MCMLXXXV (Nicolas Endlicher) is a name that carries disciplined austerity, yet his work is anything but minimal. As a DJ, curator, and co-founder of the Berlin party and collective Herrensauna, he has helped recalibrate what high-intensity club culture can hold, where pleasure does not apologise for its own severity.
MCMLXXXV’s formation is inseparable from his relationship with Cem Dukkha, known as CEM. They first met in the restrictive Vienna as teenagers, before growing into a shared artistic sensibility. When Endlicher and Dukkha moved to Berlin in 2015, they found a city where post-Wall permissiveness coexisted with an increasingly professional nightlife economy. Berlin could still be ferocious, but it could also feel strangely sanitised.
Herrensauna began in cramped conditions at Bertrams as a refusal of that smoothing process.
Herrensauna’s later movement into larger spaces did not dilute its identity. Its association with Tresor placed the collective in one of Berlin’s most symbolically loaded spaces, but a queerer crowd, a more stylistically volatile energy, and a less deferential atmosphere altered the room's emotional architecture. Over time, the project built a global circuit while retaining the internal grammar that made it instantly recognisable. The New York residency at Basement has been one of the clearest signs of that durability.
MCMLXXXV’s sets are constructed as sequences of bodily tension, drawing from EBM, electro, hard trance, and industrial. His Boiler Room appearance with Herrensauna showcased his ability to make severity feel communal. As do mixes for The Lot Radio, Dekmantel, HATE, and Glitch. The Bassiani Podcast episode showed an artist lingering on foreboding bleeps and robotic vocal shards. The b2b recording with CEM for HÖR Radio made the partnership at the project’s core audible, and on December 19, that partnership lands at Control Club for CEM b2b MXMLXXXV.
Endlicher’s curatorial reach extends through the Herrensauna label. Its compilation series, V/A Vol. 1 in October 2020, V/A Vol. 2 in December 2022, and V/A Vol. 3 in December 2024, sketches artists and ideas linked by intensity. The label has also issued focused EPs, including SALOME’s HACKER and Tomás Urquieta’s Ai ferri Corti.
A significant part of that label identity is visual and tactile. Endlicher has worked closely with Mauro Ventura, whose calligraphy-inflected imagery gives the releases a sense of craft. Through Herrensauna's collaborations with Carhartt WIP and Buffalo, MCMLXXXV has further helped translate Herrensauna’s visual code into garments and objects that read as extensions of a world.
He has also stepped into other cultural forms in various ways. Under his full name, Nicolas Maxim Endlicher, he has appeared in screen projects, including Drew Lint’s M M, and has been involved in work connected to Bruce LaBruce and Matt Lambert, filmmakers whose interests in sexuality, visibility, and transgression overlap with Herrensauna’s nocturnal politics.
What ties these strands together is a consistent philosophy of specificity. MCMLXXXV is not a neutral service provider for the dance floor. He is an organiser of conditions who changes what people allow themselves to feel in public. His work argues for something messier and more alive, intensity as a form of collective self-recognition.
