Plaza Mayor Company Ltd releases Ollie Howell's score for Kiss of the Con Queen. A striving actor is targeted by an ingenious and sadistic scammer, terrorizing the industry, impersonating Hollywood elites. Kiss of the Con Queen's narrative is paced like it exists in two distinct, and yet blurred, worlds; the sinister artificial world that the Con Queen has created for their victims, and the more real-world, on-the-ground, ramifications that world controls...

The music for Kiss of the Con Queen is short and sweet, being spread over 17 tracks (27 min, 37 sec). It's an electronic score which is almost a master class in composing deeply layered, slowly building suspense themes.

In places it's eerie, at other points it's thematically world building, but one thing it never is, is dull. While this may not be an overly memorable score - there are no significant "themes" to latch on to - it's definitely a soundtrack that adds an important voice to the movie.

Discussing the score, composer Ollie Howell, says: "For the artificial world, I captured this by using lo-fi analogue synthesisers and samplers, bending very subtly in and out of tune to each other, creating an unsettling and electronic ambience that felt warped and somehow fragile. For the “real world”, with so much of this part of the film being set in Thailand and Indonesia, I infused some heavily processed gamelan influences into the sound palette, but also found tuned metallic sounds that were non-musical in essence, but that could masquerade as gamelan sounds, to mimic the Con Queen’s deception and impersonations. I wanted it to feel like something didn’t quite belong there, arousing suspicion at all times. Then as the two worlds started to collide and intertwine, it was a lot of fun blending those two sound worlds together."

If you're a fan of rich, subtle electronic scores, then you'll find much to enjoy here.

8

Darren Rea