A new collaborative album by Thurston Moore and Bonner Kramer features a cover of the Joy Division deep cut, “Insight.”
“Kramer had the idea to cover a Joy Division tune,” said Moore. “It was a left turn from the improvisations we had been tracking, though wholly in keeping with both our sensibilities of light and dark unifying in transcendent songwriting, both of us devotees of ‘the song’ as well as ‘the freedom.’”
The track features the bass more prominently than the original, and moves the synth a little further back in the mix. But the end result does a great job of evoking the feel of the Joy Division version, without being a straight-forward cover.
In a press release announcing the album, Kramer talked about his interaction with the Unknown Pleasures album. “It was a masterpiece,” he said. “A stroke of pure artistic genius. ‘Insight’ is a criminally underappreciated tone poem; a benediction of loss, longing, and regret that still touches every cell in my body… I’d waited decades to ‘cover’ this trembling ode to the curse of being human, waiting until I finally had the perfect partner to help me re-imagine it and make it new again.”
Their album, They Came Like Swallows – Seven Requiems for the Children of Gaza, will be available on May 1st via Silver Current Records.
