In the time it takes to sip one cup of tea, we will have your daily art / music fix covered. Pour a cup of tea, and enjoy our Afternoon Tea art + posts and get social on our socials. Take your afternoon break with our Afternoon Tea features. Need an extra lump of sugar? One more sip? If you have five minutes more (or ten), we have one more hit.
Today’s feature is curated with Eric Angelo Bessel and Afternoon Tea. We discuss the upcoming album “Mirror At Night,” the single drop for “Scavengers,” including the visual + audio inspirations for the release. And of course, we had to ask, which tea to pair with this curation.
Mirror at Night is the second solo album from American-German visual artist and musician, Eric Angelo Bessel, releasing Friday, October 31, 2025. Composed of twelve instrumental songs, Mirror at Night paints an ambient landscape of dispersed artificial clouds and bioluminescent waters. Reimagining the nostalgic sounds of the Mellotron and the early aughts multitimbrality of Alesis synths, Mirror at Night marks the fifth release from the Lore City Music imprint.
“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. Mirror at Night is composed of twelve vignettes glimpsing the in-between realm; the past, present, and future merging into a still, obsidian surface.”
Stream + Share “Scavengers” now.
“Visually, I am fascinated with how a film camera captures three dimensional space into just two dimensions. There is an instantaneous flattening that happens when a lens shutter fires and light is transposed onto the film surface. When viewing a photograph, we interpret the still vignette as something in front of us, whereas the camera could have been aimed in any direction, including straight down. When I set out to take the photographs for this album, I took inspiration from the vistas observed from turn-out areas on two-lane highways in Oregon. From some of these vistas, the ground disappears into deep chasms of ancient volcanic rock, and the longer I looked, the more I began to see.”
“One of my favorite visual artists is the late Kim Keever, whom I met while working at an NYC photography lab in the mid-aughts. Kim painted and photographed entire worlds inside a 200-gallon water-filled tank. I had the good fortune of commissioning two of his abstract pieces for an album. Check out ‘Kill Your Dreams’ by Lore City to see them.”
“My favorite tea is plain kombucha. I’ve enjoyed drinking the tea for many years, and have also taken on the challenge of brewing and fermenting it myself. In the past, I made a photography series documenting the face-like kombucha ‘mothers’ also known as SCOBY (symbiotic culture of bacteria and yeast) used in the production of the tea. As a series, the grouping provides a textural examination of organic growth, while individually each ‘mother’ has the personality and character of a portrait.”
While I was writing and recording the songs that became ‘Mirror at Night’, I was listening to contemporary artists Naujawanan Baidar (Khedmat Be Khalq), Ak’chamel (A Mournful Kingdom Of Sand), Faten Kanaan (Afterpoem), Daigo Hanada (Satori), Sheherazaad (Qasr). This was interspersed with mid-nineties records by Bluetip, Shelter, and Swans.
Eric Angelo Bessel (born in Connecticut, 1981) is an American-German visual artist and musician. He currently lives in Portland, Oregon. Bessel attended Syracuse University from 2000-2004, completing a BFA in Art Photography, then attended the School of Visual Arts’ Photography Video and Related Media Graduate Program from 2005-2006. Bessel’s photography was featured in the Collector’s Guide to New Art Photography Vol. 2, released by the Humble Arts Foundation in 2010; his first artist monograph, Archive {2005-2010}, was released by Conveyor in 2011. Bessel’s first solo album, Visitation, was released by Lore City Music in 2023.
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