Echoes from Westbrook Bay

Peter Van Hoesen spent 2020 in typically restless fashion, dropping a run of records on his Center 91 label that reaffirmed his place among techno’s most dependable voices. Now he returns to his original imprint, Time To Express, for Echoes from Westbrook Bay (T2X37)—a six-track EP of purist, psyche-tinged techno that he wrote, recorded and engineered entirely himself, with no label machinery beyond his own two hands.

Opener Echos from Westbrook Bay sets the tone immediately: a wash of detuned pads and slow-blooming reverb that hangs suspended for a full minute before the kick even dares to arrive. It’s a trick Van Hoesen repeats throughout—he trusts his textures to do the heavy lifting, adding hats and percussion with a patience that borders on monastic. Nothing here shouts; the record builds its case through accumulation, four-to-the-floor bones wrapped in drone and dubby delay.

Allocators is the centrepiece, and it’s easy to hear why Resident Advisor singled it out as “flawlessly produced, purist techno”. The bassline churns with a restrained menace while metallic percussion skitters across the top, the whole thing locked into a groove that refuses to loosen its grip across its six and a half minutes. Leaning tightens the formula further, its rim-shots and clipped chords stepping in perfect time, whilst Consider the Source darkens the palette—the EP’s most shadowed moment, all low-end pressure and smeared sonics.

Then comes the curveball. Waving not Drowning is a live-taken, abstract drum’n’bass roller that nods to the fractured, broken-beat sound Van Hoesen explores in his Timedance work alongside Batu, and its off-kilter rhythms land like a splash of cold water after all that discipline. Closer Block by Block grinds things back down to a hypnotic crawl, seven minutes of relentless momentum that leave the record feeling complete rather than exhausted.

Self-released, self-engineered and entirely without fuss, Echoes from Westbrook Bay is a quietly confident statement from a producer who has nothing left to prove and everything to gain from trusting his instincts. It won’t win over anyone who needs their techno to shout—but played loud in the right room, there’s a purity here that’s harder to find with every passing year.

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