The Null Device

Recycle: Joy Division & New Order

Recycle: Joy Division & New Order; a record collector by the name of DJ £50 Note and a friend of his who specialises in sound restoration have set out to do what Rob Gretton was planning to do before he died, i.e., put out definitive editions of New Order's entire Factory-period output, sounding exactly as the originals did (and not "remastered", i.e., compressed for extra attention-catching loudness, as is the standard commercial practice now). He is doing this as a MP3 (well, .m4a) blog, with each release accompanied by meticulously restored artwork (with elements redrawn and reset as needed), and comprehensive notes, in which, for example, we learn that the choir sound in Blue Monday was sampled from a Kraftwerk track and comes from an extremely obscure instrument called the Vako Orchestron, and that a number of New Order/Joy Division song titles are film references derived from old posters in a rehearsal space, as well as details of how far back they had to look to find a copy in which the dynamics hadn't been crushed to hell.

There are 1 comments on "Recycle: Joy Division & New Order":

Posted by: ctime Thu Sep 10 19:11:32 2009

Back in my IRC days (mid-late 90's) when I was first getting into music (ahem, before napster), I randomly stumbled across two awesome bands: New Order and Kraftwerk. Back then, I had no point of reference for music (It was mostly word of mouth, wasn't it?), also downloading music was extremely slow but I somehow choose to sample both of these bands. I'm glad I did, to this day both are in my top-10 favorites. Last year in April I finally got to see kraftwerk play live..pretty much the best and worst day of my life for various reasons.

My next goal is trying to snipe an Mattel "Bee Gee's rhythm machine" which was used in Kraftwerks Pocket Calculator.