Night Tapes
Download Spirit

At the dawn of the fourth quarter of the third millennium, the lesson of the too-early-forgotten Soundpool, pioneers of the once-unthinkable fusion of shoegaze and electronic with funk-disco hues, seems to have penetrated the musical grammar of new generations of bands dedicated to exploring territories soaked in feedback and reverberation. From the ashes of Soundpool would later arise the Stargazer Lilies, who abandoned this type of hybridization in favor of more volatile and rarefied sounds, but in the meantime, a new wave of bands was preparing to emerge, where the more or less declared influence of electronic-based dreampop and shoegaze went hand in hand with an innovative and postmodern flair, experimental and at the same time eminently pop (indeed hyperpop), and whose characteristic feature was the ability to draw from the most disparate repertoires and genres, mixing them, deconstructing them, winking with irony at their fundamental traits, shaping grotesque ramifications for pure entertainment. We are thinking of ambitious projects like Entertainment, Death by Spirit of the Beehive, a magma of continuous sonic metamorphosis conducted under the banner of the fragment and submerged by multiple layers of reverberations, but also Mercurial World by Magdalena Bay, a synthpop cornucopia where it's impossible not to detect, among the chaos of references, at least a slightly dreampop component, or the pioneers Kero Kero Bonito and specifically their Time ‘n’ Place, where the j-pop and video game-derived music of their beginnings are enhanced by shoegaze guitars.

Within this heterogeneous group, a band has been carving out a leading position for some years now; it is still almost unknown in Italy, coming from the post-Soviet mists of Estonia, and with a more shadowy and introverted personality, yet no less bold in the contamination of stylistic solutions and sound languages. This is Night Tapes, a trio led by the Estonian singer-songwriter Iiris Vesik, who after a brief solo career in the vein of Bjork and Regina Spektor, and after attempting the mainstream path (three participations in Eurovision documented on Wikipedia, to my utmost surprise), has found her most authentic expressive voice among the sinuous folds of a finely and crystalline crafted dreampop, capable of transporting one into a dimension of immaterial and otherworldly beauty thanks to her impressive vocal qualities. The element that immediately stands out and acts as a glue between the various declinations of Night Tapes' sound (despite having only a handful of EPs to their credit, they demonstrate a remarkable and precocious artistic maturity) is Vesik's singing, characterized by very high pitches and capable of reaching extremely high octaves without being annoyingly affected but instead marked by an extraordinary flair and versatility.

The trio's debut work bears the title Dream Forever In Glorious Stereo (2019) as a programmatic manifesto and comprises the three tracks that give the EP its name. The start of Dream is reminiscent of the Spirit of the Beehive's compositions before their more experimental phase, immediately sketching out suggestive dreamy atmospheres dense with reverberation, which at the end open up to a funk-flavored pulsing bass à la Soundpool, submerged by a carpet of glittery synths. In the first seconds of Forever, we hear Vesik for the first time bursting into one of her characteristic highs and starting to intone a magnetic nursery rhyme with a mix of innocent carefree joy and melancholy, counterpointed by a very captivating bass line that takes the forefront: the effect can remind of certain tracks from You Will Never Know Why by Sweet Trip or the sophisticated psychedelic pop of Melody’s Echo Chamber. In Glorious Stereo finally closes the trio in an explicitly shoegaze key, with greater suspension of the rhythmic section and a wall of sound more layered and traversed by noise veins and spatial echoes, once again reminiscent of the Spirit of the Beehive methodology.

The second EP, Download Spirit (2020), is where Vesik's virtuosic trilling finally imposes itself in all its power, distancing it from the more extreme shoegaze and inaugurating the group's most peculiar and characteristic style. It begins with Fever Dream Kids, a generational anthem that has all the credentials to become an instant classic, a track that unfolds in a patient and inevitable crescendo to the epic final climax, in which the singer's voice seems to soar, assuming such an impalpability that it blends with the synth and guitar reverberations, echoing like a call from another universe. It then transitions to the title track, which is also the most manifestly psychedelic piece in the Night Tapes' discography, a mantra with a hypnotic and repeated bass line on which the vocals of a novel Kate Bush in a state of grace bloom, which at a certain point transforms into Elizabeth Fraser, giving rise to a concluding tail that seems one of the most evanescent productions of the Cocteau Twins. The next I Was An Angel stages a charming and nostalgic intertwining of voices that evaporates in an ambient key into an impressionistic soundscape, between drops of rain and tolling bells, but with Truly Being Alive, the driving bass returns forcefully to carry the rhythm, this time in a darkwave vein that is very sui generis, bizarre and grand at the same time, in which complex vocal games succeed that make musical worlds as distant as Kate Bush, the Bee Gees, and Grimes' herbertian Geidi Primes and Halfaxa collide in a totally unprecedented manner. The final act of the record is a downtempo intimate and introspective piece more purely dreampop titled In Poly Amber, which seems to spread like liquefied metal rippled by iridescent light vibrations and with which our band moves into the territory of electronics by Men I Trust and Washed Out.

It is the more relaxed and delicate branch of electronic music that refers to genres like chillwave and ambient house that impregnates the first half of Night Tapes' third EP, Perfect Kindness (2023), consisting of six tracks, which seems to anticipate an opening towards sounds more accessible to the general public, although always executed with extreme care for writing. This is evident not so much in Selene, an elegant piece with trip-hop nuances where the distortions of the first two EPs give way to a delirium of crystal-clear transparency, woven with seductive synths dancing in unison with Vesik's diaphanous voice in a blend of extreme sensuality, as in the two immediately following tracks, Inigo and Humans, with a more radio-friendly approach but constructed with grace and renewed expertise. The first appears as a colorful explosion of tropical and pseudo-Arabesque reminiscences influenced by Grimes' more recent productions, while the second is structured as an anthem with a very catchy refrain reminiscent of the pop turn of Tame Impala from Currents onwards. However, with the second half of the album, we plunge back into the more nocturnal, introverted, and fascinating side of the group, which despite abandoning shoegaze feedback and distortions manages to produce highly atmospheric dreamlike pearls, starting with Moonrise, a multifaceted and multi-form piece reminiscent of an original fusion between the ethno-psych funk of bands like Khruangbin, the elegance of early Still Corners, and Crumb's polished psychedelia. However, it is with the last two tracks that the album’s highest peaks are reached, where Night Tapes proceed by subtraction and replace the excess of their beginnings with a minimalist logic based on an ethereal stripping down of the structures. Perfect Kindness is a placid journey through soft layers suspended in a melancholic autumn sunset, a whispered spell in the ear with which Vesik's voice, never so caressing and inspired, accompanies us to discover a world inhabited by dreams and memories of a life never lived, which with an acoustic guitar attack about two-thirds of the way through the piece elevates to poetry of sublime beauty. Adding to this is Silent Song, a masterpiece of formal construction and compositional balance, where it is impossible not to be enchanted by the restrained and sinuous progression, expressive density, and the astonishing range of nuances that the singer manages to infuse into her voice, bending it at will in a triumph of visionary chromatic effects conducted under the banner of melancholy.

The latest EP the group is working on has not yet been released, but three tracks have been shared, seemingly indicating an attempt to reconcile the electronic approach and shoegaze of their beginnings in a revised and corrected version, mitigated and updated to more current sounds. Drifting re-embraces a substantial dose of reverb, but at the same time stands out as the most lively and spirited piece of the trio, as well as the most publicly successful, dominated by its synth-pop component. Loner decisively picks up the shoegaze aesthetics and mood, grafting cascading dazzling guitar riffs onto a composition embroidered with keyboards, once again supported by the singer's vocal prowess, in a sense taking a cue from what Kero Kero Bonito has done and making it their own. Every day is a game starts in a subdued and meditative manner with a catchy bass line only to introduce an acoustic guitar that increasingly blends with all the other instruments until the enchanting bridge and final emotional peak, where once again Vesik delivers a textbook vocal performance. Night Tapes still have a lot of ground to cover and must especially demonstrate their capability to construct a full-length album, but if these are their premises, and if they can maintain the same level of quality over time, they could establish themselves as one of the most solid and interesting projects in the post-Beach House dreampop scene.