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Composer's Blog: Snake Eyes
This episode centers on an unsub who believes he can stack his odds in the casinos of Atlantic City by committing ritualistic murders. Our goal was to musically portray the perverse logic and compulsion of the unsub’s gambling addiction, both when he was struggling with a losing streak and when he was experiencing the high of winning.
We represented the unsub’s losing streaks with an ethereal collage of sounds that incorporated a lot of reverb and echoed percussion. Additionally, we utilized bowed piano to create an unraveling feeling. When the unsub was winning, we represented that with an uptempo band feel that included elements such as a groovy bass and funky drums.
An interesting aspect of this season is that the interpersonal relationships of the BAU team members are being explored to a greater degree than they have been in previous seasons. This means that the music for this component of each episode needs to be character driven and emotionally expressive instead of solely focused on depicting the more foreboding themes of the unsubs.
In this episode, the interpersonal relationship component involved Garcia waking up to find Morgan coming out of her bathroom wearing only a towel after a drunken night together. The music needed to portray Garcia’s confusion and embarrassment at not remembering the night’s events while also suggesting the possibility of some hanky panky having transpired. We used Wurlitzer piano and strings as the main instrumentation for this theme, and we kept the audience guessing until the nature of Garcia’s and Morgan’s relationship was finally revealed at the episode’s end.