Audiopile Review: You ever listen to Aphex Twin’s ‘Richard D. James Album’ and wish it sounded just a little less like he was taking the piss? Like, yeah, those melodies are very pretty, and those beats are ingenious, but it all sounds like it’s happening through a thin veil of irony. Would it not be great to hear an album rather like this, but one which was able to abandon itself to unabashed melodic loveliness? And, also, to the maniacal rhythmic onslaught of jungle? Well, have we ever got an album for you, and it comes via Aphex-adjacent label Planet Mu. Xylitol is the brainchild of Catherine Backhouse (aka DJ Bunnyhausen), who is based in Brighton, which has long been a haven for the UK’s countercultural misfits. Backhouse has been an underground operator of note for over a decade, but ‘Anemones’ is the first vinyl full-length from Xylitol. And you can immediately hear why this did not and could end up us another CDR, cassette, or download release. It’s just too damn good. From start to finish, this is a joyous cascade of heavenly psychedelic ambience and off-the-leash rhythmic chaos. It references a lot of 90s electronic music that’s currently fashionable, but it never feels like a throwback. This is music that is undeniably happening NOW, and which makes now feel like a glorious eternity.

Xylitol is the alias of Catherine Backhouse, producer and DJ under the name DJ Bunnyhausen. She was a resident DJ at Kosmische, the now dormant Krautrock club and is a fan of jungle and hardcore. She currently co-hosts the radio show Slav To The Rhythm, which focuses on vintage central and eastern European pop and electronica and she’s also co-writing a book on Yugoslav pop culture.

‘Anemones’ is a total project from the cover to the music. Backhouse is fascinated by early botanical illustrations of anemones and other aquatic fauna, and how the act of taxonomy reveals as much about human psychology, desire and sublimation as it does about the organic specimen as a thing in itself. Each track is a microcosm of this ‘other life’, an allegory for the extraordinary potential latent within bodies that the dancefloor has the power to activate.

Using early jungle and garage as starting points to connect dots and open up contrasts between dance music and vintage electronics, Backhouse finds a sweet spot which, in her words “feels like something that’s simultaneously still and ancient yet propulsive and ecstatic.” Not afraid of letting the the hiss and flutter of the music show, ‘Anemones’ holds attention with ancient bubbling synths and gracefully drifting arpeggiations, occasionally brought to heel by charming melodies, all accompanied by breakbeats that explode like fireworks. ‘Anemones’ has a lively and unpolished aesthetic that’s a kindred spirit to Nondi_’s 2023 album of smeary, water-damaged footwork, ‘Flood City Trax’.

‘Moebius’ pits the spaced out neon chords of the track’s namesake against absolutely tearing breaks, allowing time for this almost overwhelming combination to become near enough transcendental, while the bleeping melody and sad slavic chorus motif in ‘Okko’ feels like an artifact from an alternative future. The Drexciya meets 2-step garage of ‘Dobro Jutro’ creates a welcome respite at the album’s midpoint before the flow builds up again to ‘Daša’ with its glassy sounds from a lost radiophonic workshop miniature meeting bruising kicks and snares. Meanwhile ‘Iskria’ has purring synth chords and 8-bit melodies evoking the cosmonaut age.

The subliminal influence of the Yugo era is felt in DIY synthesis and Mitteleuropean melody and seen in song titles such as ‘Jelena’, ‘Miha’, ‘Daša’ (named after novelist Daša Drndič) and ‘Iskria’ (taken from the fictitious Balkan region in Ottessa Moshfegh’s bleak fable ‘Lapvona’). ‘Anemones’ very effectively folds experimental genres from different times and places into a very enjoyable new sound.