SOMA MAGAZINE | AUGUST 1998


" I THINK THE UNDERGROUND IS ONLY UNDERGROUND FOR A NANOSECOND.
IT'S ALMOST LIKE AN ILLUSION".


American popular culture has been battling against electronic music for the past 20 years: It's been viewed as robotic, Teutonic, foreign, cloning, and deviant... the ultimate synthetic sin. But in her new documentary, Modulations ( airing at select events worldwide), 32 year-old Brazilian-born filmmaker Iara Lee celebrates popular music's evolution into the realm of techno-culture. The New York-based visual artist researched and constructed her own history of electronic music (much exists in hard copy, but in regionalized, genre-fied doses), interviewed its luminary musicians and journalists, and produced a film that is its own work of art.

It was only natural that Lee, the director of Synthetic Pleasures - the 1996 documentary about our experiences with artificial realities-would move on to make a documentary defining the history of electronic music. She made no judgments about technology in Synthetic Pleasures, covering all of its beauty and its ugliness: from an indoor beach complete with man-made waves to a grotesque re constructive surgery. With Modulations, Lee puts a human face on the faceless phenomenon of electronic music, giving it a rich history based both in classical experimentation, ghetto escapism, and timeworn youth rebellion.
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The film is a visual mix-tape and Lee is its DJ: cutting and scratching, backspinning and pasting images, her scenes flow with the music, which ranges from composer Karlheinz Stockhausen's high-minded electronic blips to the Invisbl Skratch Piklz' turntable battle skills. In between we see "musique concrete" founder Pierre Henry, disco disciple Giorgio Moroder, hip-hop entrepreneur Arthur Baker, spaced-out rapper Afrika Bambaataa, Detroit techno torchbearer Derrick May, techno gurus Future Sound of London (via ISDN), and drum-and-bass DJ LTJ Bukem. All the while British music journalist Kodwo Eshun and Simon Reynolds act as translators, taking us through the different eras, movements, and genres.

She also takes us around the world for a taste of the different parties where this music is played. We go from Berlin's annual summer rave, "Love Parade," which regularly attracts over one-million dance-music fanatics, to a New York underground party to a rave in Japan to an ISDN concert put on by Future Sound of London in the U. K. For the devoted dance-music fan, Lee's research is impressive; if any luminary was left out, it wasn't from lack of trying. Though the film runs a little more than two hours, its feels like a bullet-train ride through the digital soundscape.

The film was funded by Lee's husband, George Gund, who co-owns the San Jose Sharks hockey team, and who is a regular benefactor to the arts from coast to coast. Lee, a New York University film school graduate with three other short films under her belt, plans on producing a companion book and CD to be released next year in conjunction with the video distribution of Modulations . She is already at work on her debut feature film, an adaptation of the 19th-century Brazilian novelist Machado de Assis' Dom Casmurro. We spoke to Lee recently about her new film.

SOMA: Congratulations. Modulations was an evolution from Synthetic Pleasures. This time you seem to celebrate technology a little bit more.

LEE: This is supposed to be a little bit of an improvement, but with the same kind of fluid, experimental style. I'm not an expert on the subjects I choose, so I feel like it's a journey. But it has given me a lot of pleasure when people prejudiced against the music come out with a new perspective.

SOMA: With Synthetic Pleasures, we weren't sure if you were celebrating hyper reality or were afraid of it.

LEE: How do we use technology to enhance creativity? People talk about how others hide behind their computers. But we can use technology to enhance creativity, and kids are doing that. Technology created a revolution in youth culture. Bedroom musicians who don't have formal musical training are calling themselves musicians. What is it to be a musician nowadays?

SOMA: What inspired you to make Modulations?

LEE: Frustration. I was trying to release the soundtrack to Synthetic Pleasures. You spend so much tome and energy trying to convince record labels to release this kind of music. So I decided I'll just launch my own record label {which takes its name from her production company, Caipirinha }. I had every electronic musician's home number because of the record label, so that helped a lot. I also said to myself, "Life is short, might as well leave a cultural legacy."

SOMA: Do you consider yourself a post modernist in the tradition of, say, Jean Baudrillard or Umberto Eco?

LEE: I'm far from being that intellectual. I do appreciate their work. I'm trying to bridge the gap between high art and low art. I'm trying to get people to explore their preconceived values. Anything can be music. And I tried to include some of these musical techniques in the video medium-camera roll-out and flare and overexposure-all these impurities that people don't normally include in the final cut. I was interviewing musicians who said the equipment they use is too perfect, and that they had to use equipment that introduced impurities into the music. They were hungry for organic impurity.

SOMA: In Modulations you seem to cut and cross-fade like a video DJ.

LEE: Film is a very linear medium, so it was a pain to get this fluid movement without making the film chaotic. I had to really, really play with the structure of the film and be experimental. People have prejudice against traditional documentary films because they contain a lot of talking heads and are not sonically stimulating. I did everything I could to avoid the PBS formula. I even had a problem calling it a documentary. It's more of a journey film. I show it in club environments where we precede live music performances. This summer we [visited] a lot of the dance events we filmed last year, this time with the final product. Just putting it in a movie theater is not going to do it. We've been talking to MTV about airing it. And technology allows us to be involved in so many areas of art making. Why just be a filmmaker? I can be involved in the music and fashion too. [Lee created a line of Synthetic Pleasures clothing to coincide with that film.]


"THIS CULTURE IS SO ANTI-MEDIA. THEY'RE NOT EVEN INTERESTED IN THE PUBLICITY."


SOMA: It sounded like you added your own organic sounds to Modulations, such as the train.... and I noticed you actually matched the beat when you switched from footage of different club DJs.

LEE: In the early 1900s, Luigi Russolo wrote that we could go beyond these cliché ideas of melody in The Art of Noise. In the 1950's these people in France would take sounds from nature and manipulate them. This is very inspiring. Anyone can do it.

SOMA: What technical challenges did you face shooting the film: sound,
darkness, rowdy ravers...?

LEE: Ninety percent of my problems involved trying to get through club crowds with all the equipment. This culture is so anti media. They're not even interested in the publicity. They're almost hiding from the media. People are just not cooperative. It made it challenging, but I knew where they were coming from and could sympathize. When I was with [New York house DJ] Danny Tenaglia, he told me to come to the club at midnight. I came at midnight. Then he said to come back at 2 a.m., that it would be better then. I came back at 2 a.m. Then he said to come back at 4 a.m. Then he said to come back at 5 a.m., that it's going to peak at 5 a.m.

SOMA: You seemed to get all the right people. Was there anyone who was hard to get, or difficult to interview? Any big egos?

LEE: Egos are everywhere. The most articulate people were the journalists. They are constantly thinking and considering the repercussions of the culture. They give context to what the musicians are creating. With others, it was a combination of pulling teeth and hundreds of hours listening to people mumble. We were actively shooting and editing the whole year of '97. Every week we needed more gigabytes of disk-drive space to digitize it all. You need a lot of interesting material to cut a two-hour film. I knew I needed to gather a lot of footage and do a lot of archival research.

SOMA: I Was disappointed that you didn't represent more of West Coast dance music culture...

LEE: I tried to avoid making it too British. If it's not included, I just couldn't do it. Like Brian Eno. He was just not available. Kraftwerk was not available. I wanted Gary Numan and Aphex Twin. This is very complex culture and there was no way I could cover it all.

SOMA: Even with the popularity of electronic music in the last two years, it has been a mysterious genre, with visions of mad scientists tweaking computers in their bedrooms late at night. Did you set out to put a face to this music?

LEE: You have these different extremes within the culture. You have the stage presence of Prodigy and then you have Future Sound of London, totally behind-the-scenes musicians. I ask the question, "Do we use technology to isolate ourselves, or to be more together? How far should the machines go?" I think the underground is only for a nanosecond. It's almost like an illusion. I already see the commercialization of this music, and I wanted to capture it before it went downhill.

SOMA: In a century that created blues, jazz, and rock, how important do you think electronic music will be in retrospect?

LEE: I tend to think its about combining the elements. Different experiences for different types. Electronic music doesn't make acoustic music less valid. The people who are mixing different styles and elements are the ones who are doing the interesting work. The prejudice should be thrown away. One has to try it all. You see the influence of history on jungle and techno. I like the hybrids, analog, and digital together.

SOMA: You touched on this notion in both Synthetic Pleasures and Modulations, that humanity has become so clever at creating and isolating units of pleasure. In the case of electronic music, an attractive note or sound can be looped ad nauseam. Is there such a thing as too much of a good thing?

LEE: I starting listening to the music, and I said, "It's all disposable. Where's the good stuff?" The drawback of availability is that there's a lot of bad stuff. But I think it's better to have it all than to be elitist. People thought they were going to save time with computers. Now they work harder. Technology is a double-edged sword. I think the music is interesting because anyone can do it. But the good stuff floats to the top. The real gems are still very special. One just has to work harder to find them. That's why we are doing a book on this culture. Look at the influence disco has had.

SOMA: Indeed, it seems like we are experiencing disco's revenge in pop music at the moment.

LEE: We are detached enough now to evaluate its impact. People tend to reject this pop element of electronic music, but it really started it all.