|
COMMUTER
TIMES There are perhaps more implications here than Ms. Lee, who's obviously entranced with her subject, intended. Many of the makers of electronic music whom she interviews and depicts in action are young adults who seem to have succeeded in making some kind of money by helping to perpetuate a child-like emotional state which celebrates chaos and avoids the refinement and maturation of musical taste. That's reflective of my own middle-aged, melody-loving prejudices, of course. For most of my peers and many of you readers, your impressions of electronic music may have come from having accidentally wandered into a loud, throbbing, dark "rave" scene at some downtown club, or maybe just into your teenage offsprings, bedrooms when they had their sound systems jacked up so high that they didn't know you were there. For some of {ital} their {untial} peers, shown in Lee's film exercising equally dance movements as unrefined as the music, at concerts and dancehalls, a childishly chaotic but sensorially demanding sound and scene may be just what they're looking for. And everybody, even critics who've outgrown childish righteousness, knows that you can't really get anywhere arguing about taste. The artistically encouraging part of the child comparison is the curiosity of electronic musicians to examine "what the entire thing does," through experimentation with the acostic possibilities of synthesizers, the "sampling" of sounds "found" on the street and around the house, and the machine processing of machine-generated noise. This process is depicted in "Modulations" with a scope I haven't seen elsewhere, although without enough linear development or clarity of exposition to really serve as a good educational film about the electronic art form. There are a few gestures towards education, including black-and-white historical clips of early electronic instrumentation such as the theremin and interviews, mostly too brief and fragmented, with such pioneers from the '30s through the '60s as John Cage, Karlheinz Stockhausen, and Robert Moog. But Lee is mostly concerned with what happened after producer Giorgio Moroder introduced disco and singer Donna Summer to primitive synthesizers in the '70s. The director manages to cover a menagerie of genres, or subgenres, which followed Moroder's euro-disco, including techno, house, and jungle, and offers a few interesting insights into this recent evolution, including the affinity of an Afro-American hip-hop dj from the Bronx for the highly cerebral Germanic sound created by the group Kraftwerk. Lee also shows us an impressively international variety of venues where these musics are showcased and further articulated, in locations from Detroit to New York to London to Tokyo. The pace, sometimes enhanced by fast-motion and other special effects, is invigorating but generally non-linear and disruptive, which may match the intent of the music but leaves more of an impression about the subject than any kind of concrete knowledge. Similarly, Lee touches upon deeper social implications, including the music's mimicking of the alienated rush of contemporary urban life and of the physiological experience of drugs such as ecstacy, but she hardly gets deep enough herself to offer more than a sort of shrugged excuse. Missing from Lee's treatment are some fascinating electronic projects not suitable for the dancehall, including the soundscapes of Steve Reich. Nevertheless, "Modulations" is an important if not completely solid primer for anyone curious about where, for better or worse, some music may be headed in the new millenium. Look next month for the representative soundtrack album from "Modulations," due out on Lee's Caipirinha Music label (www.caipirinha.com). |