MODULATIONS

Of all CIFF features, MODULATIONS has the best beat. and you can dance to it. Documentarian Iara Lee loops you through the brave new world of electronic popular music, a millennial dawn of trance, techno, acid jazz, jungle, electro-funk and ambient rhythms. Here is everything you've ever wanted to know about house music but were unhip to ask, like … why it's called house music. From the foot of Japan's Mount Fuji to an illegal 'rave' in New York City, Lee tests the wattage of a high-tech “culture of amnesia” that surrenders to the pulse of the Roland TB-303, sequencers, samplers and MIDI synthesizers. MODULATIONS traces the roots of electronica, to Luigi Russolo's 1913 manifesto “The Art of Noise” and John Cage's revolutionary definitions of just what constitutes musical composition. See/hear how the Detroit riots in the 1960s sparked a sonic uprising in discotheques, in which weapons wielded were drum machines, keyboards and turntables. Behold the Future Sounds of London, a band who refuses to perform or appear anywhere except via high-speed Internet uplink. And be comforted, perhaps, by the founders of the trendsetting German group Kraftwerk, gray-haired and fiftesomething, but still boogeying with the best of them onstage.