Ride Team Up with Pêtr Aleksänder For New Remix Album, Share Two New Tracks
Clouds in the Mirror Due Out May 1 via Wichita; Listen to New Versions of “Repetition” and “Clouds of Saint Marie”
Mar 10, 2020
Ride
British shoegazing icons Ride released a new album, This Is Not a Safe Place, last year via Wichita. Now they have announced a new remixed version of the album, entitled Clouds in the Mirror, in which each track has been reworked by Pêtr Aleksänder. They have also shared two tracks from it, remixes of “Repetition” and “Clouds of Saint Marie.” Pêtr Aleksänder is the duo of Tom Hobden (of Noah & The Whale) and producer Eliot James and their remixes are not of the standard dance/electronic variety, instead they add strings and classical flourishes to the songs, using only the original vocal tracks as a foundation. Check out the new versions of “Repetition” and “Clouds of Saint Marie” below, followed by the album’s cover art.
Ride consist of Andy Bell, Mark Gardener, Laurence Colbert, and Steve Queralt. The initial recording of Clouds in the Mirror was done in April 2019 at Eastcote Studios in London. It was finished towards the end of 2019, after Ride finished their world tour.
Ride’s Andy Bell had this to say about the album in a press release: “Pêtr Aleksänder took our album’s vocal tracks and formed an entirely new album around them, and the results are inspired, often really beautiful, and at times, totally mental. They have crafted a delicate web of string and synthesizer arrangements which draws you into a whole other world than our version of the album. I love what they’ve created.”
Pêtr Aleksänder collectively had this to say: “Reimagining Ride’s album was a treat. We took a rather unusual approach: although fans of Ride in the first instance, we nevertheless resisted listening to anything other than each track’s main vocal before setting to work, beginning exclusively with string and piano arrangements inspired by the main vocal. Focusing on the sentiment of the vocal and re-interpreting it with our own arrangements resulted in combinations of melody, harmony and emotion that would have been very hard to achieve via a more conventional songwriting / composing approach. We even waited until the band had released the album before choosing to listen to the songs in their original state - a strange experience for us given that we knew our versions of the same songs so well by that point!”
Ride reformed in 2014 to do some touring and finally released their first new album in 21 years, Weather Diaries, in 2017 via Wichita. That was followed by the 2018 EP, Tomorrow’s Shore and then 2019’s This Is Not a Safe Place.
Read our 2017 interview with Ride about Weather Diaries.
Read our 2019 interview with Ride about This Is Not a Safe Place.
Until Weather Diaries Ride hadn’t released a new studio album since 1996’s Tarantula, which was put out after the band split up and was poorly received. The quartet’s original run lasted from 1988 to 1996 and included four studio albums (Nowhere, Going Blank Again, Carnival of Light, and Tarantula). In 2015 they also released Nowhere25, a 25th anniversary reissue of their 1990-released debut album Nowhere. A few years ago we interviewed Ride’s Mark Gardener and Andy Bell about Nowhere and you can read that article here. And then in 2015 in another interview we did with Gardener he went through Nowhere track-by-track and you can read that here.
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