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- The Joy Division project is an absolute exploration
of the deepest recesses of Ian Curtis's music.
There are key musical motifs that you'll hear,
but it's not a slavish duplicate of Joy Division.
It's not a cheesy cover version.
It's an absolute new piece of work.
- # Love will tear us apart again
- It's pretty visceral, you know? Their music is on edge.
It's dirty, dark, brittle, brutal sorts of music.
We didn't want to make it, like, a long, through-composed kind of suite.
We instead wanted to keep it to where it was,
which is basically like one smashing monster groove.
Let's see what happens if we take that and *** with it. Oh, sorry.
- (ORCHESTRA PLAY)
- The way that that was developed was Robin Rimbaud, who's known as Scanner,
actually did the first demos and the dismantling,
he ripped it all apart, the music of Joy Division,
and did his own version.
We then took that into a rehearsal room,
got the band members, which are a key part of the show,
there's three people, Matt Calvert,
Adam Betts and Rob Gentry,
who are like this trio in the middle, this electronic band in the middle,
and in the rehearsal room they took Robin's demos
and ripped them apart again, so kind of dismantled them even further
and explored them, and then those recordings of that rehearsal
were then taken by the orchestrator, Tom Trapp,
who then expanded them into full orchestra.
The visuals are key for us as an orchestra.
We always play in darkness and we like to have very striking imagery.
- I wasn't such a big fan of Joy Division.
I hadn't really listened to their music. I was aware of them.
So I was told to watch the documentary called Joy Division,
and after watching that, I realised that they were one of the best bands
that Britain had produced
and I became a big fan.
So I was very precious about
not losing their feel
or their message or their intensity
or, you know, the tonality that they created.
Because they were a punk band, you know,
they weren't trying to be big and clever necessarily.
But, you know, they struck a chord,
there was a bit of magic chemistry going on with that band.
- I think the reason why I'm probably more understanding of this music
is cos I know about it.
I know the history behind it and the rhythms and the concepts.
So that way you can imbue that knowledge to the players.
I think sometimes orchestras do gigs where they get a conductor that comes up
and probably doesn't even own an Eric Clapton CD,
let alone Joy Division,
and then there's no link, you know, there's no translation,
and then it sounds like this whole ice-cream white-coat thing, you know,
where they do, you know, like,
you know, "The so-and-so orchestra plays rock!"
And then they do this rock gig in the park
and everyone has their lunch and it sounds terrible.
So we're trying to avoid that.
- (ORCHESTRA PLAY)