Theodore Wild Ride are readying their self-titled debut LP for release on October 1st via Icarus Records/Consouling Sounds. The project joins French keyboardists Christine Ott (regular collaborator of Yann Tiersen, Tindersticks, Oiseaux-Tempête) and Mathieu Gabry (Snowdrops) with oud player Ophir Levy. This week the trio premieres an extraordinary new video for the album track “Paoha,” directed by Gabry from archival 16mm footage of Paoho Island and the Mojave desert.
The song is the first to have been composed by the trio back in 2019 when they met at the Wurth Museum Auditorium in Erstein, France, to record their debut in July of that year. Ott reveals that the initial inspiration for the track was the musical theme of “tango or habanera” and the desire to combine this “classical” and “very composed” form with an improvisational approach. Through this juxtaposition, the trio arrives at what Ott calls an “unexpected encounter” where the “codes between Eastern and Western music, between music of the past and the present, are somewhat thwarted.”
Indeed, like the volcanic island in California’s Mono Lake from which this song derives its name, layers of sonic history and culture come together on “Paoha.” The ancient sounds of Levy’s oud meet padded electronic strings as the track opens with a cinematic flourish. Meanwhile, brooding piano notes counter-point in a dirge-like refrain before the retro-future strains of an Ondes Martenot adds eerie overtones to the tango’s closing third. As Levy notes, “There is a great melancholy in the song,” calling it ultimately an “elegy of loss.”
Gabry’s visual choice to use archival 16mm footage of Paoha Island and the Mojave desert add additional strata of history to a song that already suggests an ancient past as well as a distant future. Images of charred landscapes and desolate expanses of sand seem to offer reproach, as the great forces of nature and the transformative power of time empty the landscape of human history, leaving little more than a gravestone marked by the warning, “A Victim of the Elements.” Ultimately, though, this “elegy of loss” is also a celebration of creative freedom. Like the tango itself, a form in which various cultures collide and come together, Theodore Wild Ride craft art that moves effortlessly between borders just as it slides between past and present to create the possibilities of a new future.
