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‘portals // polarities’ celebrates process as well as offering a wider emotional perspective on Night Tapes’ polyglot influences.
Many of us will at some point have done it; having either strummed a chord, blown a note or held down a key, we for the briefest of seconds counted ourselves as a musician even if the reality was very far from the truth.
But what about those artists that make music but don’t play instruments, how should others see them?
It’s a debate that’s been raging for decades, but however those on either side of it choose to feel about the other, it isn’t easily resolved.
Night Tapes – Iiris Vesik, Max Doohan and Sam “Richie” Richards – have quietly grown a reputation for multi-textured compositions which split electronica’s various differences, blending ambient noise and founds sounds with more orthodox club-ready beats.
After releasing the EPs Dream Forever In Glorious Stereo (2019), Download Spirit (2020) and Perfect Kindness (2023) ‘portals // polarities’ celebrates process as well as offering a wider emotional perspective on Night Tapes’ polyglot influences.
It was a matter of maximising spare time: assembled on computers in hotel rooms and AirBnBs, the group continued in spite of the displacement to happily make use of external stimuli, sampling amongst other things Estonian swamps and birdsong in Mexico.
Whilst they’re fiercely in defence of a non-studio aesthetic, keeping the roughness otherwise lost in a digital world, ‘portals // polarities’ inevitably has a travelogue feel.
As an example of this unpredictability opener ‘enter’ begins with a swirl of white noise before falling back to being a relatively austere acoustic ballad.
To add a twist of the surreal, Vesik’s high in the register vocals meanwhile are childlike and playful throughout, often reminiscent of a pre-meltdown era Grimes.
Seekers of obvious truths may have to look elsewhere though, ‘television’ starting with the gnostic sounding, ‘I don’t want to become just a person/In my phone in ambiance/Wanna be where the fun is/You refine until you crystallize’, with Vesik simply explaining: “The emotions are in the chords, not the lyrics.”
Maybe that’s not why we’re here though. ‘pacifico’ neatly samples a head nodding break from Souls Of Mischief’s hip hop classic ’93 ‘Til Infinity’, but next to the tougher chassis nestles a more vulnerable story of snatching joy wherever you can find it.
This melding of parts occasionally takes the listener’s annexed memory off into distractions – ‘storm’s fragmental elements live on the absolute tip of the brain – but the effect’s default mode is mostly stimulating rather than copyist.
Vesik has explained its prosaic nature as in tandem with the record’s intensely personal meaning:
“The album is an exploration of energies and an exploration into my soul. I go into the spectrality of my being and into different polarities within myself.”
The quest for meaning to one side however, there’s an undeniably sweet and soothing energy here; ‘Lemon tree midnight’s fuzzy dream pop is, if things are just right, more or less perfection, whilst ‘tokyo sway’s disarming, Café Del Mar lo-fi has the intangible quality of a sunset island breeze.
Niceness is an unfashionable virtue now, and in predictably short supply, but to bring happiness ‘swordsman’s in the cloud’s melodies are easy to hold onto, whilst the trip-hop of ‘babygirl (like no1 else)’ wraps ethereal layers around itself, managing to sound breathless and innocent at the same time.
Whatever you use, whether it’s software, a guitar or the bagpipes, you’ll know that if it was easy everybody would be a musician.
Night Tapes have made ‘portals // polarities’ as much about the journey inwards as the noise they make, assembling it from a toybox of anything.
It maybe shouldn’t work but it absolutely does, plectrum or not.
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