BY JASON SILVERMAN

11:15am 22.Jan.98.PST PARK CITY, Utah - With the 1913 publication of "The Art of Noises," Italian Futurist Luigi Russolo called for a musical revolution.

"We must break out of this limited circle of sounds and conquer the infinite variety of noise-sounds," he wrote. Russolo would likely be tickled with the path electronic music has taken during the past three decades. Various musical explorers, including Karlheinz Stockhausen, Brian Eno, and Afrika Bambaataa, have used cutting-edge technologies to chart new sonic territories.

Their works are among those examined in Modulations, a new documentary by Iara Lee Pleasures) that premiered this week at the Sundance Film Festival in Park City, Utah. Using the writings of Russolo and the sounds of John Cage as starting points, Modulations travels through '70s disco, Kraftwerk's all-synth music, and the birth of house music, making a case for electronic music as a major 20th century art form.

Considerable attention is paid to electronic music's role in youth culture. Footage from packed raves and clubs in New York City, London, Osaka, and Berlin (where the annual Love Parade attracts 1.5 million visitors) indicate the popularity of electronica. "In my day, cars were hot-rodded," says Robert Moog, inventor of the popular synthesizer, in Modulations. "These days, its computers and synthesizers." One segment of the film explores the rise of homemade house music during some of Detroit's bleakest days and puts a socio-political spin on the techno movement. "We learned that technology can power creativity," said Lee. "Kids out of the ghetto used cheap, second-hand synthesizers to start a musical revolution.... Most of these kids don't even read music or play an instrument, but they create incredible sounds. They don't need classical training. They just turn their ideas into actuality."

In assembling Modulations, Lee became something of a wired filmmaker, hiring camera operators and using emailed lists of questions to conduct interviews in distant cities. One night, she interviewed three DJs in three different cities. Among the 300 people Lee spoke with were producer Bill Laswell, New York's DJ Spooky, disco king Giorgio Moroder, and Liam Howlett of Prodigy. Shot on video and blown up to 35mm, Modulations has a grainy, underground texture. Its narrative rack, which jumps from theme to theme and city to city, is disjointed. Both its grain and its fractured nature are apparently by design.

"The film is nonlinear because the music is nonlinear," Lee said. "It is a fragmented culture. It is also a disposable one." "So much of this music is made in bedrooms," Lee explains, "I felt it was my job to record the jams and expose them to a wider audience."

Among the converts is George Gund, Lee's producer and husband. "I used to think electronic music was like getting hit on the head with a rubber hammer," he said. "But there are so many gifted artists making this kind of music. We'll be hearing more and more of it in the years to come."