The Musical Outlaws of SOUND OF NOISE

The recent Palm Springs International Film Festival introduced American audiences to a wide array of well-crafted films from talented directors all over the world. Over 190 films from 70 countries were showcased in the festival, which originated 22 years ago as the brainchild of former mayor Sonny Bono (of Sonny and Cher). I saw 13 films during my four-day visit, and every one of them was beautiful, thought-provoking, or charming.

            I ended the fest on a high note—so to speak—by catching Sound of Noise, an imaginative comedy from Sweden about a band of outlaw musicians who wreak havoc on an unsuspecting city. Outraged by the bland Musak that is broadcast through the neighborhoods via tiny speakers mounted on poles, and bored by the predictable concerts of the local symphony orchestra, the sonic outlaws devise a plan to take their percussion-based, avant-garde music to the streets. The group’s opus is titled “Music for One City and Six Drummers;” and, the outlaws consist of the band’s leader—a spunky heroine named Sanna Persson—and five percussionists who invade four of the city’s civic or corporate institutions to make music with whatever tools, machines, or equipment they find. (continued)

            For the first movement of their opus, titled “Doctor, Doctor Gimme Gas (In My Ass),” the six invade a hospital, kidnap a flabby patient with gastric issues, and then lock themselves in an operating room. There they proceed to play music using scalpels, the heart machine, ventilators, and other operating equipment as their instruments. They even “play” the patient, a well-known television personality whose problems with gas make him a good percussive instrument with just the right resonance as one of the drummers pounds on his rotund belly. The next movement, “Money 4 U Honey,” is similarly conducted in a bank. “Fuck the Music! Kill Kill!” occurs outside symphony hall during a Handel concert and features our six musicians slamming the outside courtyard with earth-moving equipment and sledgehammers.  Finally, “Electric Love” is performed at one of the city’s major power stations and involves the musicians pounding electric wires with metal rods.

The execution of the four musical movements is at once funny, awe-inspiring, and politically provocative. The group’s assaults on a hospital, bank, symphony hall, and power station amount to acts of anarchy against civic and corporate institutions that play a role in lulling the masses into lives filled with the unimaginative routines of the status quo. The protagonist in the film is a tone-deaf police detective who becomes enamored with Sanna and respectful of her group’s rage against the mundane. Because he is a representative of a social institution (law and order), his passive endorsement of their antics underscores the film’s gentle poke at the monotony of mainstream society, symbolized by the canned Muzak that the Six Drummers despise.

In a Q&A after the film’s Palm Springs showing, directors Ola Simonsson and Johannes Stjarne Nilsson talked about the laborious four-year process of making Sound of Noise. The drummers in the film are played by real-life percussionists who assisted foley artist Nicolas Becker in uncovering and recording the percussive sounds used in the film. For example, they researched the sounds that various pieces of medical equipment can make by experimenting on them in a hospital operating room and then recording them. After recording thousands of sounds, the directors worked out which ones could be adapted and corralled into a narrative. The sound design of this film is truly a work of art.

The directors were inspired to make Sound of Noise because of the success of a short film they produced a few years ago called Music for One Apartment and Six Drummers (see clip), which featured the same characters breaking into an old couple’s apartment and making music by beating on the everyday household objects found in each room. Sound of Noise expands this notion in length and scale. 

Like all of the directors I spoke with in Palm Springs, Simonsson and Nilsson are hoping to get a distributor to release their film in America. Distribution of foreign, indie, and documentary titles is in a catastrophic state at the moment, because distributors are offering very little money for films, and exhibitors for non-Hollywood fare continue to dry up. That’s not good news for audiences who love movies, because many terrific foreign, indie, and documentary films are left to play only the festival circuit or go straight to DVD with no fanfare. I hope that Sound of Noise plays Chicago soon; its sense of musical anarchy will definitely appeal to the city’s music and cinephile communities.              --Susan Doll