The six songs on Bryce Hackford’s 2013 debut album, Fair, could have been mistaken for the work of as many different artists. One loop-heavy house track evoked Moodymann; a fuzzy techno piece riffed on the Field; a song for drum machine, falsetto vocals, and slapback delay might as well have been Arthur Russell cosplay. Taken together, the album felt like a map of divergent paths, as though Hackford couldn’t bear to leave any route unexplored. On Safe (Exits), Hackford’s restlessness leads him to try his hand at collage, which turns out to be the perfect medium for a musician who tends to prefer and to or. The album encapsulates the best aspects of his magpie tendencies, avoiding the clutter that has sometimes plagued his work.
Hackford gathered the album’s raw materials during a residency at the UK’s PRAH Foundation, a recording studio and creative hub in Margate, a seaside town some 90 minutes outside London. (The studio is an extension of PRAH Recordings, a small independent label whose most famous signee is the cellist Oliver Coates.) There, Hackford recorded contributions from 11 different instrumentalists, with one catch: He recorded all 11 musicians independently of one another, without any of them hearing the others’ parts, and then reworked choice bits and pieces of their playing into a coherent whole.
The result is an appealingly loose, rangy record with a deep funk pulse, one that wraps a motley array of sounds—airy woodwinds, scuffed-up electric bass, mercurial Rhodes soloing—around Hackford’s skeletal, and often idiosyncratic, drum programming. The pacing is patient; the record opens with the 13-minute-long “Einmal,” a slow-motion approximation of ’00s minimal techno played mostly on acoustic percussion and overlaid with scraps of jazz. Flute, clavinet, and pitch-bending synths float in and out; it sounds less like a jam session than time-lapse footage of a house party. Their combined movements feel unplanned, but there’s a rhythm to the randomness.
The first half mostly sticks to this mode of woozily controlled chaos. In “Fetish Present,” a lumpy drum-machine groove fights its way through a curtain of bells; “Zajal” is slow and atonal, its synths the color of an oil slick. Halfway through, a saxophone wafts into the frame, conjuring ’80s noir visions. “Holy Mountains” gently weaves contrapuntal lines in a way that suggests a chopped-and-screwed version of the Australian improvising trio the Necks, while “Deep Voices” takes a hard left into dubby post-punk. Throughout, the influence of Miles Davis’ Bitches Brew looms large in the music’s freeform drift and inky dissonance.
The album peaks with “After Sun,” a 14-minute meditation for Rhodes and synthesizer. It’s the record’s most successful fusion of groove, melody, and mood, but the final two cuts flesh out the picture of Hackford’s work in intriguing ways. Both are ambient in form and feel, extensions of the kinds of immersive, long-form pieces he’s been experimenting with since his first album. “Coast (Maybe)” arrays plaintive synth pads over white-noise hiss, while the even simpler “Harbor” sets dubbed-out Rhodes keys against a faint backdrop of street noise and the occasional seagull. Rather than a painstaking collage, it feels like someone sitting down at the keyboard in real time, poking idly at the keys for a quarter of an hour. On an album informed by others’ contributions, this contemplative closing makes for a welcome moment of solitude.
