The Nihilists
11.12.05
Titty Twister (Dresden (Germany))
words: Michael Dumiak
photos: Ondrej "Bion" Bierhanzl

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An electronic, running rumble underneath billows of fake smoke announces The Nihilists. The sounds build with blips and beeps surfacing fast and disappearing just as quickly into a network; washes of unmistakable new-wave synth roll over a mix that, instead of becoming a dance track, is becoming a more and more dense drone, complex as it is compressed.

Then it uncoils and explodes out. You still can’t see them for the fog, but Moimir Papalescu & The Nihilists have conquered Dresden’s tough Titty Twister club on a cold east German night.

Papalescu, La Petite Sonja and Hank Manchini (pseudonyms) make up what may be the glimmer of a more outward-looking scene over the German frontier from Prague, an eastern European answer to the Interpols and Faints of the world. Papalescu’s Nihilists are built on an electronic platform but also draw on Manchini’s big hollow-bodied guitar fuzz and Sonja’s sometime-bubblegum, sometime-jaded vox to make the total package more than the sum of its parts.

Papalescu builds the backbone of the band from electronica and electroclash, and as the show ebbs and flows, it gets a little harder to tell who’s making what sounds. As Manchini puts down his seafoam guitar for a little sweaty beatbox groaning and posing, there’s still a buzzsaw in the mix. Pocket-calculator bleeping falls around the sides. Sonja calls this the electronic ground. “It’s the basic stuff and me and Hank are like destroyers. I love the co-existence,” she says later in a quick e-mail interview from Prague after taking her dog for a walk.

The Nihilist beats are precise and repetitive. It’s programmed (though there is a drummer behind all the smoke, I think,) but the tempos change nicely during a well-paced, energetic set at the compact Twister, a rather odd theme bar based on Tarantino vampire flick “From Dusk Till Dawn,” complete with half-a-truck coming through the wall in Dresden’s winding Neustadt district.

Sonja and Manchini’s lines are simple and surprising; she plays at being new-wave childish and then, following a falling wash of sound, moves with very little effort from sure allure to world-weariness, taking off her neon visors. Manchini’s more of a barker enjoying some Strummer moves; the two of them together show a fondness for Cramps-ey or B-52 constructions. For being from Prague, and being Nihilists, and playing the Titty Twister, this outfit isn’t overly bombastic or goth - it’s more glitz and sex and surrealism, visions of ducks and dogs, things going ‘bump’ in the night. “We could feel very gloomy, but we try to get out of it and fight,” Sonja says. “The Nihilists are about to kill and vivify.” By which she means kick butt and juice up a party, which they do. “Oh my God, let’s melt my butter,” she croons. Throw in a cover of “Summer Wine” and Kraftwerk’s “The Model,” and the crowd is well-oiled.

The fact that the Nihilist’s vision is grounded in 20-year-old new wave, as I suppose it might be with Interpol, new-style Gangs of Four and Gary Numans et. als, gets lost in the evening. “I am looking for the thrill,” Sonja says when asked about stylings. For two weeks I’ve had Ultravox’s ‘Sleepwalk’ running in my head, and I’m sure it was because of this show. Hmm… did Midge Ure ever rock that much? Could be. It’s a strange experience. It’s disorientation brought on from viewing what appear to be the shards and scraps of the past, but somehow feel like the future. Whether that’s fake or real is up in the air. With the Nihilists, maybe it’s beside the point.

Moimir Papalescu & The Nihilists have one record out on Berlin-based Pale Music, Analogue Voodoo.