{"product_id":"xylitol-blumenfantasie","title":"Xylitol 'Blumenfantasie'","description":"\u003cp\u003eXylitol, aka producer and DJ Catherine Backhouse, shifts up the refinement and musical breadth for her second album Blumenfantasie, the follow-up to her Planet Mu debut Anemones.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eWith Blumenfantasie, Xylitol wanted “to make space and for the music to float and propel at once”, finding routes through the pointillistic figures, cascading synths and the meditative stillness of kosmische musik and bolder breakbeat programming. She reaches this delicate balance through careful subtraction, hoping “to convey a sense of intimacy and sadness but without sentimentality” which she manages with a feel and sound that's raw and intuitive.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eBlumenfantasie rolls through detailed jungle workouts that flutter and bleep, through beatless ambience, taking a rare dip below 160 bpm for the elegiac Mirjana, the album’s most explicit nod to Krautrock with a drum break chopped up from Amon Duul II’s anthemic ‘Archangel’s Thunderbird’, through to Halo, a bare bones grime rhythm that calls to mind the missing link between industrial pioneers Nurse With Wound and Wiley's Eskibeat.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eCatherine cast her net to draw in experimental audiovisual duo Sculpture and Reading based post-rock band The Leaf Library as collaborators, pulling the former’s whirling eddies of musique concrète into a slice of sublime aquatic jungle, and the latter’s radiophonic folksong into a dark and disorientating breakbeat workout equally indebted to Source Direct as to Broadcast.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eBlumenfantasie moves with a confident, self-effacing fluidity which has been informed by DJ Bunnyhausen’s more regular DJ gigs. She speculates ‘if this album feels more cohesive than its predecessor it's likely because I've been DJing a lot more, with Worthing Techno Militia, with central and eastern european electronica collective Slav to the Rhythm, as well as being part of Italo Disco crew Flex. Moving between these zones seemed to open up hidden pathways between the disparate musical trajectories they represent.'\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eWhile Anemones contrasted the rough and the delicate, its successor is an album built for the head, hips and heart, with painterly sounds and a sense of intimacy that encourages deep listening while keeping its eyes on the strobelight and its feet on the dancefloor.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\u003cstrong\u003eTracklisting:\u003c\/strong\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cstrong\u003eSide A\u003c\/strong\u003e \u003cbr\u003e1. Chromophoria (with Sculpture) \u003cbr\u003e2. Blumenfantasie \u003cbr\u003e3. Tilted Arc \u003cbr\u003e4. Melancholia \u003cbr\u003e5. Mirjana\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\u003cstrong\u003eSide B\u003c\/strong\u003e \u003cbr\u003e6. Sudwestwind \u003cbr\u003e7. Lights \u003cbr\u003e8. Bowed Clusters (with The Leaf Library) \u003cbr\u003e9. Halo \u003cbr\u003e10. Falling\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Planet Mu","offers":[{"title":"Vinyl LP","offer_id":56340759871865,"sku":"ZIQ484","price":23.99,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0238\/8053\/files\/xylitol_blumenfantasieZIQ484.jpg?v=1765814386","url":"https:\/\/cargorecordsdirect.co.uk\/products\/xylitol-blumenfantasie","provider":"Cargo Independent Distribution","version":"1.0","type":"link"}