Glok / Timothy Clerkin - Alliance Glok / Timothy Clerkin

RIDE’s Andy Bell, recording under his electronic alter ego GLOK, and the producer and Insult to Injury label boss Timothy Clerkin have joined forces for Alliance, a brand new seven-track album released by Bytes on November 8. The collaboration finds Andy and Tim with their freak flags flying, working in a freewheeling environment where nothing was off limits, with influences ranging from Death in Vegas and Boards of Canada to James Holden and New Order.

They already knew there was chemistry — Andy and Tim were introduced by Bytes when the label suggested Tim as a participant for the Dissident Remixed album, which was put together in 2019. Tim delivered a killer rework of ‘Projected Sounds’, turning the Neu!-meets-Steve Reich original into a tripped-out, slo-mo acid house wonder; ‘Voodoo Ray’ for the shoegaze generation. They later met in person at the funeral of Andrew Weatherall (whose influence can be heard in every groove of the album) and kept in touch.

The catalyst for the album was Tim finding an old Les Paul in a case that hadn’t been touched for years. It was still in tune (albeit a rather odd tuning) and Tim posted a short film of himself playing it on Instagram. Andy was into what he heard “and said I should make it into a song,” Tim explains. “I asked if he’d like to do it as a collab and it snowballed from there.”

“We didn’t discuss much in the way of direction,” says Andy. “I was having quite a creative spell at the time, to me it felt like making music was keeping me sane but when I think back, it was actually making me more insane, just in a different way.”