The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari

Millennium Building ~ Plymouth
27~04~23

Nearly a full decade after starting our journey as a soundtrack project, we finally recoupled with the people that motivated us to start it all - Imperfect Cinema.

The amazing people at Nudge Community Builders opened up The Millennium Building as a proof of concept for the building to become a music and events venue again. As part of a run of diverse events, Imperfect Cinema were invited to screen a film that would have been screened during the building's tenure as a cinema in the 1920s and chose The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (1920). The Imperfect Orchestra were lucky enough to be approached to score this pivotal piece of silent cinema history.

Time was short; we kept the team small and got into our studio to begin a short run of rehearsals. Building around three musical motifs we fleshed out the score with tape loops and vocalisations. The performance itself was an improvisation built around the motifs we had rehearsed, which in front of a sold out venue was a thrilling and new experience for us.

Tom created a graphical score on large A3 pages to lead us through the events, scenes and dynamics of expression of the 75 minute film.

Using guitars (with their amps pointing up to the amazing ceiling rose that helps produce some of the iconic reverb in the Millenium Building's old cinema musicians' pit), percussion, harmonium, tape loops, synths, saxophone, harmonica, vocals and more, our design was to create a haunting, jaunty and dramatic score to echo the expressionist style of Dr Caligari.