Xylitol - Blumenfantasie Vinyl LP

Xylitol, a.k.a. producer and DJ Catherine Backhouse, shifts up the refinement and musical breadth for her second album Blumenfantasie, the follow-up to her Planet Mu debut Anemones.

While Anemones pulled together her formative influences of early jungle, garage and kosmische musik, interspersed with elements of early central and eastern european electro to draw connections and contrasts between dance music and vintage electronics, in Blumenfantasie mitteleuropean melancholy comes to the fore, particularly drawing on the work of Sarajevo-born minimal synth composer Miaux, whom she recognises as “a kindred spirit in terms of her directness and melancholy, as well as her lightness of touch.” She cites her as her “single biggest inspiration in the shift between Anemones and Blumenfantasie and I think the shift of mood and palette is quite apparent, even if our music is very different in how it presents.”

A fitting analogy of the album’s feel can be found in the origin of its title:

“When I stayed in Berlin earlier this year to play for the Planet Mu 30th Anniversary show I had a vivid flashback to my last stay in the city some 20 years earlier. I was out raving every night with a friend who was squatting in a disused flower shop; the trip was a kind of therapeutic letting go but the memory fragment that stood out to me was the GDR era signage above the front window in brown tiles embossed in beige reading ‘Blumenfantasie’ in that kind of classic 1970s psychedelic font.”

In her new album these crossing timelines, collisions of memory and aesthetics tessellate precariously together.

With Blumenfantasie, Xylitol wanted “to make space and for the music to float and propel at once”, finding routes through the pointillistic figures, cascading synths and the meditative stillness of kosmische musik and bolder breakbeat programming. She reaches this delicate balance through careful subtraction, hoping “to convey a sense of intimacy and sadness but without sentimentality” which she manages with a feel and sound that's raw and intuitive.

Blumenfantasie rolls through detailed jungle workouts that flutter and bleep, through beatless ambience, taking a rare dip below 160 bpm for the elegiac Mirjana, the album’s most explicit nod to Krautrock with a drum break chopped up from Amon Duul II’s anthemic ‘Archangel’s Thunderbird’, through to a bare bones grime rhythm that calls to mind the missing link between industrial pioneers Nurse With Wound and Wiley's Eskibeat.

For Blumenfantasie, Catherine cast her net to draw in experimental audiovisual duo Sculpture and Reading based post-rock band The Leaf Library as collaborators, pulling the former’s whirling eddies of musique concrete into a slice of sublime aquatic jungle, and the latter’s radiophonic folksong into a dark and disorientating breakbeat workout equally indebted to Source Direct as to Broadcast.

Blumenfantasie moves with a confident, self-effacing fluidity which has been informed by DJ Bunnyhausen’s more regular DJ gigs. She speculates “if this album feels more cohesive than its predecessor it's likely because I've been DJing a lot more, with Worthing Techno Militia, with central and eastern european electronica collective Slav to the Rhythm, as well as being part of Italo Disco crew Flex. Moving between these zones seemed to open up hidden pathways between the disparate musical trajectories they represent.”

While Anemones contrasted the rough and the delicate, its successor is an album built for the head, hips and heart, with painterly sounds and a sense of intimacy that encourages deep listening while keeping its eyes on the strobelight and its feet on the dancefloor.