Ride Reimagined By Petr Aleksander - Clouds In The Mirror (This Is Not A Safe Place Reimagined By Petr Aleksander) (LP)

Ride’s sixth album, This Is Not A Safe Place, was already a late-period gem, but Clouds In The Mirror, released in May 2020 on Wichita Recordings, does something quietly bold with it. Hand the keys to Pêtr Aleksänder, the duo of violinist-arranger Tom Hobden and producer Eliot James, take the vocals out of the frame, and let the songs breathe in a different climate. What emerges is a largely instrumental reimagining that favours strings, piano and gentle electronics over guitars and big choruses. It sounds like a risky idea on paper. In practice it’s elegant, heartfelt and surprisingly faithful to the spirit of the originals.

Hobden and James don’t simply slow everything down or smear it in reverb. They find the melodic bones of these songs and hold a light to them. Future Love opens the original LP like a sparkler, all chiming guitars and release. Here it becomes a steady bloom, piano tracing the topline while strings swell and retreat in patient arcs. The rhythm is still there, just translated into little pulses and brushed percussion. It keeps the optimism of the song, only now it feels like a memory you’re turning over in your hands.

Clouds of Saint Marie, a clear fan favourite on the 2019 record, is another highlight. Ride’s version rides a jangly, motorik groove. Pêtr Aleksänder let the harmony float, giving the chords a soft radiance and letting a single violin sing where Andy Bell and Mark Gardener once did. The melodic contour is intact, so you never lose the thread, but the mood shifts toward night driving, streetlights flicking past. It’s easy to get lost in the glide of it.

What makes Clouds In The Mirror work is its restraint. There’s no grandstanding, no sudden dynamic drops for the sake of drama. You feel the discipline of a duo who have spent time in both pop and classical settings. Hobden’s strings rarely crowd the frame, often carrying just two or three lines, each voiced cleanly so you can follow their conversation. James’s production gives the piano a rounded, human touch, with enough pedal and room to feel like someone is sitting at a real instrument, not triggering samples. That sense of tactility matters, especially in a project that could have skimmed by as a novelty.

Repetition is a good test case. On Ride’s album it’s all clipped rhythm and post‑punk nerves. Here, those angles smooth into staccato string patterns and muted piano figures. The tension remains, but the aggression melts into poise. In This Room, which closed the original with hushed menace, becomes a slow unfurling with low strings humming under a fragile piano line. It feels closer to a score cue than a rock track, though the emotional weight is the same. If you ever wished Ride’s melodies could hang in the air a bit longer, this is where you lean in.

There’s something fitting about a band so associated with texture inviting a duo to rework their songs through another texture entirely. Ride have always cared about tone and detail, from the swirl of Nowhere to the crisp, electronic edges of This Is Not A Safe Place. Clouds In The Mirror extends that curiosity. It isn’t a replacement record, more a companion piece that will sit neatly next to Ride vinyl on your shelf and make you hear the parent album with fresh ears the next time you spin it.

If you’re the kind who digs through bins at a Melbourne record store on a Saturday, this one rewards that habit. The Clouds In The Mirror vinyl sounds lovely at volume, with the strings opening up and the piano getting that warm, woody body you miss on laptop speakers. It also makes a convincing case for buying Ride albums on vinyl generally, since so much of their music is about space and movement in the stereo field. For anyone looking to buy Ride records online, this is an easy add to the cart alongside the 2019 LP, and a neat gateway into Pêtr Aleksänder’s own catalogue.

By stripping things back without hollowing them out, Hobden and James honour the writing of Bell, Gardener, Queralt and Colbert while giving the songs new rooms to wander. It’s not showy, it’s not trying to outdo the source, and that restraint is what makes it stick. If you’re building a short stack of essentials and curios for your next order of vinyl records Australia wide, pair Clouds In The Mirror with the original and treat them as a set. They speak to each other, and that conversation is a pleasure to hear.