Juno Daily – In The Mix & interview: DJ Bunnyhausen aka Xylitol
DJ Bunnyhausen in the house
DJ Bunnyhausen aka Xylitol is a woman of many talents. She was a resident at the long running Krautrock night Kosmische, but she also an expert on Yugoslavian synthpop, a subject on which she’s currently writing a book and one she already broadcasts on regularly, via her brilliantly named Slav To The Rhythm podcast.
That said, she’s also a massive fan of jungle and drum & bass, and that’s the vibe very much at the heart of her new album for Mike Paradinas’ Planet Mu label, Anenomes, as well as the rather fantastic Juno Daily – In The Mix session that she’s just completed for us. She even took the time to answer a few probing questions too…
Hi and thanks for your time…. First of all, can you tell us where you are right now, and what kind of day you’re having… Been anywhere already or going anywhere interesting later?
Today has been an emotional rollercoaster, right now I’m doing my best to dissolve it all in the bath.
Tell us about the mix that you’ve kindly done for us. Did you have a goal in mind or was it played by ear?
I was trying to honour my commitment to sensory dissolution at 160 BPM. If there’s a common thread between all the musics I love it’s the drive to obliterate the ego, whether through repetition, negative space or sensory overload.
Drum & bass and jungle are at the heart of your new album, Anemones, but there’s more to it than that… Tell us more…
I grew up immersed in hardcore and jungle. For a town with nothing going on St Albans in the mid 90s felt like an unlikely epicentre. My earliest musical epiphanies came from my neighbours and schoolmates once-removed Photek and Source Direct, as well as whatever signals we could catch from the London and Middlesex pirates from our periphery of the M25.
For a curious teenager who felt at once magnetically drawn to the dance and equally indisposed to introspection, it made sense to try and uncover all the lines of influence I could from ambient jungle to kosmische music to rare groove to soundsystem culture to musique concrete, even the ones that probably only existed in my imagination.
Ever since DJ Leon from the Kosmische Club gave me my first regular gig when I was barely 20 I’ve been trying to capture that sense of joy being in the centre of a room full of bodies vibrating outside of linear time. If it’s anything, Anemones is a placeholder for that brief moment of possibility that I’m hoping I can capture in spirit without succumbing to nostalgia.
(tracklisting at bottom of article)
Anemones is quite a straight name compared to some of the (very funny) titles you’ve gone for in the past…
It was going to be more florid but I reigned myself in! It came from a line from a poem by my friend Edmund Davies, who is a London flaneur (though he would baulk at that title) and poet for hire on the South Bank. The full line I cribbed it from read ‘We grew from the ground like anemones‘ which, when I read it, felt like an allegory for how I saw the dance and the nightclub as a laboratory for new forms of community and subjectivity.
It must be going well, as it was going to be cassette-only – a lovely format – but there’s now going to be a vinyl run too. You must be delighted?!
Having operated at the cottage industry end of the music industry for two decades, the reach of the album and the depth of connection people seem to have felt with it have really thrilled me. And yes, much as I love a cassette tape, I’m excited that it’s going to be on vinyl too so all the jungle dads, and mums, can spin at at their local pub’s open decks night.
How did you get into Yugoslavian synthpop? And what about it made you get into it so deeply? What specific qualities does it have that make it unique?
My addiction to Yugoslav New Wave came from my partner, both in life and in DJing, DJ Sarma. Our club night and radio show ‘Slav to the Rhythm’ came out of nightly trips down the YouTube rabbit hole of Yugoslav nostalgia: for her it began as a reconnection to her childhood in a country that fragmented in the most brutal way imaginable, and for me as a kind of vicarious nostalgia. Since the 1970s Yugoslav culture endured little of the censoriousness of its Central and Eastern European neighbours all the while Tito’s ‘soft communism’ afforded Yugoslav youth the social and economic conditions that could nurture a vibrant and often transgressive culture through networks of youth clubs, social centres and galleries. We’ve been hosting our irregular club night and our fortnightly radio show for Repeater Radio since 2019 and the well of Yugo New Wave, Electronica, Disco and Funk still seems inexhaustible.
And what’s next for you after this?
DJ Sarma and I are bringing Slav to the Rhythm to this year’s Supernormal Festival this weekend; I have a belated album launch at The Brunswick in Hove on August 23rd alongside UKAEA and Dale Frost (both of whom are spectacular performers). Our long promised book on Yugoslav pop culture in the 21st Century is still a work in progress and will be for a while! My new work as Xylitol is being pulled in multiple directions and we’ll just see where it goes but meanwhile I have some more very exciting gigs lined up in the Autumn and Winter alongside my best comrades Sculpture, Meemo Comma and Janine A’Bear.
TRACKLISTING
Nondi_ – Orchid Juke
Jlin – Autopilot
Suzi Analogue & Junglepussy – 2DEEP
Blame and Justice – Nightvision (D’Cruze remix)
Spiritual Combat – Rat Trap
Bruce Gilbert – Eline Cout II
Sounds Of Life – Intellect
Jana Rush – Divine
Conrad Schnitzler – Nachte In Kreuzberg
Traxman – Footworkin’ On Air
Valentina Magaletti – Unity of the Mind
DJ Mayhem – Inesse
DJ Stingray – It’s All Connected
Jana Rush – Chill Mode
DJ Manny feat DJ Phil – You n You
Jacques Lejeune – Danse u Miroir
Source Direct – Call and Response
DJ Girl – So Hot
DJ Spinn & DJ Rashad – Space Juke
DJ Taye feat Deejay Earl – I Know Luv
Taso & Teklife feat DJ Rashad and DJ Spinn- New Start
Suzi Analogue – Fsn8
Traxman and DJ EQ – Computer Ghetto II
Wriggler Bascombe – Final Battle
Traxman – Under Cover Jack
Beyond the Future – Feel It
DJ Rashad – In The Club B 4 11 O’Clock
Dubb Hustlers – Untitled
Vulva – Cydonia