Cue of the Week: Temptation

Continuing last week's theme of ethereal guitar-based pieces underscoring seduction scenes, here's a cue from the film Siren wherein lead singer Storm Fagan feels the lure of a, shall we say, devoted groupie. The trippy guitar comes courtesy of Tom Strahle, with wordless vocals by recording artist Hilary Hearty.

Temptation

Cue of the Week: The Bedroom

This week's selection the steamy bedroom music from action/suspense flick HellBent.

This scene is particularly interesting because of its eerie similarity to a moment in another film I scored, Siren. Both are ostensible seduction scenes that ultimately don't result in any seduction being accomplished. Both are somewhat ethereal in visual style, both involve same-sex couples (two men in HellBent, two women in Siren), and both, astoundingly, culminate in one party's blowing cigarette smoke into the face of the other in slow motion.

My music to both scenes was somewhat similar, though not intentionally so. Given the striking visual parallelism, I'm not surprised that I came up with similar ideas in both cases. (Part of the similarity comes from my tapping into the skills of guitarist Tom Strahle in both cues.) Next week I'll play the analogous cue from Siren.

The Bedroom

Cue of the Week: Walking

This is the main title for a suspense-thriller called Dead Line which I scored a number of years ago. Usually I'm reluctant to trot out older cues that are even partially electronically realized, since the state of the art of sampling technology moves so quickly, and older sounds quickly sound dated or fake. In this case, I think the music has aged fairly well, partially due to the phrase samples and live piano.

I'd like to say that the piano was "prepared" to make it especially creepy-sounding, but the fact is that it happened to be terribly out of tune. Fortunately, this worked really well for the scene!

Walking