Track By Track: Xylitol – Blumenfantasie

Blumenfantasie is her second album for Planet Mu, following Anemones, and the shift in mood is immediately apparent. Where its predecessor drew connections between early jungle, garage and kosmische musik through contrast and juxtaposition, this one lets Mitteleuropean melancholy seep through the cracks. The single biggest influence on that shift, she says, is Sarajevo-born minimal synth composer Miaux, a kindred spirit in directness, emotional economy, and lightness of touch. The result is music built for head, hips and heart simultaneously: detailed jungle workouts, beatless ambience, bare-bones grime rhythms, and one genuinely elegiac stretch below 160 bpm that nods explicitly toward Krautrock. It floats and propels at once.

Collaborators Sculpture and The Leaf Library both make appearances, their source material pulled into Catherine’s orbit and reassembled with heavy sub-bass and breakbeats and a characteristic lack of apology. The album moves with the confidence of someone who has been DJing a lot more, she admits, with Worthing Techno Militia, Central and Eastern European electronica collective Slav to the Rhythm, and Italo Disco crew Flex. Those pathways between disparate musical zones are audible throughout.

Chromophoria

A remix exchange with Sculpture, who Backhouse first crossed paths with at Kosmische, the krautrock and electronica club she played in the 00s. Working with Dan Hayhurst’s piano motifs, fractured electronics, birdsong and splintered breakbeats, she describes the process as being let loose with a roll of beautiful fabric from which to cut and collage. In a recent Quietus interview, Hayhurst described a will to “walk into the lasers”: a compulsion Backhouse finds extremely relatable.

Blumenfantasie

The album’s title track draws directly from the memory at its centre: staying with a friend in a repurposed flower shop in East Berlin in the early 2000s, immersed in his record collection, catching a high-life band rehearsing in the basement of a West African grocery shop round the corner in Wedding. The track builds from a simple 1970s keyboard rhythm, cyclical melodies fed through space echo and EQ, aiming for the egoless joy of Harmonia’s Watussi, before a breakbeat from Studio Pressure’s jungle classic Jump Part 2 propels it somewhere altogether its own.

Tilted Arc

Named after Richard Serra’s controversial environmental sculpture, a slim arc of metal installed in downtown Manhattan, slowly eroding, repeatedly vandalised, eventually dismantled and placed in climate-controlled storage. The track mirrors its subject: two interlocking elements echoing into the noise floor, a meditation on decay and the poetics of time before they outstay their welcome.

Melancholia

Built around a synth pad sampled from French modernist electronic composer Daniel Arfib’s Musique Numerique, channelling what Backhouse describes as Miaux’s Mitteleuropean melancholy toward something glacial but rhythmically propulsive. The title was a placeholder that earned its place. Not a Lars Von Trier reference.

Mirjana

Inspired by photographs of young women Partisans who fought fascism in what would become Yugoslavia. The track is the album’s most explicit Krautrock reference point, its drum break chopped from Amon Duul II’s Archangel’s Thunderbird. Named for one face among many, showing what Backhouse describes as steely defiance and grave determination of the kind our present moment demands.

Sudwestwind

Informed by Hans Joachim Roedelius’ Selbstportrait series and, again, by Miaux, her stillness and emotional intensity achieved with real economy. Just a cut-up breakbeat and three interlocking keyboard lines played live on a 1980s Casio from Deptford Market. Intimate by design.

Lights

A visual cue made audible: the astigmatic halo of traffic, street lamps and convenience stores at night through a rainy windscreen. Filmic in texture, the static and distortion creeping over the counter-melody, the rhythm track hovering somewhere between propulsion and spectral stillness.

Bowed Clusters

A remix of The Leaf Library, commissioned through a mutual friendship with filmmaker Peter Strickland. The original called to mind Broadcast at their most bucolic, with an undercurrent of eerie mid-century radiophonia. What it needed, naturally, was heavy sub-bass and breakbeats. Backhouse obliged.

Halo

Recovered from a mid-2000s mixtape sketch, Wiley and Danny Weed audible alongside echoes of Nurse With Wound and industrial music. The NWW reference, Backhouse notes, is explicit in the pinball flipper sound and hissing static. Nothing here is subtle, and subtlety was not the aim.

Falling

Built from elements left over from the Sculpture remix that opens the album, weaving a distorted piano sound into a melody aimed at the half-asleep, half-awake threshold. The chipmunked vocal sample comes from Roqui’s NY Garage classic I’ve Just Begun To Love You, a Nu Groove track she describes as a long-term source of joy, capable of sending her stratospheric on the acapella alone.

Blumenfantasie is out now on Planet Mu. Catherine launches it at Club Cheek in Brixton on 4 April, supported by Sculpture (live AV) and Slav to the Rhythm DJs. Tickets.