At the start of Snow Strippers’ Basement East set, Graham Perez stood on stage with his turntable, accompanied only by a projected silhouette of the duo’s other half, Tatiana Schwaninger. A bass-boosted piano melody gave way to screeching synthesizers, the beginning of “Just Your Doll” from the duo’s “Night Killaz Vol. 1” album.
The crowd, already buzzing from a tight 40-minute opener from fellow electronic act Suzy Sheer, flew into a frenzy when Schwaninger joined Perez with her microphone in hand. “Please don’t let my veins constrict,” she sang-shouted, her voice distorted and mechanized by autotune.
Snow Strippers’ lyrics and visuals teeter between sensuality and violence. At the beginning of the “Just Your Doll” music video, girls dance in their underwear in front of a shaky camcorder, but by the two-minute mark of the music video, Schwaninger has tied up and gagged the other girls she’d been partying with. “I’m, I’m lost in hell. I’m, I’m the only one in hell,” Schwaninger sings, with a flat expression on her face and a kitchen knife in her hand.
However, on stage, Schwaninger and Perez ditched the foreboding imagery for gleeful debauchery.
“Nashville, you’re too lit!” Perez shouted. In his white tank top, he looked like the spitting image of Alien, the gun-slinging, grill-flashing deuteragonist of Harmony Korine’s “Spring Breakers.”
Perez flexed his muscles for a cameraman who flitted behind the DJ stand while filming on his iPhone. Air horns, gunshots and a ridiculous, robotic snippet that repeated, “N- N- Night Killaz, Night Killaz, We love prescription drugs!” cut through the tracks.
When Snow Strippers released their first album in 2021, they embraced the noisy, digitized production style of mid-2000’s electroclash artists like Crystal Castles and Salem. With their digital camera aesthetic and fur outfits, Schwaninger and Perez harken back to a recession era cultural moment. But like the rest of us, the band is entrapped by the present; their streaming numbers metastasized over the summer when a snippet of “Under Your Spell” went viral on TikTok.
What Snow Strippers and their contemporaries really inherited from that bygone music scene is a hunger for escapism. More than a decade removed from the end of the recession, economic anxiety looms more menacingly than ever. Endless wars continue abroad, but now they’re live-streamed on our personal devices.
As the night went on, the air got hazier and more humid from strobe lights and body heat. The room stank of sweat and artificial weed. The pair played a slew of unreleased tracks, but music from their newest release, the more house-inspired “Night Killaz Vol. 2,” made few appearances save for the repetitive, increasingly grinding “prescription drugs” soundbite.
Each successive song couldn’t quite replicate the night’s initial, all-consuming rush. But in the same way that people dull their senses with another substance, another distraction, another 15 minutes of the endless scroll, the crowd couldn’t quit waiting for the next narcotic hook to hit.
