to dwell in its fragile, shifting corridors.
Mirror at Night is a record of passageways between eras of technology, personal memory, and collective dream, what we remember and what we invent. It doesn’t guide you through so much as leave you standing at the threshold, staring into the mirrored dark, waiting for the reflection to move.
Portland-based label Lore City Music will unveil Mirror at Night on LP and digital this Halloween, an appropriate release date for music steeped in mystery and shadow.
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