Black Deer – Black Deer (Huntleys + Palmers)

Black Deer’s self-titled album for Glasgow’s Huntleys + Palmers label offers detailed dancefloor transmissions in abstract techno form

Aesthetically unique Glasgow electronic label Huntleys + Palmers fold the future into 2020 with the latest work from William Burnett under his Black Deer guise. The self-titled album deftly gets into heads and animates limbs at the same time. There’s much to be gleaned from digging deeper through repeat listens, but there’s also significant pleasure to be derived from the subtle machine music immediacy on display.

“Who’s Birthday Is It Now?” bursts forth with gentle abandon, its clipped techno detailing giving off just the right amount of heat. Individual light bulbs turn on and off as the sounds traverse living corridors of inner space. Riding undulating sonic waves, “Water Glider” offers tremendous surface tension as it pulses and emits from below. There is nothing cold or rigid about these tracks, with Black Deer navigating emotional depths alongside dancefloor-tilted body programming.

A jagged left turn into electro soundscaping, “Spinning Sky” introduces unease to proceedings, whereas “She Doesn’t Want To Marry” goes further with the voices of interdimensional prisoners leaking through abstract radio signals. Curiously and rather brilliantly, Black Deer maintains an oddly compelling groove here, the experimentation manifesting its own sort of structure. A post-club paranoia-inducing look into the rabbit hole beneath then.

“Olé” is a broken beat techno mini-anthem, electronic walls building and collapsing as the listener becomes cocooned in a projected future-noir world. A thumping 4/4 brought to life with bass and crackle becomes a slow motion pull over the precipice on “Managing the New Frontier”. Meanwhile, “Tauntalising” is as jaunty as the album gets, a luridly metallic theme to a nightmare documentary, before “FR Yeah” gets under the hood and allows dreams to float out as beeps, electronic washes and the promise of the night.

huntleyspalmers.bandcamp.com