Night Tapes on their origins and being inspired by environments for debut album 'portals//polarities' • Interview • DIY Magazine

Instead of heading home between legs of touring, London-based Night Tapes instead chose to write their debut album ‘portals//polarities’ from the temporary sanctuaries of hotel rooms and Airbnbs. “These big gusts of winds would rise up through the mountain and blow everything away in the studio,” recalls Max Doohan of a trip to Mexico, where the trio ran cables out to the rooftop of their accommodation, opting to lay down tracks over a view of the valley. “We were writing two years prior to that with pictures of mountains on the desktop,” laughs Sam “Richie” Richards, reflecting on the neat twist of fate.

The trio’s debut follows a line of EP releases (the earliest dating back to 2019), and was formed from evening jams within the south east London shared house where Max, Sam and lead vocalist Iiris Vesik previously resided. “Max and I were in bands together when we were younger,” notes Sam, explaining those early days of living in the capital post-studies. “We were producing in different rooms, and we naturally started to write songs together.” The group of producers’ first full-length lands somewhere between analogue and digital: “the contrast, for us, is where a lot of the interest is. What happens when you combine multiple things?” Max posits. “It’s like collage.”

Sonically, the band lean towards more guitar-driven songwriting instead of the house and dance music usually synonymous with their peers, embracing the odd tape hiss or imperfection as they sample found sounds from busy city traffic to house party chatter. The seed of their earliest work was planted when Max’s mum gifted him an old dictaphone; once used to record her yoga classes, the device would later hang from a window to capture the capital’s ambience. “You can record a really simple guitar part and then call it to this cassette player, and it will come back unrecognisable. It was a way of becoming more interested in guitar music from a textural place. It inspired me to write songs again,” he explains.

Experimenting with textures captured the band’s ear for environments. Their living arrangements and recording methods naturally encouraged vocal saturation, while their set ups used the smallest amount of equipment possible. Restraint became key to Iiris’ vocal delivery, her near-whisper floating above Max and Sam’s instrumentals but nestled within the reverb-heavy mixes, which take cues from bedroom electronic styles to prioritise intimacy over spectacle. “You can have wobbles and flutters and all that stuff that you wouldn’t get when it’s super clean,” the vocalist adds, her visual brain firing. “I remember hearing Flying Lotus for the first time, and I could see this big, crunchy, floating ball of textures hovering around.”

Valuing discovery and retaining the imperfections of their earliest times as a band, on their debut LP, Night Tapes take advantage of their quirks and limitations; where many bands later attempt to recapture an original energy and authenticity, they’ve worn it on their sleeve with pride from the beginning. ‘portals//polarities’ showcases this in razor-sharp detail.

‘portals//polarities’ is out now via Nettwerk.

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