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Unmanned Spaceflight.com _ Chit Chat _ The music of Joy Division, art and Perseverance

Posted by: SulliedGoon Mar 3 2021, 09:30 PM

If you enjoy the music of Joy Division, you may be
intrigued by this potential connection to Perseverance.

This is a side-by-side comparison of two images.

To the right are two Perseverance plate etchings.
(They depict map contours of Jezero Crater)

To the left is Joy Division's iconic "Unknown Pleasures"
album art released in 1979.
(It depicts stacked signals from a pulsar)

So it seems that the Perseverance plate etching
may be inspired by the older album art.

This fellow's site explains the history of the original
image and how it has been adapted to various guises,
including cartography.

https://cartographicperspectives.org/index.php/journal/article/view/1536/1726

In his case, he used Crater Lake to serve as his
model.

Anyway, felt it was a neat bit of trivia that
ties together Perseverance, art and music into
one bundle.

Posted by: JRehling Mar 4 2021, 03:03 PM

Thanks for the background, SG.

Of course, "Jezero" means lake in some Slavic languages, so "Jezero crater" means "lake crater" and hence the tight link to Crater Lake.

Crater Lake is also one of the most spectacular sights on Earth, and I recommend it to anyone who anyone who can get there but hasn't yet. Liz Phair has a song named for it, which mentions the Moon, so there is another tie to music and space as well.

Posted by: mcaplinger Mar 4 2021, 04:09 PM

As much as I like the album cover, it was not original, but a repurposed graphic originally produced by a grad student at Cornell. Peter Saville's only innovation was to invert the colors. https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/sa-visual/pop-culture-pulsar-origin-story-of-joy-division-s-unknown-pleasures-album-cover-video/