Early in Parker Finn’s psych-ward horror Smile (2022), hospital therapist Rose encounters a desperately doomed woman who sees people with terrible grinning faces. She proceeds to cut her own throat by slicing an ear-to-ear grin with a pottery shard. A loop of lo-fi musicality fades up while a half-submerged vocal hum attempts to clear its throat. It is harmonised in a way that corrupts the original signal; its desperate breathiness sounds like Jon Hassell has been thrown under a bus while busking. Submerged in the voicing are fogged gamelan chimes. The score is by Cristobal Tapia de Veer, a chameleon, or magpie-like, composer whose command of polyglot styles could be described as a 21st century tropicalia. His disorienting palette caters well to film music’s current appetite for self-cannibalising stylistics and performances.

Back in Smile’s opening shock scene, the camera frames the poor woman’s body pooling blood on the ground, her fixed smile locked on a catatonic Rose. Massively extended reverb textures convey a frozen stasis as the camera tracks from the dead woman’s mask to Rose’s blank countenance, zooming into her black pupil which fills the screen. The film’s title flashes in red like a neon sign, timed to harsh synth orchestral stabbing. Those synth bursts are brief but intense. The moment is bludgeoning, insensitive, raging, raving, partying. Auditing this music alone, you wouldn’t be off the mark in tying it to Belgian techno, such as T99’s “Anasthasia” (1991).

Fledgling techno and trance from this epoch made much of being trippy through their flirtation with cybernetic dreaming, but the songs – skeletal assemblages in Cakewalk and Cubase – are excessively hedged and controlled. The ripe mythology of the era insists on pharmaceuticals intensifying the ears, nerves and brain of the tweaking phreaking nightclubbers, catered to by producers and DJs fabricating aural sensations as part of a sono-sensual feedback loop: trippy music for tripping listeners who heard the sound of music itself tripping out. But what if the drugs were overpriced illicit-thrill placebos, and the music was doing all the warping? What if the determining neural energy was activated not by reckless dosing but simply triggered by common mental insecurities? Could not then these quantized, stack-layered, MIDI-synched, graph-matrixed music tracks be a form of medication that anaesthetises (as per “Anasthasia”) through their gridlocked pleasures?

I’m proposing here that Cristobal Tapia de Veer’s score for Smile can be viewed as an imaginary alternative to the official narrative of techno and trance. The psych-ward horror movie is perfect ground for disavowing the zenith of mind-expanding feelings, and intensifying the flatline of mind-contracting conditions. The genre, here, is not the thrilling night out, but the numbing morning after. Tapia de Veer’s score is a clinical dissection of 808 tuned kick-booms, floating chordal suggestions, spiteful clicks and ticks, rumbling bass swells, and noisy throbbing loops. It’s neither ‘power electronics’ nor the equally suspect ‘IDM’ – which flatter themselves with dominance and intelligence – but a sonic charting of a curse taking hold of the psyche of therapist Rose. Tapia de Veer’s layering of processed voices (provided by singer Kim Neundorf and merged with his bowing of the daxophone) imagines the curse as a vaporous choir clinging to Rose, sounding how she feels when she senses the curse taking hold of her. It’s like she’s being affected (pharmaceutically) and transported (musically). A perfect psych-ward horror score.

Smile signs its horror through gritted teeth and stretched lips contorting the face into a malformed expression of happiness. Like the late 1980s acid house smiley face ideogram and its defaced recoupment in late 1990s happy hardcore, the well-meaning emoticon hides emotional breakdowns. With zero irony, the screaming tag for that period’s all-nighters was “mental”. Smile’s score revisits the era not through retro fandom but through illness, trauma, hallucination and panic. Rose hears children singing “Happy Birthday” at a party in besmeared vocals; later, her body crashes through a glass coffee table to the growls of triple-octave pitch drops. Neither moment references the trippy timestretching of early jungle’s ganja effects, such as in Dead Dred’s “Dred Bass” (1994) or the ecstasy fuelled hardcore chipmunking of Ilsa Gold’s “Up” (1993). The similarity, though, lies in their modes of self-corruption and self-distortion.

Tapia de Veer’s earlier scores include weirded music for Utopia (2013), ambiguous synthesis throughout Humans (2015), and chilling harmonies in Colm McCarthy’s The Girl With All The Gifts (2016). Frankly, these films’ soundtrack releases are far superior to the thinly hip narratives they scored. More importantly, Tapia de Veer’s thematic explorations of characters who are conspiratorially invented, fatally cursed, or cybernetically designed, have equipped him for portraying the most insidiously confounding type of human: the luxury tourist. That species populates Mike White’s The White Lotus (three seasons since 2021). The HBO series isn’t horror, but it certainly dwells on horrible people, horrific situations and horrifying consequences. Its toxic characters are brilliantly musicalised through Tapia de Veer’s pastiches which show how ugly the beautiful can be.

In the first episode of The White Lotus’s first season, the guests arrive at the eponymous Hawaiian luxury resort. It takes about 30 seconds of screen time to plot these characters along a spectrum of execrable personality. Hotel manager Armand directs a young Hawaiian trainee to absent her cultural identity in front of the new VIPs: he describes the resort’s psychological approach as “tropical kabuki”. What an aptly offensive description of cultural meltdown. How appropriate that Tapia de Veer’s score assembles its exotic themes into a musical cabinet of curiosities, somewhere between a vitrine of chloroformed butterflies splayed and pinned, and a museum of natural history inhabited by living caricatures.

Brazilian drums, casabas, shakers and African talking drums; microtonal trombones and pocket trumpets, shimmering marimbas, dinky steel drums and tuned wooden blocks; flutes, recorders and melodic sighs. As these musical elements are tied to moments of awful characters at their most desperate, the score aggregates a commentary on their dispositions. Yet thanks to Mike White’s unique scripting, the accompanying music is deliberately contradictory rather than passively ambiguous. The magisterial template for this empathic approach would be Ennio Morricone’s title theme for Sergio Leone’s The Good, The Bad And The Ugly (1966) – a glorious cultural meltdown that beautifully stages the worst a human can be. But Tapia de Veer goes much further. In his title theme “Aloha!” for the first season, I hear Ace Of Base and Deep Forest merged with Italian cine bossa nova as catalogued on great reissue labels like La Douce, Octopus and Plastic. Elsewhere, the music evokes a Womad-style reggae merger of Russian dubstep in a remix of Jean Michael Jarre’s “Zoolook” (1984). Overall, the score brims with postcolonial tradewind Muzak: arch, cynical, self-inflicted, yet strangely pliable and resonant.

Amazingly, of the first season score’s 28 cues, only one dials in Hawaiian guitar music (“Mahalo”). I feel there’s a reason for this. The slack-key guitars, steel guitars and ukuleles evidence how native Hawaiians absorbed mainland US instrumentation. But Tapia de Veer and White’s ears reach for the reverse flow of cultural exchange: exotica. Shaped by post-war Tiki dads Arthur Lyman and Martin Denny dabbling their toes in murky musicological waters, exotica’s ersatz sounds of ‘contra-country’ music were rendered with ever increasing artifice and theatricality in the ornate arrangements of Les Baxter, Esquivel, Dick Hyman, et al. Tapia de Veer’s score echoes with the melancholic failure of exotica’s paradise wonderland, aired like medicating muzak in a veterans’ hospital.

A smiley face often has little to do with emotion making and everything to do with emotional masking. It is also the face of the service industries: greeting, welcoming, assuaging, seducing customers. The White Lotus is the definitive dissection of the most specious of all service industries, luxury tourism. And isn’t this what film music at its most obsequious aspires to: servicing movies bent on codifying human behaviour for dramatic control? Tapia de Veer’s themes and arrangements map out a fascinating oppositional arc: from deconstructed techno to unrepentant exotica to reconstituted film music.

Wire subscribers can read Philip Brophy’s original Secret History of Film Music columns online in the digital archive. Previous instalments of this column published on The Wire website can be found here.