Feb 2-8, 1998
By Dennis Harvey

Brazilian -born U.S. documaker Iara Lee's previous "Synthetic Pleasures" took viewers on an E-ticket virtual-reality travelogue through various New Technology wonders. Kinetically dazzling, it also seemed somewhat catch-all, exhausting and MTV-ish. Her follow-up, "Modulations," narrows the focus to concentrate on current musical craze electronica's major players and history. Though still a bit of an overload, its often exciting match of style and suject should perform well with youthful urban and college auds worldwide.

What can this boom in electronic music be traced to? The huge numbers of interviewees here have many opinions. Among precursors discussed (and seen in archival footage) are avant-garde composers John Cage and Karlheinz Stockhausen; Robert Moog, of the Moog Synthesizer; 70's German art-rock bands like Kraftwerk and Can; Eurodisco innovator Giorgio Moroder; industrial-noise units such as Britain's Throbbing Gristle; the early hip-hop disc jockeys who manipulated vinyl on their turntables to create "scratch" music; and on and on.

This tangled back-story - which notably emphasizes white experimentalists over the roles played by R&B and other essentially black musical forms - is intercut with glimpses of the diverse club sub-genres that have emerged since the early '80s. Among better-known talents on display here are Prodigy, Moby, Money Mark, Future Sound of London and the Invisibl Skratch Piklz.

After seeing "Modulations," you probably still won't have a clear sense of the often minute distinctions between house, trip-hop, acid house, techno, ambient, drum-and-bass and myriad other dance-track styles. (Perhaps no one does.) But Lee captures their energy and diversity with persuasive enthusiasm.

Surprisingly, pic is much less dependent on digital-animation stimuli (which dominates many of these new artists' videos and multimedia live shows) than was "Synthetic Pleasures." It's nearly as free-form, but the less-sprawling subject holds the attention pretty well. Talking-head sound bites, concert footage and often campy old film and vid snippets are juglgled to keep the synapses firing. Though we don't get very close to electronica's audience - a little more in that department would have been welcome - the music's appeal inevitably comes most alive whenever people are filmed shanking their groove thang, often at massive "rave" parties.

While musicians spotlighted are mostly British, American ad German, this is a true jet-set production, filmed everywhere from Asbury Park, N.J., to Mount Fuji. Imaginative tech package - editor Paula Heredia surely deserves a medal for shaping what must have been an impossible amount of footage - was shot in numerous formats. But final 35mm result looks more like a transfer from video than anything else.