Night Tapes: Just a Jam Session
By Serenna Zingg
12/15/25
Courtesy of Spotify
While undeniably futuristic, listening to Night Tapes (made up of Iiris Vesik, Max Doohan, and Sam Richards) is never the kind of experience that makes you wonder if you’re receiving electronic shock punishment via your headphones for the crime of spending too much time on your phone: because, somehow, they make music that sounds more like reflective quietude than quietude itself. At times, the soundscape is meditative in its inability to be pinned down or caught; both distant enough to be shrouded in mist and endlessly regenerative, yet so close in your ear that you could practically believe it’s your own thoughts playing back to you. Although the genius of Night Tapes’ production is revealed in the game of trying to track one thread of sound and realizing you can’t, an attuned ear will still find the music stands up on its own instead of slinking into its own transient atmosphere as an excuse for spinelessness or sloppiness - undeniably a trademark that is a point of pride for the band. This balance is best found in their recent album portals/polarities, a record of soft corners yet sharp observations that feels purely allergic to digital hype of fads in its showboaty technological opulence for organic airiness.
Night Tapes’ music leans more soulful and exploratory than algorithmic or digital for the sake of it. Lead singer Iiris Vesik sees the futuristic side of their music as acting like a bridge between “the real world and the digital,” providing a welcome sweet spot for electronic fans from other clattering, horsesish digital music that sounds like its only real mission statement is winning the online attention wars. For producers, tracks like “Storm” are practically masterclasses in making genre-blending music that sound cohesive yet varied. In their 2025 full-length release portals/polarities, the collective find a way for their music to have it all: guitar that sounds like its processing medium could’ve believably been the electrified wire on a telephone pole, wettened drums that could’ve been recorded inside a humid bathroom, yet surrounded by far-off otherworldly vocals and glowing, intangible electronic helixes. Instead of dystopian hollowness or a feeling of removal from the art, the ability of their music to be used as a spiritual or meditative tool derives from vibrational warmth from compressed and saturated analog tape and organic reverb created by dispersing sound via cassette and recording through a hodgepodge of guitar pedals.
Alas, there is such a thing as being overeager about researching into a band’s creative process while preparing interview questions: seeing them described online as “classically-trained” (which they soon laughed at, as it was a bit of a half-truth), three of my questions for our interview revolved around their history as traditionally-trained musicians. Thankfully, they were some of the warmest collectives I’ve spoken with and treated the questions with an ever-increasing sense of humor. Thank you kindly to Night Tapes for not making the interview every journalist’s worst nightmare. For more on the band’s genre-neutral approach, sonic risks, and David Bowie favorites, read our interview at Iceland Airwaves below:
You’ve described your music before as being increasingly extroverted - this is such an interesting description to me. Would you boil the difference down to increased confidence from increased audience exposure and approval, or more so a different pull of influences that had been affecting your work?
Max Doohan: I would say the turning point was when we were on tour in Mexico. That energy from the tour translated into the music - but unconsciously, and we didn’t realize it until we listened and were like wow, this has shaped our music. We’re usually writing in London at night, so especially during lockdown, it was quite gentle.
Iiris Vesik: Yeah, the music is more ‘Rahhh’ instead of ‘Hmmm…’ (she added while bejeweling her eyelids for the show).
I actually wanted to talk about your live performances. The way that electronic fusion bands approach their stage life fascinates me. As an artist whose final product goes through a good amount of filters, including voice effects, how much does playing the music live change how it sounds? Are there any tweaks you like to make - e.g., washy feedback and then turn up the jazzier guitar sequences, or do you try to get it as close to the product on Spotify?
Sam Richards: That electronic aspect of it is trying to get the balance between both of these audiences. When we first started playing live, it sounded really rough because we didn’t have the ability to bring the electronic element to our live sound as seamlessly. I’d say recently it started sounding better, because we have more confidence to get the vibe we envision when we write them translated to live contexts. But, naturally, songs do kind of surprise you and take on a fresh edge when you’re playing them live to people. We’re really happy with where we are now.
Doohan: We’ve been on some excursions recently, you could say. Like the Perfect Kindness EP has some R&B elements to it, and assisted memories has lots of ambient. I think where the core of it lies is when something happens simultaneously - like when we’re developing the bass at the same time that we’re also creating it alongside the electronic elements. I think that’s when Night Tapes sounds the most Night Tapes to us.
Richards: I’ve been making electronic music for years, but I was trained in jazz guitar when I was younger. Making nonconventional music was a form of rebellion for me - but when you’re classically trained as a kid, it’s a framework through which you see music that’s hard to fully escape from that.
So, naturally, hopping genres so frequently results in a bit of a constant set of challenges that you’re encountering. What is the riskiest sonic experiment that ended up paying off?
Richards: "Space Force," maybe. "Space Force" is definitely an outlier in the discography. We made the song with a friend - a flatmate of mine at the time, actually - and the track is basically just drums, with him singing on it. We put it out very early, too, when nobody really knew what we were about. Like, even the bassline is just drums. It’s its own little experiment, in a way. But I quite like it still.
Vesik: Well, a general risk is that we have been genre-blending all throughout our work, and for a long time! I mean, I don’t think we have a defined genre that we’re in, and I guess that has been the biggest risk we’ve taken is not staying in a very defined category. We like exploring. There is, though, a vibe that we’re always going for…but it’s less of a genre and more of a feeling, and everything that is in a perimeter of that nighttime kind of vibe. But "Helix" is on one end of that spectrum, and "Dream" is another end of that spectrum. But it’s still all the same vibe, I would hope.
Doohan: It’s cool because the project has become about exploring various permutations of a vibe, and as long as that feeling is there, it feels as though we can explore any genre. What we’re working on right now is pushing it to the limit, and to the outer realms of how far it can go and still be Night Tapes, and that’s what’s most exciting to us - the feeling of being out of your depth. I listened to a really good David Bowie quote the other day, and it essentially said, “Don’t play to the gallery, because that’s when you know you’re creating your worst work.” That, and when you’re a little bit out of your depth - when you’re in water, but you just can’t fully touch the ground - that’s when you know you’re making your coolest stuff.
That’s crazy, because when you were talking about that I was thinking about that exact Bowie quote; that, and ‘I don’t know where I’m going from here, but I promise it won’t be boring!’ He’s my favorite artist. Alright, now I need to know - what’s everyone’s favorite Bowie album at the moment?
Unanimously: Blackstar.
Vesik: I just love that a lot of people consider it his best album, I really do. That’s what every artist wants, ultimately - you want your last album to be the best? Nobody wants to be the artist where people say ‘Ah, yes, their first work has to be my favorite!’
Richards: I quite liked when he pushed into his drum and bass era - it was so close to being brilliant, but it just wasn’t. But you know, that’s what happens sometimes when you commit to pushing the boundaries.
Vesik: Well, and what is really inspiring about Bowie is that his life and his art have gone through massive lows - to be a drug addict in Berlin to a national treasure, he went through such dramatic extremes. And it shows that you don’t want a crutch for anything in your life, really.
That’s what’s so inspiring to me about Low - it was actually a fixture of the Berlin trilogy, but it’s when he was going cold-turkey after a cocaine binge. And, even relatively sober, it’s commonly regarded as the crossroads where off-the-wall creativity met pure delight for his audience.
Vesik: Creatively, the starting part is what’s really hard, and drugs probably helped him get there! But, to clarify, we don’t endorse cocaine usage. I think he’s literally a really good example of just having to go on from hardship, and that if you continue working on yourself, something good will come of it. I’ve been a really big fan of positive self-referential reality tunnels recently. Again, if you don’t believe that there will be a positive outcome, how do you think you’re ever going to get there?
Those are kind of the parameters in which I believe in manifestation.
Vesik: Yes, exactly, but with just a little bit of salt.
If you’re a collective that avoids using drugs to open those neural pathways, how do you get in the creative headspace to create such unique content? Do you have any particular rituals?
Vesik: We just need to be together to make tracks. At some point, we all need to be together; what happens when we’re in a room together is when Night Tapes is Night Tapes.
Doohan: Expounding upon that, I think we’re sort of a series of balancing forces because while we all share a huge amount of the same influences, they all sort of peak off into their own directions. Sometimes, you might explore really far in this sort of place, but when you take it together, they all move naturally towards a really interesting place that becomes a bit of a self-correcting process.
Vesik: Night Tapes just began as a nighttime jam session in our shared apartment. That’s the beginning and end of it, anyway!
I have a lot of respect for the way your work fits the digital space so well, but it doesn’t feel tailored towards it - but, no matter what, I think dreamscape electronic music can fall really easily into the “blowing up on Tiktok” trap or doing really well on the internet. If you were to recommend something other than Drifting as an introduction to your best work, what would it be?
Richards: Thank you. If anyone wants to take forty minutes - which I doubt they do - to listen to the whole forty-minute album, I guess they should start there! But that’s kind of a copout answer. We used to say "Humans," because there’s so much going on in that one track, but I’d now say maybe the first EP (2019's Dream Forever in Glorious Stereo), because that’s the beginning.
Vesik: It’s one of those that you can’t really see from an insider’s perspective; so I think in a way we’re not the best to answer that question.
Britt Randma (Manager): I would say there are more electronic elements lately.
Vesik: I’m excited to expand the instrumentation. I want strings. I want strings so bad!