Ceremony. New Order. 1981. Factory.

 With a lyric written by Ian Curtis, Ceremony announces itself with a noticeably less declamatory flourish than Love Will Tear Us Apart’s revered opening, yet one just as exciting, with a bass-drums-guitar intro made singular in tone by the great Martin Hannett. What was most remarkable about this point in the rock and roll market—1980–was how interest in blues based rock had shifted from a working class demographic to an overall middle class one; a mass, global music audience had quietly become, almost at once, a surfeit of consumers clamoring for what the Clash described that year as “that special offer, a guaranteed personality”…a realization of market potential that finally saw real world fruition in the age of social media. Though New Order’s accomplishment was to combine the formal motorik dynamics of Krautrock with the commercially rhythmic vogue of disco, the band connected with an ever expanding audience by framing their distilled essence within an existing pop tradition. Beginning in the eighties a new generation of listeners was concentrating with dogged persistence on the artistic careers of bands whose recorded and live work were advancing with every new release beyond mere consumer guided formulas. If any one band from this period understood how pop music had changed for a burgeoning nightclub market whose demographic was young, bourgeois, and taking drugs—not only for recreation but for stability of the nervous system, and sometimes because manipulation of the latter had more and more to do with the former—in an urban milieu, it was New Order. This was the record buying generation who looked to actively disengage from the cultural ubiquity of information data, in part because of an affected sophistication that comes from living in an overly saturated media market of current events—catastrophic and banal—and teaching yourself to cope with that persistent stimulation of the senses through a regimental process of self-medication with drugs and alcohol. Ceremony is an open embrace of the rhythmic vernacular that had emerged from Manchester nightlife as a response to this radically widespread, generational internalization of emotions, and intellectual withdrawal. Like much of the Velvet Underground, Ceremony’s music is intentionally cold and distant, but still touched by the expressive, surprisingly generous gusto of pop disclosure. Taking off from the Love Will Tear Us Apart lyric “Yet there’s still this appeal that we’ve kept through our lives,” Ceremony looks to decode the pop exigencies of desperation, its absorption into the blood tide of human history, and how we sometimes swim in its deluge, fore and aft. Functioning like Ariadne’s thread, New Order strung the labyrinth walls with diskotheque lighting.