Imagine Waking Up Tomorrow and All Music Has Disappeared

Imagine Waking Up Tomorrow and All Music Has Disappeared, the rhythm within

The premise of the renowned British musician Bill Drummond is simple: Imagine a world without musical instruments or music players. What is left in the world to listen to?

The idea is to concentrate on a dimension that is usually unnoticed, like the sounds produced by the acoustics of physical phenomena such as the whistling of the breeze, the vibration of a car engine or the human voice. Drummond takes us on a funny road trip where our ears get sharper to the sonorities of life.

Director Stefan Schwietert follows an eloquent Drummond on his tour across Great Britain, in which he makes casual stops to ask ordinary people to participate in their sound exercises. It consists of a collection of human choirs that emit different notes and rhythms in each town along the way and then they will be assembled in a great final polyphony.

The purpose is to make people aware of their sound capabilities in spite of their musical talent. Among the choristers that Drummond persuades to get his sound records are a group of harvesters, a club of elderly woman, a group of Pakistani taxi drivers and the students from an elementary school.

During the film, Drummond’s pedagogical methodology extends to other variations of the exercises and encourages a dialogue with the public, who is involved in the experience. The most important accomplishment of Imagine Waking Up Tomorrow and All Music Has Disappeared is to leap across that fourth wall of cinema to reach an interactive capacity with a spectator immersed in a world full of sonorous opportunities.

The invitation is to find that rhythm within us. Our own pulse can be the best drum. After watching this film one knows that absolute silence is only a chimera.