Ian Curtis’ Voice Merges With ‘Unknown Pleasures’ Pulsar in Joy Division NFT
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An NFT celebrating Joy Division’s wavy Unknown Pleasures artwork will include previously unheard vocal samples from the band. The new piece renders the pulsar from the cover as audio, which is then merged with the voice of the late frontman, Ian Curtis.
Peter Saville, the Factory Records co-founder and visual artist who designed the iconic sleeve, worked with Joy Division and New Order drummer Stephen Morris and the Joy Division Archive on the project, called CP1919. The NFT depicts the sleeve’s art — radio waves coming from a collapsed star (the CP1919 in question) — animated and moving, seemingly in three dimensions with shadows crossing over one another. It will be available next month via Pace Verso.
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The project features two distinct artworks. CP1919: Sweeping Sun White 2023 and CP1919: Sweeping Sun Black 2023 show the art in their respective monochromatic makeups. White is an open edition with an unlimited number of copies; it includes previously unreleased Joy Division vocal samples and sounds. Black is one of a kind and features an ambient soundtrack including never-before-released Joy Division vocal fragments. The latter will be delivered on a hard drive in a bespoke case.
“The weirdest thing about it was putting Ian on it,” Morris said in a video promoting the project. “[It] felt very, very strange. I found these two little phrases from the live version of [Closer’s] ‘Atrocity Exhibition.’ … I just lucked out that there was a bit of Ian that probably nobody had heard before.
“Then I started messing about with the sound of CP1919,” he continued. “There’s this program that you can kind of slow a second so it lasts a month. It’s really ridiculous time stretch. … And suddenly you play it back and it sounds like a string section.”
Joy Division’s Bernard Sumner originally found the imagery of CP1919, which was discovered by Cambridge University astrophysicist Jocelyn Bell Burnell in 1967, in the Cambridge Encyclopedia of Astronomy. Originally the signal was one line until Cornell University’s Harold Craft arranged it in a way that would show the pulses. Saville took the image, reversed it and inverted the colors for the cover of Unknown Pleasures.
“In the early 2000s, we modeled a physical version of it that ultimately became a kind of virtual landscape,” Saville said in the video. “We used a moving light source. Suddenly there was this feeling of sunrise and sunset. I went back to those files during lockdown. [I] sat there watching it, thinking, ‘It needs a soundtrack.’ So I phoned Stephen.”
Bill Holding of Morph U.K. modelled the image into 3-D for the NFT. Morris created music informed by CP1919’s radio signal for the project and combined it with processed sounds from the band’s archive. Some proceeds from the sale of the NFT will benefit CALM (Campaign Against Living Miserably), which works for suicide prevention in the U.K. Curtis died by suicide in 1980.
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