Bryce Hackford likes to stretch out. This six-track debut album from the Brooklyn-based producer may look more like an extended EP on the surface, but the one-hour-17-minute runtime puts it far in excess of most standard LPs. Hackford is naturally drawn to the trancey side of house music, where repeating motifs circle across vast dimensions of time. He's also interested in rock dynamics, sometimes veering toward krautrock and the blissful velocity of Spacemen 3's landmark Playing with Fire. Some of the material on Fair orbits various paths taken by artists on the L.I.E.S. label, especially as Hackford roots his sound in house traditions, noise, and choppy production values. Dusting the overall sound with a grainy texture is a wise move, creating a sense of unity in an album that fractures in many directions.
Something Hackford doesn't lack is ambition, even if it is executed in a manner that makes his music feel purposefully small. On "Slow Emotion" he channels the kind of wide open spaces Panda Bear likes to cover, although the general tone is closely aligned to the fuzzy haze-pop of Flying Saucer Attack. Still, Fair has the same air of exploration as Person Pitch, matching the way it can grind the life out of three-second loops without losing any intensity. Hackford isn’t as stylistically cohesive as Noah Lennox, instead dropping low-rent club bangers with a debt to the initial IDM boom ("Another Fantasy") then taking a wayward turn into the twilight feel of Nite Jewel's Good Evening ("Heart to Beat"). It makes sense that Hackford has played with Arp and Delia Gonzalez, who have both taken a similarly zoned-out approach to electronics.
The structurally sound work in the first half of Fair is let go in its back end, with Hackford ending the album via two songs in excess of 20 minutes per piece. It's here that Hackford loosens his brain, with the 22-minute "Run-On Cirrus" approaching the masterful build his former charge Gonzalez worked out with Gavin Russom on the minor DFA classic "El Monte". The difference here is that "Run-On Cirrus" digs deeper into an ambient tradition, drifting into sheets of synth that resemble Vangelis channeling the Orb's U.F.Orb. He takes a step further into the calm on the following 27-minute piece "Modern Propeller Music", almost losing all sense of self entirely in its echoing guitar figures. Here, Hackford demonstrates a knack for knowing when not to play, removing the compression from his work but retaining the mesmeric force from his more compact structures.
Fair latches onto sounds that are emerging elsewhere at present, including traces of the ultra-compact work of the the Black Dog's Bytes on Laurel Halo's excellent Chance of Rain, the lingering influence of vintage sci-fi soundtracks, and the loosening of borders between noise and techno. Hackford's inevitably going to be aligned with the mini boom in scruffy house, but there's enough scope here to suggest he can survive when the walls come tumbling down, especially as he's been at this since 2007 and has branched out to work on projects such as Rhys Chatham's A Crimson Grail. That recording, as part of 200-strong guitar orchestra assembled by Chatham, taps into the same kind of audacity Hackford gets caught up in as he goes deeper into Fair. There are strict limitations and open-ended thinking here, on a work that's more interested in the constant process of evolution than finding a place to comfortably land.
