A sonic landscape for the Duniverse
A sonic landscape for the Duniverse
Timotheos – Arrakis (Album cover)
Frank Herbert’s classic 1965 science fiction novel Dune has been the inspiration behind a seemingly infinite amount of media and art. The Dune series has been adapted to television, theatre and was released as a hugely popular film in 1985. It has inspired multiple comic book series, spinoff novels, board games, card games and video games. Akin to series like George Lucas’s Star Wars and J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings, Dune has cemented itself as one of the great fictional universes ever created. Dune is one of only a handful of science fiction imaginings that have made an identifiable cultural dent that has subsequently changed the social perspective of millions of fans worldwide for the past half century.
Instructor in the College of the Humanities, Tim Pettipiece is one of those fans. In addition to his work teaching and researching in the Classics and Religion, Pettipiece is also a talented musician with a number of album releases under his belt. As a creator of ambient music, Pettipiece goes by the handle Timotheos, a nod to his love of ancient Greek culture. His latest release is a sonic landscape meant to represent evocative aspects of the Dune series. He attributes much of his interest in Dune to the intense correlation between the ‘Duniverse’ and his focus as an academic.
“I was surprised how much attention is paid to religious themes in the series, even though its attitude to religion is quite ambivalent,” explains Pettipiece. “There’s a strong tension in the work between viewing religion as a cynical means of control while at the same time a means of human progress. This is the same tension one faces when studying religious traditions in an academic setting.”
Pettipiece grew up in southern Ontario just cross the river from Detroit. Raised on classic rock, he got his first guitar at age thirteen. During his budding teenage years he began his career as a performer, playing in various original and cover bands. It was in high school that he realized his love for ambient and experimental music and eventually began recording. This led to Pettipiece’s first release: a four track cassette entitled Astronomy.
As can be said for many young artists, as Pettipiece grew older, his music took a back seat to his education and professional life. While pursuing a degree in Classical Languages and an MA and PhD in Religious Studies, he ultimately gave up playing music entirely. It wasn’t until his graduation, when his wife surprised him with a new electrical guitar, that his passion for playing live music was re-ignited.
Five years on and countless live performances later, a major shift came in his music playing career when one of his Humanities students recorded a four song demo album as a creative project for one of his courses. The student’s project was a four song exploration of the life of Simeon Stylites, an early Christian monk who famously lived on top of a pillar for much of his life. This work inspired Pettipiece both sonically and thematically.
The project illuminated the world of ‘Do it Yourself’ digital recording to Pettipiece, and consequently, he has since recorded two full length album’s of ambient music, and two EP’s.
Tim Pettipiece
His first full-length project was called Hierosolyma: a Musical Meditation on Jerusalem (2010), and was inspired by a course on the origins of western religions which he taught at Carleton in the College of Humanities.
His most recent project is of course his newly released musical tribute to the Dune series. As a lifelong aesthete of classic science fiction (particularly the work of Philip K. Dick), reading the Dune series was a pursuit Pettipiece had meaning to partake in for a number of years. It was over the months of 2010-2011 that he was finally able to read the iconic series. He describes this venture as one of the most profound reading experiences of his life.
“I was starting a new recording project while I was about midway through reading the series and was so totally immersed in the experience that it came through the creative process.”
Pettipiece has a wide range of influences from early music to Brian Eno, but throughout the course of recording Arrakis, Peter Gabriel’s Passion soundtrack to Martin Scorsese’s, The Last Temptation of Christ, Tangerine Dream’s Rubycon as well as some post-rock and neoclassical recordings played central roles of inspiration for his album.
After several months of recording and numerous technical setbacks, Arrakis: Music Inspired by Frank Herbert’s Dune, has just been released as a digital download.