Kurt Stenzel - Jodorowsky’s Dune OST

Pitchfork 80

In 1974, surrealist filmmaker Alejandro Jodorowsky was tapped to direct his adaptation of Frank Herbert's monumental sci-fi novel Dune. The film was set to star David Carradine, Gloria Swanson, Mick Jagger, Orson Welles, Salvador Dalí, and Amanda Lear. Meanwhile, after the producers considered none other than Karlheinz Stockhausen, Pink Floyd was slated to compose along with contributions from the French prog-rock outfit Magma. Jodorowsky was given a lavish budget but the film didn't make it past its intensive pre-production stage.

As Frank Pavich's 2013 documentary Jodorowsky's Dune illustrates, Jodorowsky and his production team put a great deal of effort into storyboarding and design, with an eye for detail that would've made Stanley Kubrick blush. As it turns out, the great irony of Jodorowsky's career is that he made his most widely-felt impact with a film he never even began shooting. To this day, his work on Dune continues to reflect in popular cinema and culture. In a sense, his version of Dune died giving birth to the genre-defining films that emerged in its wake. Alien, for example, was written by Dan O'Bannon and of course bore the unmistakable design aesthetic of Swiss painter H.R. Giger—both of whom had been brought in for Jodorowsky's production. This backstory, of course, frames Kurt Stenzel's score to Pavich's documentary and vice-versa.

So many things could have gone wrong here had Stenzel attempted to encompass the pretense and grandeur of the subject at hand. "We need to try," he writes in the liner notes—the implication being that we as the audience should put forth our best effort both to imagine the film Jodorowsky envisioned and to honor the scale of what he was aiming to accomplish. But Stenzel's score—which consists mainly of a bunch of analog synths that he sequenced and mixed in real time (with no additional digital sequencing)—actually requires little effort from listeners.

Given the psychedelic quality of Jodorowsky's most well-known films, El Topo and The Holy Mountain, it's no surprise that in the documentary the maverick Chilean director talks about wanting to mimic the effects of LSD with Dune. But his goals didn't stop there. Jodorowsky breathlessly describes how his film was to serve as a "prophet"—not as a prophecy, but as a living, breathing entity with a consciousness of its own. "For me," he declares on camera, "Dune will be the coming of a God. An artistic and cinematographic God."

To Stenzel's credit, although he does fall prey to a bit of reverence—most notably in passages that feature audio samples of Jodorowsky waxing poetic on what moviemaking means to him—the music doesn't strive to be anywhere near as lofty as that. Stenzel is wise to go for a more discreet, at times even whimsical, tone that supports the documentary's easygoing, storytelling structure. It's too bad that Stenzel, when he does opt to use Jodorowsky monologues, doesn't get more creative with them by chopping them up or subjecting them to effects, but the samples occur rarely and end up being incidental to the score's overall flavor anyway.

Charmingly, the liner notes include a list of all the synth gear Stenzel used, just in case you're interested in geeking-out. But that would be missing the point. Stenzel's score doesn't stand out so much for the tools he used to create it as much as for the choices he made while using those tools. Pavich instructed Stenzel to go for a "Tangerine Dream-type feel," and as such the predictable path would have been to mimic the wheezing, primitive synthesizer sounds that define sci-fi cinema of the '60s and '70s—sounds that now feel quaint at best and moldy at worst. Had Stenzel emulated the audacious bleeting style of, say, early Moog pioneer Richard Teitelbaum, Emerson Lake & Palmer, or any number of artists from the period, he would have artificially encased this music in a temporal ambience it doesn't actually require in order to engage your attention. Ultimately, not unlike the French electronic duo Air, Stenzel has too much creative inspiration to settle for being a stylist, and though he openly references the past, he lands with both feet firmly anchored in the present.

Pavich's documentary more or less consists of a string of interviews undercut with shots of old photos and storyboard drawings. Clearly then, Stenzel's job was to keep the music moving along to match whatever pace Pavich set as appropriate for the audience's patience threshold. Stenzel shifts quickly but gracefully from one motif to the next, weaving sounds in and out like a choreographer who prefers to stay offstage while guiding each "dancer"—each new instrument, melody, textural element, or structural change—into the fray on cue. By turns dramatic, spaced-out, otherworldly, entrancing, stately, ominous, hopeful, playful, and chatty, most of the tracks on Jodorowsky's Dune run about a minute long and manage to cover more than one mood before they run that course. Taken as a whole, they stream by yet never feel rushed, and Stenzel establishes his dual knack for patience and economy very early on.

In what is perhaps this album's defining moment, a high-pitched synth line wails and echoes in a vast empty space. Stenzel gives it a character and shape not unlike those celestial bodies that appear to us via deep-space photography as giant, colorful plumes. The lone synth line segues into a live drumset, the first appearance of organic instruments and room ambience on the whole album. The drums don't last long, and soon they too meld into vaguely Middle Eastern-sounding chants before the voices grow more distressed. Then, a snarling, heavily filtered electric guitar riff that recalls Tool's "Forty-Six & 2" makes its entrance before flaring out as quickly as it came. One might expect these elements to step on each other's toes. But, as with just about every other sound that leads up to this passage, Stenzel creates a sensation of smooth sailing, even as he radically alters the scenery every few minutes. On Jodorowsky’s Dune, Stenzel takes you across topographic oceans that never rock the boat.