There are tuba thefts, and even a halfway-explanation for them, but they’re hardly the point of this experimental false/true movie, which has great sound design and unusual use of captions, and grows to encompass John Cage and Bruce Conner.

Michael Sicinski on Patreon:

There are also “fictional” passages in The Tuba Thieves, although one gets the clear sense that, in the post-Iranian New Wave fashion, these people are playing versions of themselves. O’Daniel shows us a group of friends from the L.A. Deaf community, but mostly focuses on a young couple, Nyke and “Nature Boy”. Nyke is expecting, and this has prompted her to think back on moments of her own childhood, which she discusses with Arcey, her father. NB, meanwhile, is traveling a lot for his work and, at the start of the film, is becoming increasingly irritated with his audiologist’s hearing tests. Declining to repeat the words on the test, he instead composes a dense, Surrealist poem in ASL, using most of the same words.

Alissa Wilkinson in NY Times:

The 1979 final punk show at San Francisco’s Deaf Club shows up, as does a surprise free 1984 show that Prince played at Gallaudet University, the nation’s only liberal arts university devoted to deaf people. They’re all driving toward a similar point: Listening means more than just hearing, and in fact doesn’t requiring hearing at all. But the sounds, the vibrations, the racket and clamor and buzz of everyday life are as important in their presence as in their absence. O’Daniel’s scrutiny of them is somehow rigorous and abstract, serious and playful, and provocative in a way that makes us take in the world differently.