Klaus Schulze
Dune

A livid and spectral introduction, entrusted to the icy sounds of synthesizers, opens "Dune," the 1979 album by Klaus Schulze and a homage to Frank Herbert's science fiction novel published in 1965: seven minutes that create an atmosphere and prepare the listener for the unexplored territory they will soon face. Shortly after, the sounds of a cello cautiously make their way into the environment, first with fleeting shards of sound, then with increasingly wide and expansive melodies. It wasn't easy, but the dialogue between Schulze's electronics and the cello—an instrument like few others loaded with history and memory—played by Wolfgang Tiepold, is perfectly achieved.

The music grows in intensity, becoming more tense, more excited, increasingly convulsive until, reaching the peak of its fullness, it unfolds while lowering the tension, revealing to the listener new and richer horizons of sound, unleashing all its hidden expressiveness.

This is how the music of "Dune" works: with this orgasmic progression, articulated in about ten episodes in which the gradual accumulation of material is taken to the extreme and then brought down without ever losing richness and color. A brief coda of just under two minutes, which concludes the track, reiterates the same mechanism in concentrated episodes placed one after the other, almost as if to summarize what has been heard so far.

"Shadows of Ignorance" is the second track of the album, where eight minutes in, in addition to the synths and cello, vocalist Arthur Brown joins in, reciting in English a long poetic text speaking of the future, the universe, evolution: text sometimes recited in time, sometimes intoned, but never becoming a proper song or chant; the voice rests on a rhythmic carpet created by a drum machine, whose only flaw is making the piece a bit monotonous in its 26-minute duration.

But everything in this album contributes to making its listening a suggestive and engaging experience, urging us to cast our gaze toward the sandy dunes of distant planets, and perhaps even beyond.