THE STRAITS TIMES (SINGAPORE) | APRIL, 1998


LOUD LOOK AT THE ART OF NOISE.

Modulations is a must-see and hear especially for those wondering what the electronic buzz is all about.

"People have a cliched idea of what a melody is ..." -Bill Laswell, record producer.

THE dazzling selection at the annual Singapore International Film Festival, which opens tonight, includes another gem for music-lovers -- Modulations by Brazil-born American-Asian director Iara Lee.

At last year's fest, she took us on a fascinating and frightening journey through our increasingly-plastic world of Synthetic Pleasures. This time, she focuses her lenses -and mikes -on a specific facet of this world, electronic music.

That makes Modulations the perfect sequel not just to her earlier film but also to another documentary screened at last year's fest on the birth of grunge and the Hype! -as the movie was called -that killed it. Interestingly, today's electronic artists play down the hype that has now engulfed their own genre.

"It's just sounds. It's just noise," says Britain's Talvin Singh, who put together last year's Anokha, Soundz of the Asian Underground. "But organised -organised noise, organised sounds." Nor are they under any illusions that they are doing something new.

"It started with electronic music reproduction," says American techno's Money Mark.

In fact, electronic music even predates rock. No less than the late jazz legend, Miles Davis -whose electronic experiments were savaged by so-called jazz purists who had once sung his praises -looked back as far as Bach. He became aware of that while working on his critically-reviled 1972 album, On The Corner.

"I had begun to realise that some of the things Ornette Coleman had said about things being played three or four ways, independently of each other, were true because Bach had also composed that way," Davis wrote in his autobiography.

Modulations traces modern electronica roots back to Luigi Russolo's The Art Of Noises, a manifesto for the deconstruction of melody and harmony. He published it in 1913.

It also has amazing footage of a young John Cage, the experimental composer who, in 1937, realised: "Electrical instruments will make available any and all sounds that can be heard."

Lee has spliced together expertly clips of more than 70 artists -- old and new -and others, talking about the art of noise. She samples clips of a performance here, computer animation there, historical footage everywhere and sets this visual collage against a pulsating barrage of electronica.

She hip-hops between past and present and genre-jumps from drum-and-bass to fusion to ambient, from children smashing their toys to Ken Ishii, Orbital, and LTJ Bukem thrashing keyboards and twiddling knobs.

In the process, the film itself becomes the equivalent of the latest disc of remixes out of a Detroit techno factory or from Britain's Wall Of Sound label. That makes it as entertaining and exciting as it is illuminating.

One minute we are introduced to present-day Bristol junglist Roni Size, the next we see France's '50s musique concrete pioneer Pierre Henry working, and American Arthur Baker reminiscing about how he built Afrika Bambaataa's classic Planet Rock atop Trans-Europe Express by Germany's Kraftwerk.

There are scenes of Karlheinz breaking sound barriers by running a microphone over a Chinese gong. And of the inventor of the synthesizer, Robert Moog, fooling around with Leon Theremin's even earlier invention. In a key segment about midway through the movie's 75 minutes, Lee's frenetic cameras come to rest on Davis' long-time producer -Teo Macero -doing exactly what today's electronic artistes do, without modern technology.

He took analog tapes of Davis and his bands jamming and literally cut-and-pasted them -into modern masterpieces such as Corner and In A Silent Way.

"I consider the studio a musical instrument. I toy with it all the time," a still-vibrant Macero says. If Davis did not like the result, he says he remixed it again.

Of course, today's technophobes are following in his footsteps. At the outset of Modulations, Moog provides a fitting analogy for these offspring of Macero, Cage and Stockhausen.

"When I was a kid, cars were the thing. You hot-rodded. Today, it's computers and synthesizers," he says. "Electronic music is the hot-rodding of the '90s."

* Modulations will be screened at the Majestic theatre on Saturday, April 25 at 9.15 pm. Tickets are $ 8. You can hear the music of Ken Ishii, Orbital, the MGM soundtracks and more on Zach's Trax at 10 pm on Monday on Radio Heart 91.3

Paul Zach