Available on: PRAH Recordings

To start off with, all this angsty kerfuffle about “outsider house” can do one. Like, pasty white bohemians are making off-the-wall electronic music – yeah, that’s never happened before. I know we need micro-genres to have something to talk about but it all strikes me as unnecessary line-drawing: if someone’s making house, whoever they are and however weird it is, then it’s house and will stand up as such in the DJ-led club ecosystem, and if they’re not then it’s just continuation of the longer, deeper kosmische-industrial continuum.

I say this because this album kicks off with a nine-minute groove, ‘Another Fantasy’, which is basically Theo Parrish meets Einsturzende Neubauten. It’s little more than one house loop full of industrial fuzz, and Bryce Hackford having a lot of fun with filters. I have absolutely no idea how it would work in a club, but I suspect in the hands of a skilled DJ very late at night it will be dynamite – however it doesn’t need to be, and it doesn’t matter whether or not DJs do play it, because it also fits very neatly into the rest of an album which is barely club-oriented at all, although it is still loop-based head music.

There’s a lot of bliss running through Fair, albeit often painfully intense. The high-end fizz that almost entirely obscures the sleepy song and bassline of ‘Slow Emotion’ is like particularly sadistic shoegaze, and the Cluster-like arpeggios of ambient pieces ‘I Want More’ and the 24-minute ‘Run-On Cirrus’ threaten at points to get overwhelmed by similar white-out treble distortion too – although these ones stops just short of jamming needles in your eyes, and are actually a very pleasant listen.

‘Heart to Beat’ is a slightly odd listen, so much does it sound like Arthur Russell with some analogue synths and a cheap distortion pedal, but it’s good too. And the bonus 27-minute drone, ‘Modern Propellor Music’, is a very nice drone. All told it’s a very solid bit of electronic weird-out with some violently transcendent bits and other long sections you can happily drift off on. With this and the excellent Oliver Coates album, PRAH Recordings is looking quite promising really.