In Towards the Center of Time and Surrounded by Spirits, Peter Van Hoesen continues his singular pursuit of sonic architecture and psychic depth. Known for reshaping the boundaries of techno and experimental sound art, the Belgian producer takes a decisive step away from the club floor and into a terrain of temporal suspension. The album unfolds as an extended study in perception, where layered frequencies, resonant bass currents, and spectral harmonics define an inward journey toward stillness and self-erasure.

Van Hoesen, who first emerged from the Brussels electronic underground in the early 1990s, has long rejected categorical purity. His work spans dance music, electroacoustic composition, and audiovisual performance, often probing the metaphysical dimensions of listening itself. From his formative years with the Foton collective to the conceptual techno of his Time To Express label, his art has remained grounded in the tension between body and abstraction. In this latest project, recorded between Berlin and Ho Chi Minh City, his narratively restrained aesthetic reaches its most introspective point. The tracks operate like shifting chambers—dense yet porous, filled with slow-moving energy where time dilates and perception fractures.

The sound palette is tactile and multidimensional: modular synthesis glides against deep subharmonic pulses, microscopic textures flutter within wide stereo fields, and percussive patterns dissolve into the suggestion of ritual. Van Hoesen’s use of spatial composition techniques—some rooted in his research at the Spatial Sound Institute in Budapest—renders the album almost sculptural. Each track feels less like a sequence of events and more like a resonant space to inhabit. Echoes recur not as motifs but as gravitational orbits, pulling the listener closer to what the title implies: the elusive center of time itself, surrounded by murmurs of unseen forces. True to his multidisciplinary outlook, Van Hoesen frames the project as both sonic experiment and metaphysical reflection. The “spirits” referenced in the title suggest not ghosts but resonances—imprints of memory, physical vibration, and electromagnetic trace. His decades-long immersion in modular systems and feedback architectures finds a new poetic charge here, while maintaining his signature balance of precision and mystery.