Emperor: Battle for Dune Soundtrack

Emperor: Battle for Dune Soundtrack, David Arkenstone / Frank Klepacki / Jarrid Mendelson, 2001

While Westwood Studios’ Dune II: The Building of a Dynasty was not the first real-time strategy game, it codified many of the genre’s conventions and helped launch its 1990s boom, epitomised by Westwood’s own Command & Conquer juggernaut. In that sense, it seemed fitting that 2001’s Emperor: Battle for Dune, Westwood’s third Dune game, was positioned to break new ground once again as the studio’s first 3D RTS title — or so it appeared. In the event, Emperor: Battle for Dune was well received by critics and players alike, but few would have hailed it as more than a solid entry in an increasingly crowded field. Ultimately, it became Westwood’s final RTS game: not another revolution, but a kind of bookend to the developer’s pioneering work.

Things were more interesting on the musical side. Emperor: Battle for Dune featured the same three factions as Dune 2000 had a few years earlier: House Atreides, Harkonnen and Ordos, the last of them a non-canonical addition to the Dune universe that allowed the developers greater stylistic freedom. As on Dune 2000 — and, of course, the Command & Conquer series — RTS music heavyweight Frank Klepacki was brought in to score the game. This time, however, Westwood requested a distinct musical identity for each house. That effectively tripled the workload, so Klepacki enlisted two composers with whom he had collaborated before: David Arkenstone and Jarrid Mendelson. Arkenstone had worked with Klepacki on Lands of Lore: Guardians of Destiny and Lands of Lore III, while Mendelson had made crucial contributions to one of the Command & Conquer franchise’s strangest and most distinctive entries, Tiberian Sun.

Working largely independently of one another, apart from using copies of Klepacki’s earlier Dune scores as reference points, the three composers produced a vast soundtrack lasting roughly three hours, with each faction receiving around an hour of characteristic music. Klepacki scored House Atreides in relatively straightforward synth-orchestral, cinematic terms; no genre mash-ups of the kind found in Command & Conquer appear here. Arkenstone, meanwhile, devised a more aggressive hard rock and metal style for the Harkonnen, a surprising turn for listeners familiar with his gentler fantasy work. Yet for all their differences, neither composer really distinguishes his material from similar game scores, both relying on genre conventions that struggle to sustain such lengthy compositions. In the end, it is Mendelson who brings the most imagination to the project, perhaps aided by the characterisation of House Ordos as treacherous strategists whose music, according to an IGN feature on the soundtrack, was meant to convey a “strange, out-of-this-world alienness”.

Mendelson had already proven his compositional abilities on Command & Conquer: Tiberian Sun. Yet while that 1999 score was, like his portion of the Emperor: Battle for Dune soundtrack, entirely electronic, the later game finds him taking a somewhat different tack. Tiberian Sun was a masterclass in understatement, steeped in dread and paranoia. Emperor, by contrast, demands a more overtly forceful approach suited to an action-heavy RTS, but Mendelson still arrives at something inventive and frequently surprising.

In essence, Mendelson adopts a consistently maximalist method here, writing densely layered electronic tracks that can be downright bracing in their intensity, irregular rhythms and liberal use of dissonance. The result is music that feels grand enough for a war game, yet edgy and unsettling enough to twist the genre’s conventions out of shape. It is not easy listening, but it is also the first Dune franchise soundtrack since Stéphane Picq’s Dune to find a genuinely imaginative musical language for the planet’s otherworldliness. Mendelson certainly achieves the “out-of-this-world alienness” he was asked to conjure. Picq had arrived at similarly strange and evocative moods through richness of atmosphere; Mendelson reaches comparable territory through far more aggressive means.

The soundtrack’s boldest gestures arrive early in Mendelson’s portion of the score. “Not an Option” is a kind of mutant march, with pounding beats backing twitching melodic fragments that oscillate nervously through Dune’s night skies. The cue’s martial profile is offset by calmer passages that still vibrate with tension, as well as by foreboding synth leads that keep the music from settling into anything conventionally triumphant.

Mendelson’s gift for astonishingly intricate, ever-shifting electronic layering is just as apparent on the whirlwind “The Strategist”. A grating, circular lead winds its way past distorted bass pads and hyperactive buzzing textures, turning the cue into one of gaming’s most elaborate crisis themes through the melody’s alarm-like insistence. Despite its industrial groove, fierce dissonances and endlessly repeating lead leave the track perpetually on the verge of implosion. As it piles up a staggering amount of detail, “The Strategist” achieves with apparent ease the epic effect that Klepacki and Arkenstone’s music strains after, all while avoiding cliché entirely.

Other tracks are less hypercharged, focusing instead on the Ordos’ strangely techno-ethereal, icy character and their calculated, machine-like mentality. A trio of cues — “House Ordos”, “Ghola” and “Executronic” — opens up huge cavernous spaces filled with glistening machinery whose myriad gears seem to grind ceaselessly against one another. As in Tiberian Sun, Mendelson’s command of atmosphere is masterful. He creates a fascinating sense of eerie beauty and splendour while tantalisingly keeping the alien objects that inspire such awe just out of reach; witness the way “Executronic” repeatedly slips from majestic passages back into experimental beats. Later, “Dream of the Executrix” pushes this surreal mood into nightmare territory, introducing chopped-up, screaming electric guitar into the cue’s tapestry of uneasily interlocking electronics.

Of course, the Emperor: Battle for Dune soundtrack never strays far from the battlefield, but Mendelson does not respond with straightforward battle music. A cue like “Deception” advances with unsettling determination, while the whiplash transitions of “Sabotage” maintain the score’s constant atmosphere of threat amid the eccentricity of its many layers. “A Plan of Attack” features a surprisingly lean arrangement built almost entirely around knotty rhythms, while “Ordos Control” and “The Specimen” exchange overt displays of force for a haunting atmospheric pull. And when Mendelson finally does write something close to a war anthem in “Infiltrators”, its choral synth rhythms, pounding drums and anthemic pulse are still interrupted by one of the score’s most muttering, minimalist interludes. In his hands, Emperor: Battle for Dune becomes an unpredictable descent into a dreamlike, raging underworld of innovative game-music electronica.