Jodorowsky’s Dune – music by Kurt Stenzel
A unique documentary about a movie that almost, but didn’t, get made, the musical treatment for Jodorowsky’s Dune is a novel one: score the documentary with the music that the unmade movie should’ve gotten. Chronicling, as it does, an abortive attempt to bring Frank Herbert’s genre-redefining novel to the big screen in the 1970s, Jodorowsky’s Dune is graced with a fittingly ’70s-style score awash with analog synths (or very good approximations of them).
Think of early Tangerine Dream (composer Kurt Stenzel’s auditory reference point), or the all-synth, almost-abstract score of Enter The Dragon, or the music of Jon Pertwee-era Doctor Who: that sound in your head is the sound of the Arrakis that was never meant to be. It’s the sound of a Dune that would’ve starred the likes of Salvador Dali, Orson Welles and Mick Jagger, rather than Kyle MacLachlan and Sting. The music is authentically trippy – as Alejandro Jodorowsky’s vision for Herbert’s epic likely would’ve been – and anyone born in the ’70s or steeped in ’70s genre cinema will likely find the wobbly analog synth sounds are a comforting old friend.
On a few tracks, there is dialogue from the documentary itself, and depending on my mood I can come down on either the “no, just let me hear the music, please” or the “oh, that’s kinda neat and it helps set the tone” side of the fence. It’s only on a few tracks. Stenzel sequences the album as a four-sided double LP, staying true to the medium that would’ve been available to a soundtrack album from the unmade movie. Tracks blend together as ethereal suites and reach an end point whereupon, in some alternate universe where Jodorowsky beat David Lynch to the punch, someone presumably turns the record over.
Alejandro Jodorowsky’s mid-1970s attempt to change how sci-fi reached the big screen never happened, and Dune languished in Hollywood turnaround hell while a little movie about the last of the Jedi Knights became the film that changed the entire playbook in 1977. That movie, of course, redirected movie music back onto a 
European-inspired orchestral course, almost exactly 180 degrees away from the music Stenzel imagines here (and 180 degrees away from Jodorowsky’s pie-in-the-sky dream of having post-Syd-Barrett-era Pink Floyd score his vision of Dune). But Kurt Stenzel’s realization of the course on which movie sci-fi soundtracks could have continued is an incredible, atmospheric listen.
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- Coming of a God (5:27)
- Greatest Movie Never Made (1:01)
- Parallel World (1:41)
- Parallel World (outro) (1:03)
- Leap of Faith (0:43)
- Time and Space (2:04)
- Optical World (2:55)
- Nebula (1:25)
- Invitation (1:02)
- Point of View (2:36)
- Moebius (4:48)
- Arrakis (1:58)
- Millions of Stars (0:21)
- Into the Galaxy (1:26)
- O’Bannon Meets Jodo (1:18)
- Finding the Others (0:57)
- Spiritual Warriors (1:36)
- Conception of Paul (2:01)
- Ships With Souls (1:51)
- The Pirate Spaceship (5:23)
- Rescue From a Sandworm (2:36)
- Mad Emperor (0:23)
- Burning Giraffes (1:42)
- Baron Harkonnen (0:33)
- Giger’s Theme (1:06)
- Deepest Darkness of the Soul (1:15)
- Feyd Rautha (4:17)
- Total Extermination (2:16)
- I Am Dune (6:00)
- Hollywood (2:22)
- Fingerprints (4:16)
- Open the Mind (3:38)
- Try (2:30)
Released by: Cinewax
Release date: November 13, 2015
Total running time: 75:31
