This is the zero, the everlasting ice. In the whole history of the pop there is no blacker, harder, more desperate music. Unknown Pleasures is called the first album of
Joy Division; it originates in northern Manchester in the years 1978/79, in the midst of the explosions of punk and New Wave, in the whirl devouring everything of nihilism and post-modernism, "no future" and "anything goes". Punk tells of the end of the history, from the arrival of the last judgement; postal punk wants to build a new empire: on the remains of the tradition. Everybody is in movement in the pop-musical revolutions of these years –
Joy Division, nevertheless, give the time solidify: Their songs jangle in postal-historical cold; their singer Ian Curtis paints crystal pictures of an introspection which becomes nothing what she finds the native country. But he was a romantic as well. His desperation lacks every sweetness like the musicians of those years him are in habit to apply – but also that loudness of the self-overestimation, in the pop music generally her melancholy qualifies: to the passing confusion of pubescent. With Joy Division nothing passes. The pictures which they paint in her music are everlasting - dark, cold and full of suffering. Unknown Pleasures was produced by Martin Hannett, a brilliant sound farmer who has learned his technologies with the Dub reggae. With King Tubby and Lee "Scratch" Perry he has learned the use of the echo chamber and the endlessly delayed sound. However, nothing is here lulled to sleep or sweet-talked. Hannetts echo is sculptural and clear: he builds immense rooms, cathedrals in which the voices, the destinies look even smaller and more lonesome. He mixes guitar and bass far back in the background, until only the rhythmical scaffolding is left and Curtis' voice.
Joy Division -
Disorder
Joy Division -
New Dawn Fades
Joy Division -
She's Lost Control
Joy Division -
I Remember Nothing
