Soundtrack 2012: Sound Of Noise

21st November 2012

Perhaps the debut entry in the Swedish-Musical-Cop-Comedy/Thriller genre, Sound of Noise was enjoyed at Cardiff’s SoundTrack Film Festival by as many as five people, as bad traffic and an even worse game of Rugby saw the majority of the city’s population elsewhere last Friday. And it’s a damn shame for them that they missed this little indie gem.

Sound of Noise concerns itself with harried detective Amadeus Warnerbring (Bengt Nilsson) a man who despite growing up in a family of musical genii, is tone deaf. Clearly troubled by his parents’ disappointment over his lack of musicality, and his brother’s success as a master conductor, Warnerbring chose to join the police. Unfortunately for him, there are some musical criminals on the loose.

Heading up this group are Sanna and Magnus (Sanna Persson and Magnus Börjeson), who have recruited a motley crew of percussionists to take on Magnus’ opus – ‘Music for One City and Six Drummers. Broken into four movements, this composition is an elaborate work of auditory art that uses everyday objects and sounds throughout the city as instruments. In order to complete their concert, these six drummers aren’t afraid to break the law.

Points for originality then. The duo behind the film, Ola Simonsson and Johannes Stjärne Nilsson, are following up on their 2001 short Music for One Apartment and Six Drummers on a grander scale, with the musical miscreants using everything from JCB’s to hospital equipment (and a patient) to make their music. These scenes are by far the most memorable – expertly crafted to seem both ludicrous and somehow credible at the same time. When the gang hold up a bank, they use ink stamps as percussion and shred hundreds of Krona notes to create chords, even building the screams of a bank clerk into the melody as he watches the money destroyed in front of him.

Nilsson, as the troubled cop, is engaging even though he’s left with the far less fun job of chasing after the musicians, picking up discarded metronomes as clues along the way. The film begins to struggle a bit towards the finale, and unfortunately the last movement of the score is perhaps the least interesting, as the gang clamber up electrical pylons and use the cables as instrument strings. Despite it’s scale, this effort doesn’t quite live up to the first three musical sections. The combination of this and Warnerbring’s attempts to rid himself of music once and for all derail things somewhat as the film closes, but the ride there is worth the price of admission.

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