Following the Beat

In the documentary “Modulations,” one of the many techno music artists interviewed says that 132 beats per minute is the optimum pace for an electronic dance record.

If so, Iara Lee is the perfect person to make a film on the subject--that’s about the pulse of her speech.

Throughout the film, much is made about electronic or techno dance music being a truly global, multicultural art form that, via its use of new and readily accessible technology, allows anyone, anywhere, to be an artist.

Again, Lee is the ideal chronicler of the scene. She’s of Korean descent, was born and raised in Sa~o Paulo, Brazil, and has lived in New York for the last decade.

Chipper and chatty, she’s a true believer in the spirit of inventiveness and community of the dance music scene. She’s a living, breathing advertisement for the human quality of a style of music that is often written off as mechanistic--and for the vast range of an art form that many dismiss as monochromatic.

“It was my purpose to not only entertain people who are part of this scene, but introduce people who are not exposed,” says Lee, 32, in a conversation that bounces from point to point, as if she’s constantly examining her passion from multiple angles at once. “A lot of times, people reject something they don’t know. But by exposing people, I can open their minds.”

What she wants to open them to is a perspective that this music is not just the latest pop music trend for Madonna to tap into on her recent album. Rather, the film, which opens an engagement at the Nuart theater in West Los Angeles on Friday, portrays it as a musical style with a long, involved history that goes back to the roots of the Industrial Revolution, one built on an unlikely double-helix entwining the intellectual European-based art experiments of such innovators as Karlheinz Stockhausen and ‘70s German ensemble Kraftwerk with the urban grit of Detroit, Chicago and Bronx warehouse parties.

To state the case, she traveled around the globe, interviewing more than 300 people, ranging from Stockhausen himself, futurist Alvin Toffler and modern synthesizer inventor Robert Moog to such young figures as soundscape experimentalist DJ Spooky, Prodigy mastermind Liam Howlett and German malcontent Alec Empire.

“The whole year of ‘97, I was going all over the place,” she says. “These musicians hide in the dark. I’d go in with my Sun Gun [portable film light] saying, ‘Please let me turn it on for just 20 seconds.’ ”

The duo Future Sounds of London wouldn’t even let her interview them in person, but insisted on doing one via an Internet video connection--the same way they do their concert “performances.” But it’s all part of showing this brave new world--and showing how it’s not really so new.

“People ask, ‘Why interview Alvin Toffler?’ ” she says. “But that’s what Derrick May and Juan Atkins in Detroit were reading when they started the dance scene there. The idea was to escape the ghetto, and they were totally into Toffler’s futurist thinking. So I went talking to him about techno and how influential he is, and he was, ‘Hey, I didn’t know! Really?’ So I sent him some CDs to make him aware.”

Stockhausen was not so ready to acknowledge his progeny.

“He’s totally in his ivory tower--’I don’t validate any of this. Mine is classical music,’ ” she reports.

One who was thrilled to be included was Giorgio Moroder, the German producer-composer. He was in part responsible for what is generally acknowledged as the first popular song to mate the German art-electronic aesthetic with urban American dance styles: Donna Summer’s glorious, pulsating 1977 hit “I Feel Love.”

In a separate interview from his Los Angeles office, Moroder said that he revels in the populism that the technology has allowed.

“Technology helps a lot,” says Moroder, who today is working on a stage musical version of “Flash-dance” and another musical drawing on characters from German folklore. “Especially people who are not musically trained. You don’t have to be a great musician to do a great track. David Bowie told me that Brian Eno one day came to him with a record and said, ‘David, you have to listen, I found the future.’ And he played ‘I Feel Love.’ That was quite nice.”

The role of technology is central to Lee’s film. Following the theme of her first full-length documentary, “Synthetic Pleasures,” an examination of the link between new technology and pop culture, she shows here how electronic dance music was shaped by the advent of fairly simple, widely accessible machines used to program beats.

“It’s a lot about disposable culture,” she acknowledges. “Kids can take up toys and make music. The good side is it empowers kids; it’s about getting out there and doing something. The bad side is it overflows the market.”

But the impact cannot be denied.

“[Journalist] Calvin Bush was right when he said in the film that it was a disposable culture, but it’s become more meaningful than we could have predicted,” she says. “Now there are dissertations written on disco. Over and over in pop culture, things get dismissed as lowbrow or mundane, but when you look back, you realize it has ramifications beyond what you’d predict.”

From early in her life, Lee had an orientation to dance populism. In Brazil, her father was constantly bringing home the latest disco records and for a time even operated a small dance club. But it was film to which she gravitated. In the mid-’80s she ran an international film festival in Sa~o Paulo. It wasn’t until after she’d settled in New York that she gained an awareness of the new directions in dance music.

“My first experience of electronic music was at a concert by [English act] the Orb, a few years ago when they first toured America,” she says. “I was like, ‘When are they going to start?’ And my friend said, ‘They’ve been on two hours. That’s them behind those consoles in the dark.’ I can’t say I’m a raver. I’m involved with the culture, but not a scenester, and in a way that’s good. I didn’t come in with prejudices or formed ideas. I went, ‘This is going to be an adventure and will explore every possibility.’ ”

The adventure for Lee is not over. Since completing the film, she’s resumed her global travels, taking the film for special engagements at festivals and at electronica events. Through her Caipirinha Productions (the name comes from a Brazilian alcoholic drink), she also started a record label to release music too far out on the cutting edge to appeal to most established companies. Among the recordings is “Architettura,” a planned series of sound sculptures inspired by architecture. The first, “Tower of Winds,” features musicians Savvas Ysatis and Taylor Deupree honoring Toyo Ito’s titular structure in Tokyo. The label is also releasing a companion album to “Modulations,” featuring key electronic dance pieces from “I Feel Love” to the present.

And next up is a move into narrative fiction, with plans to turn “Dom Casmurro,” a landmark Brazilian novel by 19th century writer Machado De Assis, into a movie. Lee hopes to shoot the movie next year in Brazil.

It seems odd that someone so caught up in technological advances would choose to work in such a seemingly stodgy medium as film. But Lee insists that it’s not so much a matter of what technology you use, but what you do with it.

“Technology is a bizarre thing--the fantasy of power and control,” she says. “A lot of times, if it’s misused, it separates people--the whole thing about how computers will isolate us and make us far from humanity. I say: Let’s twist it around and let technology help us communicate with more people.”