Killer sounds for a crime show

Musical scores are crucial to a host of TV series, but no other show uses background music as extensively as Criminal Minds. It can make a scary serial killer almost unbearably stomach-turning, or transform a brightly lit police station into midnight at Dracula's castle.

The show's cues, which is what TV and film people call the individual sequences that play as scenes unfold, may lack the lyrics and catchy melodies of the songs on Glee, and they may not sound like music to most viewers, but they can help define character and mood as much as anything that appears on the screen.

Marc and Steffan Fantini, raised at Broad and Dickinson in South Philadelphia, now living in L.A., are two of the three not-so-criminal minds behind the music of the show.

Some of their tricks sound as weird as the psycho killers who populate the disturbing series, which follows a fictional team from the real FBI Behavioral Analysis Unit who jet around in search of the country's worst criminals. The audience eats it up. In its first run, Wednesdays on CBS, Minds is No. 11 in the ratings this season, and reruns are flourishing in syndication on the ION network and cable's A&E. The series plays in more than 50 countries.

"We often take a sound and distort it and destroy it, since the show is so dark and creepy," Steffan Fantini said in telephone interview. "A violin being bowed with a kitchen utensil on the rustiest string makes a horrible, ugly sound, which works so well under these heinous crimes."

Fantini is reluctant to give away all the secrets he and his brother and their colleague Scott Gordon use for the show, but he'll list a few: "The sound of a Dumpster closing, with reverbs, echoes, distortion pedals.

"We've played weird instruments, Dobros, dulcimers, and we play them the wrong way. We've stuffed things inside the hammers of pianos, aluminum foil or a piece of sheet metal.

"For vocal things, we've said the craziest words, turned them back and distorted them. We'll use full profanity, recessing and distorting it, then flip it around and mix it into the track underneath, and it's really creepy.

"We have a blast."

The Fantinis come from a long line of musicians, even if the song did skip a generation coming to them. Their grandfather, Mariano Fantini, was a trombonist in a carabinieri band in Italy before coming to Philadelphia, and all 12 of his brothers were musicians, Steffan said.

Though they weren't musicians, their parents met musically; both were instructors at an Arthur Murray dance studio. Mario Fantini was known as "The Pump" at South Philly High School, where he played quarterback. "He could pump that ball," Steffan said, "barely had to move his arm."

Mario started as a teacher in Philadelphia and went on to become a noted educator, overseeing the decentralization of New York City schools in the '60s, and then in Los Angeles and Washington, D.C., writing 15 books, and becoming dean of the School of Education at the University of Massachusetts.

The brothers have been in music all their lives. It wasn't hard for them to get into character in one Criminal Minds episode in 2009, helmed by noted director John Badham (Saturday Night Fever, WarGames), as the bandmates of a Goth musician who had murder follow him to every show. They performed as vocalists behind the likes of Ringo Starr, Bon Jovi, and the Eagles before getting a publishing deal with Lorimar and a record deal with RCA in the '90s. As instrumentalists, Marc is primarily a guitarist and Steffan a keyboardist, but they play everything.

They're into their seventh season with Criminal Minds and have scored Lifetime's Army Wives since its inception in 2007. That work, with its emphasis on bluesy, Southern instrumentation, is almost the polar opposite of the music for Criminal Minds.

"As opposed to being recorded 'in the box,' as we say, with samples and everything, that show is much more [about] organic instruments," Gordon told a writer for the American Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers last June, after the trio won its sixth straight ASCAP award for Minds and fourth straight for Wives. The prizes are given to composers on all the top-rated shows.

"The box" is really a lot of them, filled with sound samples, including many orchestral and instrumental ones, which can be melded together to create the spooky Criminal Minds music. Producers and composers strive never to repeat cues in different shows.

"We have many, many computers," Steffan said. "Each one has sounds that we have created. You type in 'screeching metal,' for instance, and all these sounds come up."

Sometimes, things are less techno-wonderful.

"We had to do an episode where the guy was a pedophile," Steffan said. "We had toy pianos. We creeped out the sound of these baby toy pianos, and it would make him really disturbing."

Criminal Minds is disturbing enough that many potential viewers who love similar shows - CSI or even the skeevy Law & Order: SVU, both of which it stomps in the ratings - refuse to tune in. How do people cope, when they have to live with the grotesquery every week and think up sounds to make it scarier?

"I don't really take it home with me," Steffan said. "If I did, I would probably be in trouble. My relief is going to Disneyland. I make a lot of trips there, maybe more than any other grown-up."