Music for supervillainy?

Cafe Society
61

I’d try subverting the usual expectations a bit.

Arvo Part: Tabula Rasa LP. Religious-sounding music, but solemn and melancholy, not the histrionics and ecstasies associated with certain canonical baroque works. Good for covering montage sequences of Eurotrash villains in designerwear and their computer-hacker underlings.

instrumental taiko drumming: might be good for transitional scenes featuring the characters preparing for or positioning themselves before the final action-packed climax. I.e., the Armani-suited bad guys get in their Lear jet; the good guys crack the code and scramble to cover the target, etc.

Balinese music: oh, it’s not just for heroin-production cover shots anymore! Try this for the background in an evil-seductress-in-bed scene, especially if she ends up killing the good-guy patsy she’s with. Yowza!

Brian Eno: what could offer a greater contrast in dramatic irony than to juxtapose pure evil with misleadingly nonthreatening, placid appearances than Eno’s tranquil, limpid Tuesday Afternoon (previously used in “9 1/2 Weeks”)? Or, suggest a villain’s derangement by tapping Eno & Fripp’s No Pussyfooting LP (esp. “Swastika Girls”). Or, if the evil plot unfolds in an airport, use Music for Airports… :smiley:

postmodern boy/girl pop acts: whether you appropriate the Japanese girl-group Shonen Knife, the Western pastiche kitsch of the Japanese duo Pizzicato Five, or feel more comfortable with the pop-culture allusions of the Scottish teen trio Bis, there’s a big wide world of playful, unthreatening, globalist, commericiality-embracing sonic sugar highs for your ironic exploitation.

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Pink Floyd was mentioned a few times already. Whilst I most definetely second “Careful with that Axe, Eugene” the one that gave the creeps as a kid was “One of these days” from the album “Meddle”. This always conjured up marching armies and all round menace and that was even before I could understand the punchline in English when a scary voice roars “one of these days I’m going to chop you into little bits.” Eek.

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I’ll have to second
Night on Bald Mountain
Carmina Burana
Mars from the Planets
and
Pink Floyd’s “One of the Days” (I was planning to FIRST it).

But you’ve all missed a gem. For the scenes where the villain’s sinisiter plan is unfolding and the heroes/victims go on their way all unknowing, Isao Tomita’s electronic rendition of Mussorgsky’s Firebirds. Absolutely as creepy as music gets.