Peter Guyer, Norbert Wiedmer

Sounds and Silence is a documentary by the Swiss filmmakers Peter Guyer and Norbert Wiedmer, who spent about five years following Manfred Eicher, the founder and producer of ECM. It shows him at work in sessions, rehearsals and concerts in Europe, North Africa and South America, and lets the music carry the film. There is little explanation and Eicher himself speaks rarely. What remains is a close look at how ECM records are made, and at a producer who works mainly by listening.

The film premiered on the Piazza Grande at the Locarno festival in August 2009, won the Berner Film Prize that year and was nominated for the Swiss Film Prize. Guyer and Wiedmer directed and filmed it themselves, with sound by Balthasar Jucker and editing by Stefan Kälin. The musicians include Arvo Pärt, Eleni Karaindrou, Jan Garbarek, Anouar Brahem and Dino Saluzzi, with Anja Lechner, Kim Kashkashian, Nik Bärtsch, Gianluigi Trovesi, Marilyn Mazur and others.

The journey moves from the ECM office in Gräfelfing, near Munich, to Athens, Udine, Carthage, Tallinn, Pernes-les-Fontaines, Copenhagen and Salta in Argentina. In Tallinn's St. Nicholas Church, Pärt rehearses with the conductor Tõnu Kaljuste, and the composer and his producer end up dancing to his Estonian Lullaby. At the La Buissonne studio in southern France, Eicher works with Bärtsch's Ronin down to the treatment of a single muted string. In Munich he chooses album covers, and in Argentina he joins Saluzzi and Lechner, whose duo Wiedmer would follow further in El Encuentro. Karaindrou sums up his method on camera: "Wherever Manfred works, he is 100 percent involved."

Writing in The WholeNote in 2012, John Larocque described "an intimate view of the recording process" and noted that Eicher "imparts very few words throughout the film". Tyran Grillo, for ECM Reviews, saw a portrait closer to an ideal than a report, but valued how much of the label's working life the cameras catch.

DVD-9 (NTSC, 16:9 anamorphic, Dolby Digital 2.0 and 5.1, all regions), 87 minutes, multilingual original with German, English and French subtitles. Bonus: the short film Playground by Gildas Boclé with Manu Katché's group, and the trailer. Released in 2011 as ECM 5050.