Blumenfantasie

DJ and producer Catherine Backhouse’s second album under her Xylitol alias is an immersive collection of kosmische jungle, ghost breaks, and haunted drum & bass. Although derived from club music, to me this is very much a headphones album, the kind of album that builds its own distinctive, uncompromising sonic world. The cavernous drops of sub bass and expertly chopped and sliced breakbeats — that for all their abrasive sonic qualities feel welcoming in their familiarity — provide a rhythmic backbone for her audio vocabulary of fragile synthetic textures, twinkling synth programming, gossamer thin samples and ethereal, drifting audioscapes, the tracks sometimes dipping into a particular cold, grey, lonely European synth tradition. Elsewhere there are hints of flittering IDMish programming, and clear, innocent new age chimes, the slightly BBC Radiophonic Workshop / library music archive feel contrasting nicely with the futurist breakbeat science. Potent sonic witchcraft.