MUSICAL HEISTS & ANARCHY: Sound of Noise (2010, directed by Ola Simonsson and Johannes Stjärne Nilsson, Sweden/France)

What is the collective noun for a group of percussionists? How about a clattering?

In 2001, the writer / directors Ola Simonsson and Johannes Stjärne Nilsson created a nine-and-a-half-minute short film called Music for One Apartment and Six Drummers in which a clattering of percussionists break into an elderly Swedish couple’s apartment and performs four songs. Each song is entirely instrumental, percussion-based, and played on found objects specific to one of four rooms. The opening number titled Kitchen, for example, incorporates cupboard doors, wooden spoons on juice glasses, an egg beater, dog bowls, and a food processor. One can – and should – find the short in the usual internet places with ease.

Whatever magic makes a short or a sketch work is not necessarily going to be able to support the weight of a ninety minutes plus feature. Rather than attempt to extend the single concept of the short Sound of Noise uses Music for One Apartment and Six Drummers as a seed to create something inextricably linked but much more expansive and wholly delightful. 

The trespasser vandals of the short have become an anarcho-terrorist performance group with the broader goal of upsetting the entire musical culture of their city (Malmö, Sweden). The film follows a general heist movie format as two members of the gang evolve from a small-scale public disruption to plotting “the big score”, a public musical assault in four parts. Next, of course, comes the assembling of the team. These scenes are some of the most fun in the movie. Snapshot bits of the most dangerous drummers in Sweden trying and failing to find their places in the straight world like an expert safecracker cutting keys at a hardware store. 

Do musical terrorists committ their heists in 4/4 time?

Once the group is together, the first stage of the plan is executed. The team disguises themselves as doctors, infiltrates a hospital, smuggles a hemorrhoid patient into an empty OR, and performs the first part of their opus / manifesto, creating rhythm out of surgical equipment and the body of the patient himself. 

Though the band makes a clean getaway, the crime attracts the attention of the anti-terrorism police force led by Amadeus Warnebring, the tone-deaf black sheep of a famously musical family. This character is original to the feature and brings an intriguing backstory. While his younger brother excelled to become a world-renowned conductor, the non-musical Amadeus faded in the estimation of his parents such that even his position heading the anti-terrorism unit failed to bring him any respect. Music for him brings only pain. As he closes in on the Six Drummers gang, he begins to sympathize with the results of their actions, if not their motives. For him, the destruction of music, as a means to silence, is a consummation devoutly to be wished.

True to genre, a cat and mouse game develops with an evolving empathy and respect between the two sides.

Though, to be clear, this is not one of those sad parody movies. It is a wholly original story that touches on heist-film narrative tropes but makes no direct references to any other pre-existing property. To re-emphasize, this is a wholly original movie. Any argument against is quickly dismantled by the four major set pieces, i.e., the four musical pieces of the team’s conspiracy. What other movie would have the audacity to turn over significant chunks of its runtime to pleasing but still fairly experimental music? In the case of one performance involving jackhammers and heavy construction equipment, the soundtrack borders on an actual musique concrete.

Protest, noise, revolution, harmony, compassion, and dissent are not among the typical trademarks of a crime story and like the anarcho-terrorist performance collective, Sound of Noise gleefully destroys that convention.

Matt Olsen is a largely unemployed part-time writer and even more part-time commercial actor living once again in Seattle after escaping from Los Angeles like Kurt Russell in that movie about the guy who escapes from Los Angeles.