Electronic Connections
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The Brazilian-born, New York-based Lee, who used sample-based music to score her 1995 exploration of the allure of technology, Synthetic Pleasures, set herself an almost impossible task: trying to encapsulate not just rave culture in its prime but also its historical precedents–including futurist Luigi Russolo’s 1913 manifesto “The Art of Noise”–and the current wildly diverse landscape of electronica in a mere 75 minutes. Wisely she doesn’t try to impose a tidy, artificial linear order on a phenomenon whose development looks a lot like the Blob’s. Instead she shifts the focus from one evolutionary leap to another much as a DJ segues between records, picking up on and following thematic threads. For example, Lee answers the euphoric positivity of German techno producer Westbam, cofounder of the Berlin techno happening the Love Parade, with the skeptical anger of German digital-hardcore celeb Alec Empire (of Atari Teenage Riot), who says, “At the end of the day, it’s just a stupid party.”
One thing that’s clear by the film’s end is that electronic music, more than even punk rock, has become the great democratic art form. In the mid-80s Chicagoans like Marshall Jefferson and Jesse Saunders picked up the outmoded Roland TB-303 bass-line machine for chump change at area pawn shops; in their efforts to imitate 70s disco records they unwittingly created house music. For some artists, like Detroit techno progenitor Juan Atkins, the music was an escape: “Detroit is such a desolate-type city that you almost have to dream of the future to escape your surroundings,” he tells Lee. For yet others, like world-famous dilettante Bill Laswell, it’s about maintaining relevance: “The only way to arrive at something different is by combining things now.” In other words, electronic music is all things to all people–or at least all people that don’t hate it on some kind of misguided principle–and Modulations is more about its seeds blowing in the wind than a single scene blossoming in any one time or place.
