Following a rather busy summer, I’m pleased to say that the Cue of the Week blog / mailing list is back!

This week’s selection is the first track I composed for Lifetime’s Secrets Beneath the Floorboards, a thriller about a widow who discovers that her husband was into what we’ll politely call some shady business. Our protagonist struggles to clean up the mess and, BTW, also save her own life from a highly motivated stalker. (Needless to say, this provided lots of opportunities for tense music.)

Secrets takes place in a rustic environment, which inspired the acoustic guitar as well as the washboard-esque percussion. There are also some less-familiar sounds that add a dash of what’s going on here?, to use the technical term.

p.s. If you’d like to hear the music in context, you can watch the film over at Lifetime!

This week’s selection is planning music from the game Wizard Ops Tactics, specifically for the winter level. Per timeless game music tradition, winter is evoked through high-register strings and other treble-y instruments.

This week’s music selection continues the series from the game Wizard Ops Tactics. This cue evokes a mix of childlike sweetness and ominous danger, as befits a level with a split personality!

This week’s selection comes from the soundtrack of the mobile game Wizard Ops Part One by Phyken Media. A spirited mix of orchestral scherzo and contemporary beats accompanies the titular fire wizard as he blasts his way through enemies in the game’s first, arboreal level.

The mobile game Wizard Ops Tactics featured turn-based spell-flinging gameplay in a variety of colorful locations. Like its predecessor game, it featured sound effects created vocally by the great Michael Winslow of Police Academy fame!

The main musical theme reprises the frenetic orchestral signature of the prior game, but transforms it into a more militaristic march — as befits a strategy game.

This week’s cue comes from the magic-themed mobile shooter Wizard Ops. On the game’s beach level the player does a kind of sideways walk while being buffeted by enemy fire. I thought it would be fun to set the music to an asymmetrical meter (5/4) that suggests a literal sidestep. Marcato strings and intermittent percussion help evoke the milieu of constant bombardment.