Night Tapes at London’s Village Underground: Spectres to shift a sunday crowd
Trance-prop outfit Night Tapes made their debut album in a flatshare in London, with the sound down low so their neighbours could dream easily. Now, at a sold-out show at London’s Village Underground, the band are afforded the chance to make as much noise as they want. It’s an opportunity they refuse to let pass them by.
The band appear almost ten minutes late, precious minutes that allow the London crowd a few extra slugs of their pints, a greater opportunity to forget why they had come. Finally, the five musicians materialise on stage and launch into the album opener ‘Enter’. For the most part, the chatter halts. Night Tapes’ gaudy textures and hazy melodies made for a live experience that even the most discordant London posers can’t resist.
Their 2025 album, portals//polarities, shows an ingenious usage of sampling to create soundscapes enchanted with the nocturnal titterings of a metropolis in constant formation. But their beginnings lie in a jam session that they transformed into a serious endeavour, and the relationship between each instrument – the low frequencies and gaudy textures beneath Vesik’s spellbinding highs – is so evidently spun from a long history of synchronicity. Not even Village Underground’s impressive high ceilings can house the splitting, soaring falsetto; the next best place for the sound to go is into your body.
“This next song,” Vesik addresses the audience not three songs in, “Shows we can change the culture of winning, so a lone victor doesn’t mean a victor at all.”
She speaks of becoming one with “the biosphere, the human race, and the fucking planet” before launching into ‘Swordsman’, which shimmers and shakes as Vesik begs, “Could we stop cutting into our hearts? / Could you choose me over an idea? / To hurt me is to hurt yourself,” and tells the loosening London crowd that things can change with entirely believable conviction.
Since the album’s release, Night Tapes have often been discussed in the same breath as synth-pop contemporaries, Magdalena Bay. But this comparison misses the trip-hop leanings and atmospheric shadows at the heart of their frequent sampling. While their contemporaries experiment with external grandeur, Night Tapes explode the internal until it is a portal to the undefinable, the shiftiness of transformation.
Plus, a Magdalena Bay show often suffers from what I’d call the High Price of the Image; their digitised aestheticisation of sound works wonders for their inspired music videos and gleaming costumes, but often their live shows fall flat with no contextual referentiality to ground them.
Thankfully, Night Tapes don’t suffer from the same issue. Instead, they opt for limited animations, perhaps the shuddering burst of a star or the London skyline in a purple overture. Instead, Vesik twists and turns her body in time with an internal rhythm, becoming the vessel through which the music moves. Two percussionists ensure we have plenty of beat to choose from, the bongos especially heightening the glassy, woozy soundscape.
A song or two from the end, the hegemony of the image is shattered, as a friend of the band appears on stage to film the outfit through a grainy phone camera. It is streamed directly to the projector behind them. Soon, tambourine in hand, Vesik dips down from the stage and enters the audience, phone camera diligently capturing the moment behind her.
The stream is glitchy and blurry, but this is besides the point: the image is not them but us, together, experiencing as one. It is a simple idea that marries a lot of their lyrical musing with the usual cold arena of a London show. Singularity becomes multiplicity. Hands are thrown, and hips gyrate at a higher frequency, aware of the image now destabilised, making more room for experience.
Perhaps in the only way we could have, we end the night like trees, both arms held in the air. Vesik orders us to breathe deeply and thank the roots of our bodies for providing what we need to feel, thank the universe for the freedom within. We reach up to the stratosphere. Up here, in an otherworldly trance, it is the Night Tapes sound that lingers, delicious and undeniable.
