Great news for people who love morbid, mordant, sci-fi-inflected synth music: Infiné Music label is reissuing Zed's (aka Bernard Szajner) awesome imaginary soundtrack LP Visions of Dune (1979) on Aug. 25. Created over eight days on a borrowed Oberheim sequencer and an Akaï four-track, the music here represents some of the deepest, most intense evocations of alien atmospheres ever waxed. It's a claustrophobic and expansive collection of dystopian tone poetry and ominous electro rock that will appeal to fans of Heldon, Magma, and first-half-of-the-'70s Tangerine Dream.

Szajner, now 70, told The Vinyl Factory that he conceived a series of what he called “mental impression[s] of a character, a situation or a concept” from Frank Herbert’s novel. Elaborating further on the concept behind Visions of Dune, Szajner said:

Just as a novel is a continuity of words, which form a continuity of sentences, which together form the continuity of the story; I assembled my words and phrases (notes, sounds and loops) in a continuity which to me formed an “auditory film,” a “transposed imaging” of the novel, which explains why the sounds are linked one to another without any real cuts separating one track from another, all forming one continuity, with the exception of the physical demand posed by the fact that, vinyl discs having two sides, it was impossible for me to create one single and unique continuity — I was forced to “divide” my “musical story” in two.

You can pre-order Visions of Dune here. Check out Andy Votel's minimix of the album here (scroll down halfway).

Tip: Norm Chambers