Sculpture, photo by Pat Grimm
Xylitol play Acid Horse Festival, May 24 – 26 alongside former subscriber music artists Wacław Zimpel, VALVE, UKAEA, and Farmer Glitch & Friends. To get discount tickets – and many other perks – subscribe today and email acidhorsewilts@gmail.com.
“In a way, it’s a really fucking stupid name”, laughs Catherine Backhouse. She’s talking about Xylitol, the artificial sweetener which has also functioned as her stage name since the early 2000s. “Just like Sculpture, to be honest”, Dan Hayhurst concurs. He handles the music in that audiovisual duo, teaming up with artist Reuben Sutherland to create art as multidimensional as their name suggests.
“I wanted a name that started with an X”, Backhouse continues, “because X seemed like this mysterious, futuristic letter. I wanted something artificial, plastic and cheap, something sweet and a bit icky. That seemed to fit with my aesthetic at the time; I’m drawn to the glamour of plastic.” For decades now, Xylitol has been carving out her own niche in the underground UK dance scene. Though her earlier music is indebted to the zany attitude of analogue synth pop and experimental electronics, she is soon to release a paradisiacal jungle and breakbeat record Anemones with Planet Mu, which she calls “really, really gratifying, as I’ve followed [label founder Mike Paradinas’] music since forever.”
Soon to play at the tQ-affiliated Acid Horse weekender at the end of this May, she and Sculpture have also teamed up to release remixes of two tracks, one from each artist, available exclusively to Quietus subscribers. They serve as a direct artistic exchange between the longtime friends, who met as regulars at Kosmische Club, a krautrock and post punk night often hosted at The Garage or Corsica Studios. “When you say a post rock and electronic club, it sounds very cerebral – it really wasn’t at all,” says Backhouse. “It was quite messy.”
Kosmische was Hayhurst’s first taste of going out in London, having previously lived in Derby and Sheffield going to techno, rave and house nights. “I always wanted to walk into the lasers – like you’re seeking out this sensory disintegration. There’s definitely that same connection there between your first experiences in techno clubs and Club Kosmische.” Backhouse, too, went out to techno clubs, but she was most immersed in the burgeoning 1990s jungle scene in St Albans, inspired by her older brother who went out raving in the golden years of the 1980s. “I was too young at the time, so I enjoyed it vicariously through my cool older brother who gave us tapes of Centreforce FM and Fantasy Radio,” she explains. “I’d listen to these, like: oh my God, this is like transmissions from another planet.
“I had a friend who was at school with Photek,” she continues. “Phil and Source Direct, they’re people we’d see around town. St Albans is an unlikely hub for this one particular mutation of jungle, and it was just there – everyone listened to Weekend Rush or Don FM.”
Both of the new tracks released to tQ subscribers exist in liminal worlds that echo the anachronistic, disjointed qualities of their artistry. Xylitol’s track ‘Ammonia’ has not previously been released, and does not appear on her upcoming record, making the Sculpture remix its only public iteration. “I wasn’t sure what to do with it,” she explains. “It was much slower and slightly odd, and it needed that external output to bring out what was in the track.”
Sculpture’s remix transforms her jungle sensibilities into two floating worlds, mashed together. He made the tune on a particularly searing day in a field, a stark contrast to being holed up in his north London flat. He took his iPad outside to a spot overlooking the sea, caught between these two environments. “It was a bit of an interesting puzzle: I’ve got this jungle track and it’s amazing, but I didn’t want to make these beats better, or different.” Instead, Hayhurst took Backhouse’s break, deciding to “treat it like a paste and squirt it around,” as he puts it. “That’s my usual M.O. What I really like to do is to take two things and make them happen simultaneously. You get these overlapping, but not really synchronising things, whether they’re places, realities, rhythms,or temporal associations. I just really like to just stick things together and fuck it up and see what comes out of it.”
There’s a particular moment in the remix where after a minute of tranquil, dreamy synths, a spray of drum hits splatters out of the cosmos and hits you in the face. It’s comical stuff, and I tell Hayhurst it made me burst out into laughter. He grins. “I love that. I just think music is just so overly serious all the time.
“It’s not that I don’t have serious intent, I very much do,” he clarifies. “But it should be able to be surprising and funny. Good pop music, whatever it is, has always been all of those things. It’s a form of communication. You’re hoping to get a reaction of some kind, for it to be a two way street. To hear somebody say, ‘It made me laugh’, I love that, it’s perfect. My mum always says, ‘Oh Dan, it was so nice, but then you always have to do something horrible, don’t you?’”
Catherine Backhouse, photo courtesy of the artist
Meanwhile, ‘Chromophoria’ is taken from the upcoming Sculpture record, which Hayhurst calls “the most direct record I’ve made so far”. Backhouse takes Hayhurst’s musique concrete stems and twittering bird chirps, layering her trademark analogue keys on top and turning it into an idyllic jungle banger that’s concurrent with her desire to create music with “a direct emotional connection,” as she puts it. “I’m trying to connect with stuff that hits me quite viscerally.
“Dan gave me this beautiful material, I almost felt I had this length of fabric to chop bits from and make this montage from,” she continues. “I got really carried away. Dan talks about walking into the lasers, and I think through dancing there is this ego dissolution and this sense of internal displacement, which is just what I wanted to get, and which is what I got, from that material, but just needed to bring that out. Another way of getting lost in this material was looking at something you could fucking wig out to.”
She cites two main points of reference for her artistry: the album Zuckerzeit, “Cluster at their most playful, like they’re tapping into some kind of ancient lore,” and of course, “the mad jungle techno stuff.” She says, “For me, the most important thing is to actually make some kind of sense on a dancefloor. Part of me wants to push things as far as I can go while it will still work, but when I started doing jungle, I didn’t want these more overtly experimental approaches to it, which always defy you to approach it as a dancer. I don’t want to approach it from the point of remove – fundamentally, it’s music to be danced to.”
Artwork for Xylitol and Sculpture’s tQ exclusive split
Each artist’s remix has a haunted quality about it, which both agree manifests in different ways. When asked about hauntedness in his music, Hayhurst responds: “What I’m interested in, which these days is not such a novelty because of the internet, is the way time has been melted down into one massively overstimulating cauldron. I don’t know if haunted is the word, but the past is with us.”
Backhouse, on the other hand, thinks it is herself instead who is haunted: “I’m haunted by the music that I’ve listened to and absorbed. My music involves memory. There’s elements that could be interpreted as nostalgic – god forbid, that’s far from the intent – but you can’t make a jungle record without having these past references. But like Dan says, we have a different relationship to the past now in the era of infinite availability of every cultural artifact,” she continues. “I have my own personal nostalgic memories of jungle, and the golden age of krautrock and analogue electronics, which I was too young to experience firsthand. So there’s multiple levels of memory and sedimentations and history within there, but they all naturally coexist in the internet era.”
Ultimately, the two artists are guided by the pursuit of what Backhouse terms “the desire for ego dissolution,” the ability to lose yourself in sensory disintegration, memories of an era gone, in a rush of warm crackling breaks: “Just to obliterate that and to help others to be able to do that, as best as I possibly can.”
Xylitol play Acid Horse Festival, May 24 – 26 alongside former subscriber music artists Wacław Zimpel, VALVE, UKAEA, and Farmer Glitch & Friends. To get discount tickets – and many other perks – subscribe today and email acidhorsewilts@gmail.com.
