Dune: A Cello Walks Into Schulze's 1979

A man who had just got hold of a Polaroid camera was making an album sleeve. Schulze with his head wrapped in silver paper. Schulze fumbling with strange objects. Schulze in shorts. Schulze in silly caps. Those pictures still exist. None of them was used. What he settled on in the end was the television set in his own flat.

Where this record sits

The man with the camera was Klaus D. Müller, Schulze's manager and biographer, the same person who settled the place of Picture Music out of his own diaries. He told the story in issue 181 of the fanzine The KS Circle in April 2012. He wanted a science fiction image, because Schulze had made the record with Frank Herbert's books in mind. He shot plenty of Polaroids. Then came a stretch where he enjoyed taking snapshots off television and video, and what he finally used was a video still from Tarkovsky's Solaris, from 1972. He glued Letraset letters along the bottom of the TV glass and laid a piece of thin string across the monitor. Do not ask him what the string was meant to express, he wrote.

Metronome was nervous about using the title at all. Müller wrote to the book's publisher and came back with a letter saying Frank Herbert himself had no objection, which he showed to the record company. Someone at Metronome then had the idea of giving the sleeve a glossy silver finish.

This is the record after X, and two people have joined him. Wolfgang Tiepold on cello and Arthur Brown on voice.

Track listing

"Dune" runs longer on the 2005 reissue than on the Brain original. "Le Mans" is a 1979 live recording added to that edition.

Through the two pieces

• "Dune." 30 minutes 28 seconds. Layers of sound rise and turn away with no pulse and no tune holding them. A cello crosses over them. Writing in the French magazine Best in December 1979, Hervé Picart called this side a maelstrom of sound with the movement of an ocean, and compared the cello flying above it to the ornithopters circling that planet. Follow the cello in and out and let the rest sit.
• "Shadows Of Ignorance." 26 minutes 20 seconds, and the piece where Arthur Brown sings. The same writer described a long metallic litany carrying a recitation, half sung and half chanted. The words came printed with the record.

How to listen

• Lights off, at night. Do not break the first 30 minutes.
• Find the cello first. A long tone from a machine and a long tone from a bow end in different shapes.
• On the second piece, listen to where the voice is placed rather than to what it says.

What happened next

In October 1979 the Austrian paper Salzburger Nachrichten wrote that images form while this music plays, that associations come, that a listener leans back and loosens. If the ear could think, the piece ended, it would probably choose Schulze.

A letter that arrived much later sits on the official site too. A man in England bought the record in 1979 purely on the strength of that glossy sleeve. He played it twice and found it interesting, no more. The third time he listened in the dark at night and was overwhelmed halfway through by the emotional power of it. He put off saying so for a quarter of a century, assuming the message could never reach Schulze, until he found the official site.

One track to send a friend

Send "Dune." 30 minutes 28 seconds. Add one line: the thin diagonal line on the sleeve is not a scratch, it is a piece of string laid across a television set, and the man who laid it there never wrote down why.

Where to get it

The 1979 Brain pressing is the one with the glossy silver finish. For the live "Le Mans" and the longer "Dune," take the 2005 Revisited reissue. Tilt the sleeve and the silver catches first. That is what sold it to the man in England.

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