Matt Sorum and Billy Morrison are interviewed for the Documentary "The Heart Is A Drum Machine". The premiere last week was hosted by Matt...
I've always been partial to Steven Adler when it comes to Guns N' Roses drummers, but Matt Sorum (also of Velvet Revolver and The Cult) provided excellent opening remarks before the start out the 9:30 screening I saw.Watch the trailer here:
http://zu33.com/heart/In The Heart Is a Drum Machine, Filmmakers Ryan Page and Christopher Pomerenke Ask the Ultimate Musical QuestionFrank Zappa is often credited with saying, "Writing about music is like dancing about architecture."
If describing music can't capture the emotions music evokes, then making a movie that talks about writing music must reside somewhere between sculpting an opera and cooking with Frank Lloyd Wright.
Yet there's probably no better way of describing music's regenerative powers and fleshing out its abstract properties than through the equally powerful and abstract medium of film. Phoenix-based producers Ryan Page and Hans Fjellestad have done that several times already, most notably with 2005 documentary Moog (about the legendary synthesizer) and the 2002 movie Frontier Life (which covered the Tijuana music scene). In trying to make a documentary about music that hasn't been done before, they approached Christopher Pomerenke, who'd been in Valley bands Runaway Diamonds and Less Pain Forever, about directing just such an endeavor. The result is The Heart Is a Drum Machine, which will make its world premi?re on Friday, February 6, at Phoenix Art Museum.
"We're kind of likening music to food and shelter in this movie," says Page. "We proposed, in a soft way, that maybe music is something more physical, something within our own manifestation, that possibly, we're introduced to rhythm through our mother's heartbeat in the womb."
Pomerenke continues the thought: "And when we depart from our mother that sad, sad day, we carry on that beat with our heartbeats. And that all matter is vibrating, and the planets are moving in concert with each other, and that music isn't just some television box or some painting."
It's a pity that Pomerenke is sequestered behind the camera throughout The Heart Is a Drum Machine because his unique ideas about music are as funny, heartfelt, and just plain weird as those of many celebrity participants who sat down and tried to answer, "What is music?"
In all, more than 100 people were interviewed for the film, including
Matt Sorum of Guns N' Roses/Velvet Revolver, deaf musicians, Juliette Lewis, Wayne Coyne of the Flaming Lips, George Clinton, Elijah Wood, and Maynard James Keenan of Tool, who offers ? during a tension-ratcheting segment in which the subject doesn't even speak his words ? one of the more riveting explanations of how music is based on tension.
http://www.phoenixnewtimes.com/2009-01-29/music/in-the-heart-is-a-drum-machine-filmmakers-ryan-page-and-christopher-pomerenke-ask-the-ultimate-musical-question/http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1198130/
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