There are a lot of layers to peel away to get to the heart of Bernard Szajner's Visions of Dune: brittle, mythic surfaces that have calcified over the years. First, there's all the baggage attached to Frank Herbert's Dune series, to which the French musician's 1979 album was meant as a kind of interpretive tribute; beyond the novels themselves, there are any number of famously star-crossed adaptations, including David Lynch's 1984 box-office bomb and Alejandro Jodorowsky's "lost masterpiece," whose travails were recounted in last year's documentary Jodorowsky's Dune. And there's Szajner's own fantastic backstory, told so often it has become reduced to a few abstract brushstrokes: born in a cave during the Nazi occupation of France, his parents fugitive members of the French Resistance; inventor of the laser harp that helped make Jean-Michel Jarre famous (and for which Jarre took credit); light-show mastermind behind concerts for Magma, Gong, and the Who, and as such, a primogenitor for everything from Daft Punk's pyramid to Skrillex's space ship; member of the (Hypothetical) Prophets, a sardonic, proto-coldwave duo anthologized on Tigersushi's 2004 compilation So Young But So Cold: Underground French Music 1977 – 1983.
Given all that potential interference, a listener encountering Visions of Dune for the first time might be struck by how immediate it is. You don't need to have read Herbert's novels to appreciate Szajner's undulating electronic compositions. Despite titles that point to characters and themes from the novels and films—"Kwizatz Haderach", "Bene Gesserit", "Spice"—these are not narrative pieces; they're rippling abstractions as sensuous as the curves of actual dunes. Likewise, they require no visual complement to come alive. Szajner may have made his name with phantasmagorical stagecraft, but Visions of Dune, like the best psychedelic music, is itself a planetarium show that plays out behind closed eyelids. Chimes, bells, and zither-like glissandi add to the otherworldly ambience of its raga-like drones, meditative bass pulses, and chilly filter sweeps; open fifths and modal scales scan as vaguely Orientalist, like the Middle East via Mars, while all the rising and falling frequencies feel like metonyms for the cyclical nature of nature itself.
Structurally, the album alternates between multi-song suites, like the seamless five-song stretch from the opening "Dune" through "Bene Gesserit", and discrete tracks that take a given idea—a pearly guitar tone, a contrapuntal tangle like a wrought-iron bar puzzle, a pitch-bend fugue—and tease it out to its frayed ends. He's assisted in places by Gong bassist Hanny Rowe, Magma's Klaus Blasquiz and Clement Bailly, the British guitarist Colin Swinburne, and Fondation's Anannka Raghel, who's given the manly-robot treatment on the ominous "Kwizatz Haderach", though their contributions are generally submerged within the music's tape-collaged ebb and flow. Structured largely around the movements of arpeggiated synthesizers, the music bears comparison to contemporaneous work of "cosmic" synth wizards like Tangerine Dream, Klaus Schulze, and Edgar Froese, though it's also refreshingly free of some of their kitschier excesses.
The proto-post-punk "Harkonnen", a dissonant tangle of gnarled electric bass and flangers on the fritz, offers a glimpse of Szajner's later coldwave phase. "Ibad," a kind of new age proto-techno, is preceded by "Gom Jabbar", an 85-second miniature of queasy tones that fall like flakes of mica, and on "Fremen", Pac-Man death spirals morph into a surprisingly funky drums-and-synth jam in 17/4 time (if I'm counting correctly). Even further afield, "Duke" and "Spice" sound uncharacteristically digital for a product of the '70s, and bewilderingly nonlinear even today. With their demonic choirs, glassy sheen, and weird compression, like a jet engine in a teacup, they reveal themselves as distant antecedents of a present-day artist like TCF, he of the unholy blur and apocalyptic affect.
As it turns out, both of those cuts, while recorded at the same time as the rest, were left off the 1979 release; apparently someone at Pathé Marconi, the parent company behind the Sonopresse label, deemed them too "futuristic." Perhaps they were right, given how jaw-droppingly out there they sound even now, 35 years later. As both Lynch and Jodorowsky could probably attest, it wouldn't be a Dune project without something getting left on the cutting-room floor. Fortunately for us, Szajner's unique approach to folding space has at last been revealed in its entirety, and it doesn't seem to have aged a day.
