Last year, Catherine Backhouse flew to Berlin to perform at legendary IDM label Planet Mu’s 30th anniversary. The German capital looks a lot different than it did when she visited in 2005, when there were still empty apartments and squatters everywhere. The friend she stayed with then lived in an abandoned flower shop, and the store’s name—Blumenfantasie, written in what she recalls as a “1970s psychedelic font”—stuck with her. It served as a potent contrast with her own marathon partying, a pop of color among the gray concrete and drab brickwork that housed the beating heart of European dance music culture.
Backhouse’s music as Xylitol works on a similar level. Since signing to Planet Mu in 2024, she’s infused the jungle and early drum’n’bass of her youth with warped, old-school synth motifs inspired by her longtime love of krautrock and kosmische music. The combo, something like cosmic jungle, is novel enough to feel fresh, even though it’s actually a mix of sounds from decades before—nostalgia for memories scrambled by the passage of time and too many nights out. (She even uses 20-year-old software to make it.) With her second Planet Mu LP, Blumenfantasie, the open-ended drift of krautrock and the freewheeling flow of jungle meet the lonely hum of European synth music. It sounds like a lot on paper, until you hear Backhouse’s intuitive drum programming, and the melodic motifs wrapping around them like vines crawling up a drainpipe.
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Before she started making jungle, Backhouse was immersed in the world of Neue Deutsche Welle, which was to krautrock what new wave was to punk. On Blumenfantasie, she starts to bring those ideas back into her music, with strange, arcane sounds and melancholy moods that evoke Berlin streetscapes. It’s an aesthetic mined by artists across the continent: Belarusian stars Molchat Doma, the Soviet hardware–obsessed producer X.Y.R., and the Bosnian composer Miaux, who Backhouse namechecks as an inspiration. With all these disparate styles funneled into drum’n’bass, Blumenfantasie feels truly out of time, an alternate history of the hardcore continuum where jungle developed in the basements of Kreuzberg instead of London.
Blumenfantasie begins by hurtling into the world of the National Film Board of Canada in a collaboration with audiovisual duo Sculpture, “Chromophoria.” The breaks are lightweight but frantic, switching up and looping back upon themselves with all the giddy grace of early ’90s Metalheadz records. The synth melodies seem to melt around them, to eerie and unsettling effect. “Bowed Clusters,” with London dream-pop group the Leaf Library, is more lysergic; the drums dip in and out of a mucky puddle of sound that calls back to Delia Derbyshire’s radiophonic music as much as it does Wendy Carlos’ groundbreaking synth albums. It’s like listening to two dimensions at once: the textured melodies feel like physical objects, and the loose drums float in antigravity and bend the rules of time and rhythm.
The album is a sensory trip. The calm, breathing chords on “Lights” create the illusion of slowing down the drums, and “Melancholia” sounds like it’s flying through outer space, the bass enveloping the soundscape before leaving a weightless vacuum behind every few seconds. There’s a dip into brittle chiptune on “Halo” and a lovely detour into downtempo on “Mirjana,” with a hopeful synth melody that sounds like it sputtered out of a sequencer that can’t quite keep time anymore.
