THE VILLAGE VOICE



MUSIC FOR MASSES | Modulations

Directed by Iara Lee
A strand release at the quad.

By Dennis Lim.

Iara Lee's ambitious new film Modulations is both historically savvy and self-consciously forward looking-as a documentary on electronic music should be. The movie setsout to provide a context (chronological, philosophical, geographical) for the interactions of technology and popular music and is smart enough to arrive at the conclusion that, when it comes to sonic science, the bottom line is, Fuck context.

Darting from one farflung corner of the electronica diaspora to another, Modulations is, within its amped-up, time-traveling structure, a reasonably cohesive piece of filmmaking. Paring down hundreds of interviews, incorporating footage of raves (from Brooklyn to Mount Fuji), intercutting sped-up landscapes and trippy CGIs, Lee and her editor, Paula Heredia, strive for a kalcidoscopic style somewhere between free-associative and intuitive. It's almost a too obvious conceit-the movie mirrors the cut-'n-'mix quality of the music-and some of Lee's organizatinal choices are questionable (the final 15 minutes or so, dealing with magnetic tape splicing and turntablism, seem like an out-of-place afterthought), but the overall effect is actually quite engaging. It helps that the director, whose previous film was the 1996 futurist-trend doc Synthetic Pleasures, is as adept as she is at meshing and manipulating sound and image.

Lee greatestfeat here, though, is the mass of interviews she's accumulated; a representative sample of electronica's boys' club, from legendary old-times like Karlheinz Stockhausen and Pierre Henry to Detroit's iconic Belleville Three (Juan Atkins, Derrick May, and Kevin Saunderson) to contemporary practitioners like LTJ Bukem, Squarepusher, and the Prohun's hyper description of 200-plus bpm "gabba" as music that "drills through our cortex," allowing for a "synaptic rearrangement."

Lee's film should be of some use to those looking to tell Chicago house from Detroit techno-or, for that matter, a TB-303 from a TR-909. But it'd be a little unfair to call Modulations a mere primer; even if the film is, in an Electronica for Dummies way, sufficiently wary of its expansive subject to confine the discourse to catchy and vaguely familiar sound bites, it's also inquisitive enough to pan out of a glimpse of the big picture wherever possible.