Unknown pleasures

This is the title for the first Joy Division album. It was release in 1979, and just after, Ian Curtis killed himself. Legend and reality mix at this point. Many say he did that because he couldn't stand any more the pressures of a wife, a lover and a daughter. I can understand that, specially the wife and the daughter. It's also said that the song “She's lost control”, with it's magnificent bass line, is in honour of his wife (i can also understand that).

The cover of this album represents a diagram of 100 pulses from the pulsar CP1919. If you check Wikipedia or Google I guess you will find a lot more information about the songs, the album, Joy Division, Ian, the Factory label and the all post-punk movement.

But don't want to talk about marriage or even Joy Division. What I want to write is about this guy in a window over some creepy store and the listening of music.

When listening to music a person is not just processing some wave signal and using it to get an insight of the surrounding environment. We are creating emotions, and those emotions are going to have a real impact in all our body, not just our brain (after all we are one body). If you find it difficult to believe just read António Damásio and is neurological research.

This album for me always brings back the extreme and contradicting emotions of my teen years. I like to think the guy in the window is living without thinking of the impact is life may have on others and, therefore, experiencing only the most overwhelming joy and the darkest depressions, without any greys.

This picture was taken somewhere in London. I couldn't get there again even if i wanted, because i was just wandering at the time, and i really don't know where his this place. At the time I first listened to “Unknown pleasures” i just was like this, a slim boy smoking on the window with no material pressures to attend. For me “Unknown pleasures” will always bring back something that I don't want to let go, the freedom of living freely in it's extremes.

I do need to fell like it from time to time. It's a catharses of all daemons and those bass lines just pumping, they are magical. For me his like some ritual of passage, like a tribal ceremony to conjure back the years of Eden. Even the lyrics are strange, they look like they have encoded some hidden truth, only disclosed to those willing to live the exact same moments as Curtis did when writing them. Because of that they have no meaning, they are a spell cast on those who listen.