Joy Division to release ‘Unknown Pleasures’ NFT featuring unheard Ian Curtis vocals
Joy Division‘s drummer Stephen Morris has teamed up with Factory Records’ Peter Saville to celebrate a new NFT celebrating the band’s album Unknown Pleasures.
The item is part of a new digital archive collection titled CP1919 and displays an animated version of the iconic album sleeve. It will be available next month via Pace Verso and also includes previously unheard vocal takes from the late Ian Curtis which were discovered by Morris.
The project is made up of two artworks, CP1919: Sweeping Sun White 2023 and CP1919: Sweeping Sun Black 2023. There will be an unlimited amount of copies released of the White edition, containing previously unreleased vocals and sounds. However, Black is strictly limited to one copy, featuring an ambient Joy Division soundtrack from previously unheard vocals. The hard drive will arrive in a bespoke case.
Explaining the release in a video, Morris admitted: “The weirdest thing about it was putting Ian on it. [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.”
He continued: “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.”
Saville added: “In the early 2000s, we modelled a physical version of it that ultimately became a kind of virtual landscape. 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.”
Meanwhile, last week, a mural dedicated to the late Curtis was resurrected in Manchester to coincide with World Suicide Prevention Day and was commissioned by Headstock.
“It was important that we took the time to find the right location to ensure a long-term home for the artwork,” Headstock founder Atheer Al-Salim told BBC.