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.
