Giving in to Unknown Pleasures
Joy Division, Unknown Pleasures (cover by Peter Saville)
How many images can a music album have?
As many as the silences it has ever broken. My silence at my parent’s place, your silence in a car on a wet road, their silence in a lonely walk. We all have our private memories attached to it, which come up in the surface once we listen to it again. As time goes by, the soundtrack of our lives is slowly created: it consists of the music that has touched us, that marked important moments, that reminds us of places and people.
So as I was listening to “Unknown Pleasures” by Joy Division for the [f(x)=∞]th time I wondered what was my first image of this album. The cover. A black square with white wavy lines inside. I decided to find out more about this image, and I came up with an interesting story about how Peter Saville created the unique cover for this album.
Black, minimal, no titles on the surface (despite the fact that it was the band’s debut album, their name was missing!): unique.
In a parallel course with the album’s story -Ian Curtis’ life, Manchester of the 1970s, Joy Division and the New Order that followed, the punk rock scene- I started thinking about the visual part of the album and what it meant. Art, Music and Abstraction have followed intersecting courses from the early 20th century and onwards.
And this is how it all goes together:
Different colors, different shades: among the sounds and colors of Unknown Pleasures
is my article for this month’s Interartive.
This issue is really great! You can read
two more articles about music (punk rock and ethnic),
two articles about a very strong social subject aroused by Anibal Parada,
notes on the beginning of animation,
a virtual gallery about an intervention in Sao Paolo by Eduardo Srur
and an exclusive interview with street artist Adam McLevey.
Now, let me print it and take it with me to the beach!
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