Xylitol’s Anemones is the album of the year

Plus Asra3, Aphex Twin and more

Xylitol, aka DJ Bunnyhausen aka Catherine Backhouse

I’ve been watching the new (ish) version of Nick Hornby’s record-shop romedy High Fidelity this month and it has reminded me how much I love lists. Which, let’s face it, is handy in December, as we start to drown in them. It’s landfill list season and all are welcome.

There are many people who think that lists of the best-albums-of-the-year kind are absolute nonsense and there is no need for them. They argue, with some logic, that it is totally absurd to say that any album is the 33rd best of the year and such thinking can actually be negative in terms of properly assessing a record’s charms. I have time for this argument.

At the same time, lists are at least a way of getting people to pay attention. One thing that I have REALLY noticed this year is how hard it is to get people to read / listen to / enjoy anything I create and it is undoubtedly worse for musicians, with 100,000 songs uploaded to Spotify every day. (Or whatever the actual total is.)

Social media doesn’t work - as even James Blake discovered - and most platforms are so full of stuff that the chances of someone chancing upon your work just because are almost zero. (This is one reason why I am genuinely touched that you choose to subscribe to this newsletter. Thank you.)

I make an effort to seek out new music. And yet ever so often I come across an album, a few months or even years after release, and I wonder how come no one told me about it? Only to realise that loads of people told me about it. But I didn’t pay attention, lost in the maelstrom of reviews, playlists and recommendations.

This is one reason why I like lists. There are loads and loads of lists, great lashings of lists, far too many lists to get your head around, and charting at 36 in the X list of the year probably isn’t going to get me to listen to your album. (Which is my problem, not yours, obviously.) But I do pay attention to lists and charting high in several end-of-year rundowns will get me to pay attention, as a kind of brute force attack.

This is why for Line Noise I want to name one album of the year. And that is Xylitol’s Anemones, released by Planet Mu. Xylitol - as you will hear / read in the accompanying interview - has had a great 2024 and certainly doesn’t need my help. And yet if I can persuade you to listen to just one album this festive season, make it this one. And if it’s just one song, then give Moebius a go. (To be fair, I am also going to be doing a post with 20 or so overlooked albums from 2024. Please listen to them too. But for the moment: Xylitol.)

In a Line Noise double, I spoke to Xylitol for the podcast to celebrate this feat. You can listen to that here. And below I have written a piece using some of that interview to talk about what a wonderful album Anemones is. Warning: contains Belgrade Bananarama.

Xylitol’s Anemones or the quantum magic of prog jungle

There is a very distinct magic to Anemones, Xylitol’s sixth album (depending on how you’re counting). It’s a kind of quantum record, in that it appears to be found in at least two places at once, until tied down by observation.

My initial take on Anemones, which I first heard in late spring 2024 and has stayed with me ever since, was that it was prog jungle, a combination of classically-inclined Tangerine Dream synths and cut-up Amen beats, like Rick Wakeman down Rage or a Tubular Bells brock out. It is a combination that I found both perfectly relaxing and utterly stimulating, a sonic stew that simultaneously invented and mastered a fabulous new sound.

It turns out that this description is not that far from the truth - or perhaps better put, from one truth of this remarkable record. Xylitol, aka DJ Bunnyhausen aka Catherine Backhouse, was a resident DJ at Kosmische, a now-dormant Krautrock club, and is also a huge fan of jungle, having grown up in hardcore suburban outpost St. Albans, home to Source Direct and Photek.

“We knew them around the place,” she says of her town’s celebrated junglists when I speak to her in December 2024. “It was two steps removed. They were people you'd see around town. Jim [Baker] from Source Direct used to work in the supermarket before they got signed to Certificate 18 Records … It felt, at least to me, in the circles I was hanging out in, it was something that was in the air. We were on the periphery but at the same time it felt like a weird epicentre, once removed.”

Backhouse herself calls the mixture of styles on Anemones “Gutter Kosmische”. “I've always been drawn simultaneously to genres like grime, I grew up with hardcore and then jungle,” she says. “But I've always also had this tendency towards the trippy and psychedelic. And there have been specific moments where these things have converged beautifully.”

“It's a really beautiful aesthetic,” she adds. “I like this simultaneous desire for propulsion, for bass pressure, and for earthiness and organic life.”

On a song like the nine-minute album centrepiece, Moebius, you can hear why this combination works so well. The song’s central synth melody seems to creep outwards as it spins, delicate and industrious like an Amon Düül soundtrack to bees collecting pollen, while a furious Amen beat stutters and squalls and a second, more subdued, break lurks beneath. Eventually an ancillary synth line comes wending out of the mix like a flower seeking out sunlight.

Between the song’s elements, Backhouse winds a clever line between stability and evolution. There’s always something changing in Moebius, largely in the evolution and treatment of the Amen break; but the central synth, which is both wavering and rooted, keeps the song tightly focused. At the end of the song’s nine and a half minutes you might feel like you’re back where you started; but you have been on a fantastic journey.

Similarly, the song’s two contrasting textures - on the one hand, the furious, steely funk of the Amen, on the other, the floral embrace of the synth - keep a fine balance. Neither sound is particularly new: the Amen has been a staple of jungle for three decades, while the synths could have come straight from a 70s prog adventure on ice. But I don’t think I have heard them combined in this way; not this proggy and this hardcore, which makes Anemones a subtly unique record.

Going back to the idea of quantum observation, Moebius exists simultaneously in two sonic states: the upbeat fury of the Amen and the beanbag-chill of prog electronica. You can focus in on either, tying the record down temporarily; or you can de-focus the mind and let the two states co-exist.

“That's kind of what I'm aiming for with the music,” Backhouse says when I put this idea to her, “this simultaneous psychic stillness and bodily freneticism is something kind of meditative. I wind back to when I was 16 and first heard the track Meditation by DJ Crystl. That did something absolutely magical to my mind when I first heard that tune. That's what I was trying to cling on to, that simultaneous really hyper-intense, strapped-into-a-kind-of-wind-turbine fanaticism, but this absolute blissful, ancient kind of stillness.”

Perhaps this is why Anemones has stuck so long in my mind this year: I can’t tie the record down, so I can never get tired of it.

Prog jungle - a term Backhouse accepts with good grace if not necessarily enthusiasm - is a fantastic idea. But there is a lot more to Anemones than this particular juxtaposition. As well as being a fan of Krautrock and jungle, Backhouse is also an expert on vintage Central and Eastern European pop and electronica, and in particular Yugoslavian synthpop, which she DJs at Slav To The Rhythm club nights and on Repeater Radio, alongside her partner DJ Sarma.

“In terms of what was real, existing communist countries, Yugoslavia, was much more a free and open society than most of its immediate neighbours in Eastern Europe,” Backhouse explains. “During the 1970s and 1980s there was a really, really vibrant youth subcultural scene, which had much more openness… In Yugoslavia, it was a new wave scene, really. And although there were some fabulous prog and experimental bands within Yugoslavia, the excitement really comes from the new wave disco scene going on there.”

Backhouse says you can hear the influence of Eastern European electronica most openly in the Anemones track Miha, which is named after “Slovenian synth wizard” Miha Kralj.

“I guess the closest similarity of Miha would be the Vangelis, Jean-Michel Jarre wing of synth music,” Backhouse says. “He did his own cosmic synth excursions, as well as producing disco and pop records for artists like Cice-Mace, who are a kind of Belgrade Bananarama girl band. They're absolutely fantastic. We have this real bubblegum disco pop but with these really outrageous, cosmic synth arrangements and vocoder things going on. It transcends kitsch and kosmische. That's very much influenced the track Miha.”

Again, the idea of musical contrast is central. When I ask Backhouse what she loves about this Eastern European music, she identifies “the tension between experimentation and pop sensibility that's enacted in a way that's beautifully unselfconscious and seems to embody this visionary and forward looking spirit”.

You could say the same about Anemones. It is a fantastically original and satisfying album on a musical level. But the record’s innovation extends beyond this, with Anemones billed as “a total project from the cover to the music”.

Backhouse has a fascination for early botanical illustrations of anemones and other aquatic fauna - although it is jellyfish rather than anemones that appear on the record’s scientifically ornate cover - and in particular how the act of taxonomy reveals as much about human psychology as it does about the specimen.

Backhouse says that she loves botanical illustration “as a space where scientific taxonomy and aesthetic objects converge”. “I think about the life of the illustrator, what their internal life is and what they're putting through this, what's supposedly an objective scientific illustration, when actually there's so much more going on in there,” she says. “That almost acts for me as an analogue to the DNA of the music and these different strains, which feed into jungle, feed into ambient music and the kind of connections that are there.”

More than just a brilliant album, then, Anemones is a gesamtkunstwerk, or “total work of art”, to rank alongside Kraftwerk’s The Man-Machine or Drexciya’s Deep Sea Dweller EP. And if that sounds like elevated company, well it is but Anemones always wears its cleverness lightly, in keeping with the record’s quantum duality. Anemones is smart but visceral; studied but instinctive; a thunderous tear out for meditative states; both 2024’s best record and a work for the ages.

Some listening

Two Shell - Magic Powers

When I was writing about maximalism last week, I really should have mentioned Two Shell, a duo who have great metric tons of ideas, not all of them good. Magic Powers is hyperactive, even for Two Shell, stuttering and skipping all over the place, like an E number fit made musical, with the addition of a sort-of-out-of-tune vocal that I enjoyed for its brazen roughness. Christmas is definitely here, in Two Shell world.

Asra3 - #IDKIfYouKnow (feat. Cartier God)

It’s a credit to reggaeton oddball Asra3 that I had never thought of him working with a rapper, until he collaborated with Athens, Georgia, vocalist Cartier God and then it made perfect sense. On the mind-mangling #IDKIfYouKnow, Asra’s attention-span-defying, everything-all-at-once production skills runs into Cartier God’s treated-to-the-point-of-destruction (but still rather sweet) vocal to create a song that glows and glints like a rain puddle infected with petrol.

Aphex Twin - T13 Quadraverbia N+3

This is by no means a new Aphex Twin track, having first been released as part of the epic Soundcloud dump back in 2015, then subsequently come out again on London 03.06.17, a limited EP released at Field Day 2017. But it is an utter pleasure to have one of my favourite Soundcloud tracks available more widely. As with many of the Soundcloud tracks, T13 Quadraverbia N+3 is probably just Richard D. James playing about with a new toy (in this case an Alesis Quadraverb) but he makes something so deliciously vibrant it really doesn’t matter. This is fun Aphex, running a simple, but touching, (and ever so slightly jazz) synth riff through acres of reverb effects then laughing his head off at the results.

Things I’ve done

Line Noise Episode 193 (Album of the year 2024 with Xylitol)

Well, obviously, you have to listen to this now. I know I quoted some of it above but there is so much more to the interview and Xylitol is utterly charming. So give it a spin.

Line Noise presenta Nitsa 30 - Episodio 10 con Marta Salicrú (RPS)

For the Spanish speakers out there, Radio Primavera Sound director - and Nitsa veteran - Marta Salicrú shared her memories of (nearly) three decades dancing at Nitsa, with the spotlight on the early 2000s and electroclash in the tenth and final Line Noise episode celebrating Nitsa’s 30th anniversary.

The playlists

The end is nigh! The end of 2024, that is. And that means you need to get your best albums and songs lists in order. Should you want a helping hand, I have my Spotify list of the best music of 2024 - in its last few weeks of being updated, like a knackered old horse about to be shot - and that old faithful playlist of the best new music of the last four or so years. Follow them, who not? (And, just for the record, I love horses. Please don’t shoot horses.)