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FEATURE
Un-electrifying "Modulations"
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By Charles Cronin
There are dilettantes in electronic music as everywhere else, and they're giving the neighborhood a bad name. There's unappealing evidence of this in Iara Lees' documentary film, "Modulations," now playing at San Francisco's Opera Plaza.
The print advertisement for "Modulations" features a young woman of
ambiguous ethnic origin, with glossy lips, a come-hither expression, the
black wire of her earphones wrapped around her wrists to conjure
sadomasochistic notions. She never appears in "Modulations," in fact, no women are featured. The seductive image is simply a lure to attract a male audience to this poorly organized, long-winded, hour-plus film that claims to trace the history of electronic music from the intellectual exercises of musique concrete pioneers like Pierre Henry to the present day, where dancing to mechanical rhythms under the influence of a chemical compound seems like
the most natural thing in the world. (Only about eighteen men and
three women attended the showing I saw on September 13.)
As one of the film's talking heads observes, nearly
all music heard today is electronic in some sense. But Modulations doesn't explore the import of this truism. There are barely allusions to the implications of digital technologies and the possibilities they offer for disseminating, manipulating, and graphically representing music today. Instead we hear the simplistic meanderings of a group of men who appear to spend too much time adjusting their hair styles and piercings, and too little studying C++ or acoustics. One learns almost nothing about the underlying
technologies of electronic sound from the sort of sententious and
jingoist palaver found in the film and its promotional materials: Jungle is not just hip-hop--it's a truly British urban experience; We were never musicians, we were just collage artists; We are not entertainers, we are sound scientists; Musique concrete was born in Pierre Schaeffer's studio.
"Modulations" does tip its hat to purportedly sophisticated
musicians, trotting out brief clips of John Cage and Karlheinz
Stockhausen. But these, like the fleeting appearance of Alvin Toffler,
who makes a provocative connection between Cartesian philosophy and
electronic music, are drowned in a morass of brief interviews assembled in
a herky-jerky manner to reflect the disjointed and hyperactive quality of
popular electronic music. "Modulations" makes no reference to the real
electronic music virtuosi--the un-cool (and decidedly non-proletarian)
MIT, Stanford and IRCAM (Paris) researchers who genuinely understand
electronic music and the technology in which it is grounded.
Still, "Modulations" is not all bad. Having interviewed musicians--um, "sound scientists"--in Asia, America and Europe, all of whom work with electronic noise, Iara Lee stumbles upon curious symbiotic relationships among the tribes of electronica, e.g. the connection between German electronic music and dance music associated with the Detroit underclass in the 1980s, and the influence of disco on practically all popular electronic music since the 1970s. The sound of the brief disco segment is a welcome burst of color (imagine!) in a surprisingly dull soundtrack that is short on unexpected or bizarre sounds, and long on canned percussion tracks.
One of the final and most telling moments in "Modulations" is a brief clip showing a boy kicking a toy truck and hacking it with an axe. The
voice-over claims that given a musical instrument, a child will not
attempt to make music, but will instead dismantle it. This doesn't comport
with my experience, and my guess is that children who behave that way, without intelligent parental intervention, will end up like the overgrown boys featured here, doomed to repeating variants on the old saw, " the only
instrument I can play is the radio."
(Charles Cronin is a graduate student at U.C. Berkeley's School of Information Management and Systems. He completed a Ph.D. in Musicology at Stanford in 1993.
©1998 Charles Cronin, all rights reserved
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