Xylitol

Twenty years ago poet, novelist and flaneur Edmund Davie gave Catherine Backhouse a hooky copy of Fruity Loops while they were sharing a short life housing flat in South East London. Armed only with this and the fabled Peter Quistgard edition of Cool Edit Pro, the unashamed dilettante has pushed the limits of her fevered imagination attempting to assimilate kosmische music, cold wave, jungle techno and NDW through the meagre tools at her disposal via albums for Woodford Halse, remixes for Planet Mu and countless self-released EPs, mixtapes and albums.

Glamour, cheapness and plasticity are her tools and values: the amphetamine modernism of Ravesignal III, the lysergic reverie of Harmonia’s ‘Watussi’, the deep space breakbeat propulsion of DJ Crystl repurposed for the era of slow motion apocalypse. Xylitol is the rusty spanner dismantling your reproduction Oramics machine, the grit in the membrane of your EDP Wasp, the bashed corner of the 180 gram vinyl Ghost Box reissue you just bought from Boomkat. Her every snare-rush is a curse of hatred to the analogue wankers, hauntological dinosaurs and radiophonia bores that contribute in their own small way to the slow quiescent death of TERF island.

Catherine Backhouse also co-presents the radio show ‘Slav to the Rhythm’ alongside DJ Sarma playing incredible music from Central and Eastern Europe via Repeater Radio and in nightclubs on the Sussex Coast; she sometimes appears in adverts and short films and sells books in a shop

A 2022 interview with her can be found here.

Some of her music is available on bandcamp

Slav to the Rhythm shows are archived here.

She instagrams and tweets as @bunnyhausen