Modulations

The documentary and the things they talk about are not so exciting. However, they show some pretty important people here in "Modulations: Cinema For the Ear".

I am watching this documentary 25 years after it was released, and it was very nostalgic for the time period - the things I experienced and the things I missed. For any fan of electronic music or rave culture, this movie is great to experience. The music clips they play are incredible; I now feel like digging back into my collection of CDs, since much of this music is not available on Spotify.

The director Iara Lee seems to have been quite active over the years, while not receiving enough recognition. I may have to look into some of her other documentaries and shorts.

8 stars for this.

2023Aug18Fri.

Smash cuts! Hardcore coverage! Dozens of dizzying locations around the globe, get ready to enter the world of electronica and meet its makers and mad doctors, blending the sounds to breathe electric life into the air – injecting culture…breeding a living being with a generation riding the tide of true music and electric emotion.

From filmmaker Lara Lee comes this epic, documentary examining the electronic music scene on a global level. Spanning its history in culture from its earliest beginnings, get the music, slamming dancefloor footage, and interviews with all the exotic experts who exist within the electronic universe where all minds may enter!

Modulations attempts to cover too wide a subject area in too little time. Electronic music is an all-encompassing label that is applied to musicians as diverse as Can, John Cage, and the Prodigy(!!). There are great segments here with pioneers such as Cage, Robert Moog, Karl-Heinz Stockhausen, and Pierre Henry. There are too many segments of talent-short and ego-long knob twiddlers. And there's an inexcusable total lack of Kraftwerk or Cabaret Voltaire, the two groups who pioneered the crossover of 'electronica' from fringe to pop. And why no interview with Afrika Bambaata? He made it onto PBS' Rock n Roll Series, and he should have been talked to here.

The lowpoint is reached when a German techno artist says that techno has absolutely no revolutionary potential....except for his own special brand of hardcore jungle!! Modulations is a fascinating but frustrating once over lightly look at this ever evolving music scene.

A broad range of people linked to the current and past techno scene have made it into the film and it would be mean not to note how great Holger Czukay's dancing is. But the publicity for Modulations says it "traces the evolution of electronic music", which is not quite true. There's quite a leap from the jumble of clips involving Pierre Henry and John Cage into the familiar material on disco, Kraftwerk and Derrick May.

A more serious documentary might have challenged what the techno movement has to say about itself. Techno's rhetoric is borrowed from the modernists of the 50s and 60s, but maybe the real story is a more familiar one for pop music: the dancefloor's appetite for the next big thing.

This was totally my scene back in the day, but for me, this documentary is all a bit of a mess. Too many strange cut scenes that seem totally irrelevant.

Some great DJ appearances and tunes, but not enough for me. Should of built up a crescendo to something wonderful that pulls it all together, but never quite happens.