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Special film & music
Issue. No. 48 August 1997
THE
ORGANIC ELECTRONIC QUEST OF IARA LEE'S MODULATIONS Books, Shelves of them, and cats. " You're not allergic, are you? " asks Iara Lee. Real cats, not virtual felines or 3D animations or hallucinatory holograms. Iara Lee, the director of SYNTHETIC PLEASURES, the documentary exploration of man's mutation into machine, has real books and real cats. She's got a real penthouse duplex apartment, too, and it's not in BioDome, it's in the Upper East Side of Manhattan. Home base for one or two little projects that Iara has cooking right now. " My operation is art, culture, technology, music, fashion, film- I have six Cds I'm releasing this year, " she says breathless. " With fashion , my sister and I imported fabrics from Switzerland for jackets, we did a big fashion show during Fashion Week, all with synthetic material. I've got so many projects going on. " Her big project is a new movie called MODULATIONS- not just a history of electronica, but a film " about that ecstatic freefall into the unknown in the era of the proliferation of digital technology; an age in which the boundaries between human and machine are becoming increasingly blurred. " Applying the ethos of SYNTHETIC PLEASURES, then, to electronic music. " It's a natural progression, because a lot of musicians are synthetic musicians. I'm interested in doing a documentary on electronic music, but more within the culture as a whole, how it affects culture and music. " Thirtyone-year-old Iara Lee was born and raised by Korean parents in Brazil. " I've been in the film environment since I was 17. I used to run a film festival, Sao Paolo International Film Festival. I did that for five years and then I got bored, and decided to go behind the camera. I made three short films, and SYNTETHIC PLEASURES was my first full length. This will be my second. " With the help of writer Peter Shapiro, Lee traces electronica back to the 1940s project Musique Concrete, describing a genealogy that runs through Stockhausen and Can to Kraftwerk, then hops over the Atlantic to Sun Ra, Parliament- Funkadelic, Chicago house and Detroit techno, and back over, this time to England, for the birth of trance, ambient, jungle, and drum'n'bass. " It's hard, because I thought, I'm gonna do this movie from Kraftwerk on. ' But the distinction is kinda blurry: what is electronic music? You start digging and you're like, " Oh gosh! When did it start? It was many, many years ago, it's a logistic nightmare! ". Lee has already amassed over 60 hours of interviews with everyone from Marshall Jefferson and Ryuichi Sakamoto to Carl Cox and Moby. One element that Lee sees running though the history of electronica is the technique of cut-and-paste that she uses to make her own films. " Pierre Henry, he's one of the godfathers of Musique Concrete, he's the one that started the whole idea of cut-and-paste. He would splice tape instead of using the computer. And cut-and-paste is the part of my style too.... using a lot of images that are not connected on a rational level, so hopefully the film will be very unpredictable. I was thinking of intercutting interviews- two talking heads, and in the middle there will be an appliance, and the sound of that appliance intercutting the talking head. I'll have landscapes or things that will relate to music, but always in a contradictory way, not so linear. I like to play with non-linearity the way that musicians play with non-linearity. " That's the thing with drum'n'bass, the music they create, it's so complex when it comes to programming that no human being would be able to produce that in a natural way. The Ninja Tune people, they want to explore the idea of automatic creativity robots, which make combinations of sounds that human beings will not be able to do. And then the musicians would sift through all the different combinations the computer makes, and analyze it and edit things in and out. So this is automatic creativity music. " Lee believes the development of electronica has caused a " shift in the power structure" of music. " I interviewed Sakamoto from Yellow Magic Orchestra, and he said, in the past it would take seven years for someone to learn how to play a note on the Shakuhachi flute, this very difficult instrument from Japan. And now, with computers, you don't need that time. Traditional musicians may even look stupid, because they took all these years to get where they are, and then these kids empowered with the technology just advance so fast. My interest is with these bedroom musicians, these kids, 18 years old, 19 years old. The way they do music, the way they do programming, blows people's minds. " Then again, it's a different set of rules and regulations. It's still a lot of work. It's the same thing with technology: you're supposed to have more free time, but I see myself working even harder. People say, " You're a filmmaker, you're got to have a point of view. Is technology good or bad? and I don't have a straight answer. It's really a gray area; it empowers me, it frees me, but at the same time it enslaves me, y'know? At the end of the day, I gotta force myself to take a walk, ' cause the computer and the technology are absorbing my attention and my life. " It's the bigger picture portrayed by SYNTHETIC PLEASURES, the question of how technology impacts the quality of human life, that will be the focus of MODULATIONS. " Is it good or bad? In the end it's both, in an extremist way. It's a big issue people are trying to figure out: is this for our benefit or not? Because it becomes a handicap; your start having these virtual relationships. Technology enables us to have a sanitized experience in all ways- people having virtual sex or virtual friendship. People feel comfortable with this protection, they don't wanna go out there and deal with the nitty-gritty anymore. " MODULATIONS is not like a cheerleader, saying that electronic music is great, and everything else is terrible. It's about how the technology behind it affects society in general, and in this particular case the music world. " Brushing a cat off her lap, Iara gets up to print out a list of upcoming interviews. " It's not about the trend, it's about the real musicians. I get the quality first, like Squarepusher, Talvin Singh, Seefeel, and then I get the established guys, like Prodigy, Chemical Brothers, Orb. They like to be attached with the cutting edge, so now I have a lot of clout to go to them. " And when will MODULATIONS be finished? " I'll be shooting and editing until the end of the year, and hopefully it will be ready for Sundance '98. But SYNTHETIC PLEASURES took me three years and a half, for one film! So at this point I have no illusions. "
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