Artist News Releases

Ride to release classical rework of This Is Not A Safe Place album

By | Published on Friday 13 March 2020

Ride

Ride have announced that they will release a classical reworking of their 2019 album ‘This Is Not A Safe Place’. Arranged by composer duo Pêtr Aleksänder, the new record – titled ‘Clouds In The Mirror’ – will be released by Wichita Recordings in May.

The idea to create a classical rework was conceived while Ride were still in the studio recording their 2019 album. Discussions with Pêtr Aleksänder – aka Tom Hobden of Noah & The Whale and producer Eliot James – developed into a plan to create a different version of the record using only the vocal tracks from the original as a guide.

“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”, says Ride’s Andy Bell. “They have crafted a delicate web of string and synthesiser arrangements which draws you into a whole other world than our version of the album. I love what they’ve created”.

Pêtr Aleksänder add: ‘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”, they continue. “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!”

Listen to the Pêtr Aleksänder version of ‘Clouds Of Saint Marie’ here:



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