For a fresh take on the heist movie, just add music. The inventive Swedish comedy Sound of Noise is about a band of musical malcontents who break into a hospital, a bank and other public places to play compositions using the surroundings as their instruments. Led by Sanna (Sanna Persson), the sextet attempts to perform a piece called Music for One City and Six Drummers that composer Magnus describes, in a mild understatement, as “conceptual.”
Sound of Noise’s central lark is that, instead of this rebellion arriving via the usual path of rock’n’roll, it comes from an anarchist collective of black glasses-wearing musical outcasts.
Sanna decides the piece has to be performed and, in a gladdening twist on the typical recruiting the-team scenario, retrieves musicians from unhappy gigs as the rhythm sections of house bands and orchestras. But the team’s actions attract the attention of local law enforcement and the case is assigned to Amadeus Warnebring, the tone-deaf policeman son of a famous musical family.
Sound of Noise is light and insubstantial as a feather, but the performances are something to see. The six drummers use everything from a paper shredder to electric wires to power tools to an unconscious human being to make their music, the percussion combining to make aurally interesting tunes edited rhythmically to emphasize how they’re being sculpted out of the everyday sounds we’ve long ago stopped noticing.
Independent Film Channel
