Xylitol: Blumenfantasie
An experimental journey into ambient jungle and 'gutter kosmische'
Growing up in London’s periphery and turned onto electronic music by an older brother, Catherine Backhouse spent formative years in the 1990s between pirate radio, house parties and record shops.
The DJ and producer has been making music as Xylitol for two decades, but only recently adapted the sonic palette of hardcore and jungle, the formative genres of her youth.
Earlier DIY releases and her DJ sets at Kosmische, the long-running club night in London, were shaped by 1970s krautrock and 1980s Neue Deutsche Welle. For her 2024 debut album for Planet Mu, Anemones, she created a fascinating amalgam of jungle, garage, downbeats and ambient, with a lo-fi spirit and a melodic pop sensibility.
Trodding on the path set out by Anemones, Catherine now releases her second album on Mike Paradinas’ label: With pastoral synths over frantic 160 BPM breakbeats, the ten tracks on Blumenfantasie [German: flower fantasy] feel poetic and emotional while steering clear of any starry-eyed sentimentality.
I spoke to the producer, who’s also known as DJ Bunnyhausen, about her process and inspirations for the new record, coming of age in London’s 1990s scene, and what’s left of dance music’s revolutionary spirit.
Catherine, where were you in ‘92?
Oh gosh, I was living at home with my parents in St Albans [North of London]. At the time, I was super into hardcore. I had some raver friends, but we’re not old enough to go to clubs. My friends all looked older than me, and I just was cursed with the babyface. We were hanging out at friends’ houses, listening to pirate radio, just being immersed in the scene, but almost vicariously.
What kind of music did you hear playing around the house?
I didn’t come from a super musical family. Most musical influences came from my brother who’s four years older than me. He was going to raves in the late 80s, early 90s. St Albans was a good vantage point for that, because it’s on the M25 orbital around London. It was kind of suburban, but close enough to the scene.
What style of music did you first fall in love with?
The first thing that really struck me when I was young was synth pop. I was six or seven, seeing The Human League and Soft Cell on Top Of The Pops, finding that very exciting. I got bought an Ultravox album for Christmas by my auntie one year, and was absolutely rinsing that. My first single was “Give It Up” by KC & The Sunshine Band. My taste was all over the place.
Then you started tuning into pirate radio…
Yeah. From St Albans, you could quite easily pick up the pirate stations from London. I remember listening to Center Force FM and Fantasy Radio with my brother and taping stuff. This was my first real exposure to techno and acid house. There’s obviously a pathway from synth pop into that, but when you’ve never heard [Phuture’s] “Acid Trax” or minimal Chicago house before, it’s fucking wild, you know? There’s this amazing energy to it, and it felt kind of clandestine hearing this music, interspersed with static.
We were taping stuff and listening in friends’ bedrooms to Don FM, Rush or whatever. Stations came and went, but it was just a constant backdrop from my early teens as I grew older into my late teens and 20s, when I was living at home in St Albans with my parents and when I moved out, started at uni and lived in London.
“There’s always some little kind of utopian kernel within people coming together and dancing and engaging in this communal nighttime activity. (…) There’s still some radical potential within dance music, even if it’s sometimes hard to discern at this particular point in history.”
Did you get any classical musical training?
Not at all. As my first musical instrument, I got a little Casio VL-Tone keyboard when I was in primary school. I learned to play simple things on that. For my 15th or 16th birthday, I got bought an Amiga 500 by my parents and grandparents together. I was gaming on that, but I got some rudimentary music software as well. I don’t remember what it was called – it wasn’t a tracker thing, but really primitive. It had three seconds of sampling memory and I was trying to make techno like Underground Resistance or Altern 8 on that. I don’t even have any copies of these tapes, but I gave some to friends. No one else admits they still have a copy anywhere, but maybe someone’s got one in their nan’s loft.
I read that you got into academic electroacoustic music through a record collection from one of your mate’s dads.
Yeah, my friend Tom, his parents are French, and his cousin had two turntables, so we’d go over there to have our little listening sessions. By the time it got to late in the night, we’d sneak down and have a look through his dad’s collection. There’s always the element of daring about it. It’s kind of a challenge to sit through all of one side of that Iannis Xenakis LP, Persepolis. It’s stunning, I still love this music. I don’t know what my 16-year-old self made of it, but it was exciting to discover it. We were listening to Pierre Henry, Bernard Parmegiani, Luc Ferrari, a lot of musique concrète and 20th century high modernism. It was such a journey, and something settled, even if it’s only a desire to explore and make connections.
At age 16, coming across that stuff can be mind-altering.
I mean, I don’t think I understood it. It was just a little adolescent foray into it, because it was there. Like, “What’s this cool shit that my friend’s dad’s got in his collection?” I can’t say I delved properly back into that terrain until much later.
You mentioned techno and house, but how did you move into hardcore and jungle?
I was just surrounded by it. Again through my older brother, I started going to record shops, specialist dance music stores that were close by – in Stevenage, Watford or Luton. I got really into the early Warp stuff: Sweet Exorcist, Forgemasters, LFO, the whole bleep and bass, as it lately got known. I felt like this was my music. I felt so invested in it.
These record shops were really welcoming environments and such an education, because you obviously built connections with the staff over time. So it progressed naturally from the bleepy Sheffield stuff to the Belgian stuff, and one day it’s like, “Have you heard this Shut Up And Dance 12-inch?”, which is also going on in the pirates. There’s a whole nexus of the shop and the pirates and what your mates are listening to, and it just unfolds and it’s all part of the community.
There’s still so much jungle influence in Xylitol, while there’s maybe not so much techno or house influence.
Yeah, I don’t know. I’ve always loved jungle. St Albans and the home counties in general had a particular relation to it. I didn’t know them personally, but Jim and Phil from Source Direct and Rupert [alias] Photek, these were older brothers of friends from school and I’d sometimes see them around. They were doing exciting things, and there was a sense of local pride. They were opening up this sense of possibility.
There’s these other two producers, Oaysis, who released a 12-inch on Formation and a couple of things on Moving Shadow. They’re in the hall at my school, and at friends’ house parties, they go to the same slightly crap pubs in St Albans and hang out in pub gardens. They had an aura, but they were also relatable, there’s a personal connection. The scene was around us because we’d be at mate’s houses, like: “Did you hear Dawn FM last night? Did you get a shout out?”
Jungle’s based on a handful of classic drum breaks. Did you feel drawn to that kind of minimalism?
I think so. I’ve always been limited to some extent by economic expediency. I’ve never been able to afford a big modular setup or anything, so you make a virtue of necessity. But also, a certain ingenuity happens when you have some kind of boundaries. If you’re really pushing against that, then that becomes a motive for creation and you can create more interesting results than having this endless, limitless palette at your disposal. The Amen break is obviously the classic example of that. It’s almost inexhaustible. It’s familiar, but also limitless in its permutations.
You also really seem to like the Think break though.
(laughs) Yeah, I’m reminding myself that other babies are available: “Think”, “Hot Pants”… I did venture out a bit on this album, go through the record collections and find other things.
Another strong influence on the Xylitol sound is Krautrock. Where did that come from originally?
In the first instance, just from being into techno and electro. If you have the kind of mindset, then you dig through and work backwards. We had a good public library, so I’d find and listen to Kraftwerk’s Autobahn and Ralf & Florian. In the late 90s I got into other bands like Stereolab and Tortoise, who were repping the Krautrock stuff, and then I started going to a night called Kosmische.
I was a DJ by that time anyway, and listening not just to techno and jungle and electronica, but also discovering this other stuff. I ended up being part of that collective putting that night on, being one of their DJs and co-promoting it. The club ran from ‘97 through to the late 2000s and it was a formative influence. We’d play everything there, from Can to Mouse on Mars to Autechre – it was very adventurous, but not kind of chin-stroke. It was still very hedonistic.
You started making and releasing music in the mid-2000s, but it sounded quite different from what Xylitol stands for now.
Yeah, what I was doing in the 2000s was very influenced by the Neue Deutsche Welle cassette scene and artists like Felix Kubin. I was listening to that, but also to like Conrad Schnitzler and at the same time to the early grime and dubstep that was emerging. I was still finding my feet production-wise, having not produced any music for probably more than a decade. But a friend gave me a copy of Fruity Loops, so I kind of went for it and had some fun with it.
In 2021, you released the ambient tape Inside A Stone Of Cream There Is A Language – a pandemic project?
Absolutely. During lockdown, most of my social life was conducted on Zoom. The last thing I wanted to do when doing music was to be looking at my screen. So I dug out an old Tascam four-track recorder. Lockdown just gave me a space to explore another way of working. Some tracks on the album are little miniatures, and there’s a bit of continuity from my earlier work when nothing was over three minutes. But also there’s a space to actually just explore this existential and also quite literal kind of space. I was lucky enough to be furloughed, so I had time on my hands to do stuff.
For your brilliant 2024 album Anemones, you signed to the established indie Planet Mu. How did that happen?
Initially I’d sent a demo to Lara Rix-Paradinas, Mike Paradinas’ partner, who was running a label at the time, Objects Limited, just to see what she thought of these tracks that I demoed. The tracks were “Moebius”, “Okko” and “Rosie”. She got back and said, “Well, I’m not doing Objects [anymore], but I’ll play it to Mike, see what he reckons.” Mike was feeling it and said, “Yeah, go and do an album.” Obviously I was a little bit simultaneously taken aback and absolutely overjoyed.
What does your production process look like, in terms of methods and gear?
I just use an ancient version of Adobe Audition. It’s 20 years old at this point, because I’m lazy and don’t like learning new gear, and I know my way around it. Every time my laptop does an update, I thank God that it’s still working.
My process is pretty haphazard. Sometimes I will start with a chord sequence in mind or I’ll noodle around, improvise something and hit record, maybe isolate some section of that. It’s a process of building and overlaying and then subtracting again, until it takes a shape and identity. It’s very organic how I weave different sections together, rather than have this really particular structure in place.
I’ll do some sound processing – I really love parametric EQ, playing with different delays and intervals. There’s a bit of arrhythmia, which decenters the rhythm in a way, but I also want the rhythm to work on a dancefloor as well. It’s very important that you can dance to the music for me. That’s part of what makes the music work, this kind of embodiment. These things are almost pulling against each other, this cosmic stillness and this rhythmic motion.
The new album is called Blumenfantasie. Where did that German title come from?
Last summer, I had a gig at Silent Green in Berlin for the Planet Mu 30th anniversary – amazing venue, beautiful crowd. I’d not been to Berlin for 20 years and it reminded me of the last time I was there in 2005, when I was staying with a friend who was squatting in this old flower shop in the Wedding district. Being out there again, I had this vision of the sign out the front, which is in this beige 1970s bubble writing, this Magma font. The sign said Blumenfantasie, which was the name of the shop.
At the time I was there, I was having a bit of a shit time at home relationship-wise, so I have good memories of being in Berlin and just letting go, being in this warm environment with a friend, immersed in music and the club, listening to my friend’s amazing record collection at home. He even had friends performing little low-key concerts in the front of the shop building. It just triggered all these associations and memories.
2005 was a great time to be here.
It really was. It was exactly the kind of therapy I needed. So it’s a poetic title with a personal resonance.
Aside from those memories, are there any specific records that influenced the new album?
There’s two, actually three, that come to mind. One is DJ Crystl’s “Warp Drive”. That stuck with me since I first heard it when I was 17 or whatever. It’s just pure intensity. It’s like Tangerine Dream with great beats, an absolutely ridiculous piece of music, but incredible. I’ve never experienced anything like that before or since, really.
More recently, I love Miaux. That’s Mia Prce, she’s born in Sarajevo, but based in Antwerp. I think she’s a genius. She has this incredible way of conveying this depth of melancholy and sorrow, but sometimes also hope, just without any kind of sentimentality at all. She’s really economical what she does. It’s stately without being pretentious in any way. I’ve been listening to her a lot, not just her recent album Never Coming Back, but all her back catalog.
And then also Hans-Joachim Roedelius, his self-portrait series I really like. Some of his music’s maybe a little more bucolic, maybe a bit more pastoral and sometimes joyful. There’s a bit of that in Mia’s work as well. It’s really just the kind of intimacy in the economy that I’ve been deeply into.
I was actually thinking of Roedelius when I heard “Südwestwind”.
Yeah, that’s the one. It’s probably the most explicit on that song. You know, I was really into that early 80s Sky Records type cosmic stuff, where it gets a little bit new age, but it’s still kind of sweet.
Another one that stands out is “Mirjana”. In the 90s we might’ve called that one ‘big beat’, right?
Oh shit! (laughs)
It’s not meant as an insult! I was really into early Chemical Brothers…
It’s fine. It worried me the most about this track, if I accidentally made a Mo Wax or a big beat track. (laughs) I’m not sure which I’d like it to be, but hopefully it’s just its own thing. There’s just two tracks on the album that fall below the 160 BPM threshold. This one started with me listening to music in the car, and “Archangels Thunderbird” by Amon Düül II came up on random play. I hadn’t heard that in so long. It’s got that almost Led Zeppelin kind of rock drum break in the middle of it, and I wanted to try doing something with that. It’s one of those rare occasions where it started with a rhythm track rather than a melody.
What’s your take on generative AI in music production?
My instinct is that I hate it. I don’t use it and I don’t feel any compulsion to use it. But by the same token, I am sure there are ways in which as a tool, it can be used in a way which isn’t completely dehumanizing. I’m just not entirely sure what it is. There are artists I admire, like Grant Wilson-Claridge who started Rephlex, that are experimenting with this stuff. But I feel an intrinsic distrust of it.
I think the problem with AI essentially is capitalism. It’s just monopolized in this way that is used to alienate cultural workers from their labor and to exploit, and I hope there is some way that it can be still harnessed in a way that’s liberatory to an artist. But I’m skeptical.
I recently read this essay by Drew Daniel of Matmos, where he’s grappling with the idea of making dance music under fascism. It made me think about the political aspect of dance music in the 90s, and how this has vanished from contemporary culture.
It’s complicated. In the 90s, some of the parties I was going to were very much politicized events. Even if the music itself was largely instrumental, there was a radicalism in the gathering and in the milieu, which was mostly articulated in the artwork and the dialogue and the track titles. There was a lot of talk about dance music being this positive force of momentum and radical political change, which was obviously pure idealism, as beautiful as it was to be in that moment. I think we’ve got to be realistic – this rarely coalesces into a movement with some actual kind of political efficacy.
But there’s always some little kind of utopian kernel within people coming together and dancing and engaging in this communal nighttime activity. As much as real estate might try and impinge on it with spaces in London like Drumsheds, which are owned by people tied to Reform UK, the right-wing political party. There’s lots of forces against it, but there’s still some radical potential within dance music, even if it’s hard to discern at this particular point in history. I’m not sure how we harness that, how I harness that as an artist, but there’s a need for that – even if maybe too many claims were put on the radical potential of techno and jungle in the dizzy times of the 90s.
Are these things on your mind sometimes when you’re making music?
They’re present in the background. You know, I found absolute joy and liberation in dancing. I found a sense of meaningful community and friendships which have lasted my lifetime through dancing with them and being absolutely boxed at an afterparty with them. These things create connections, and if you meet like-minded people, then something can come from that, and hopefully at least some kernel of a politics. But it has to be harnessed to other things, rather than seeing it as intrinsically political in and of itself.
Xylitol’s Blumenfantasie is out on March 20 through Planet Mu.