Stuff You Gotta Watch: Modulations
"The world is not binary; it's chaos," Genesis P-Orridge states at the beginning of Modulations. Genesis feels the turning point in music happened when "we discovered that [...] everything to do with culture could be cut up and reassembled in ways that didn't exist before." This epiphany, made possible by galloping technology and insatiable curiosity, is essential to understanding the history and evolution of electronic music as we know it today: an arena of constant reinvention and brilliant impermanence.
One third of a project that also includes a book by Peter Shapiro and a soundtrack album, Iara Lee's documentary examines the intense relationship between human and machine that lies at the core of electronic music, in the way it is both made and perceived. Throughout a voyage that begins with Luigi Russolo's 1913 Futurist manifesto The Art of Noises and concludes with drum & bass in the mid 1990s, we are treated to highlight moments from nearly a century of transforming the acoustic wave into a fantastic multiverse of frequencies.
Assembled like the jump-cut technique that first enabled sounds to be thought (and heard) differently, Modulations gathers interviews, live performances, studio footage, and myriad stunning images to create a poetic reflection on the past, present, and future paths of electronic music.
Review by Ana Leorne. Check out the full archive of the Stuff You Gotta Watch column.