Ever since he discovered his music’s potential as a medium for documentary, Steve Reich has not been shy about tackling big ideas. In his string quartet Different Trains, where melodies were derived from the rhythms and contours of spoken text, Reich juxtaposed the innocence of childhood with the horrors of the Holocaust. The Cave, his multi-media collaboration with the video artist Beryl Korot, matched musical text samples with talking heads to illuminate the conflict in the Middle East.

Three Tales, their second collaboration, takes on nothing less than the perils of technology in our time. Throughout ‘Hindenburg’ (the zeppelin, not the general), ‘Bikini’ (the island, not the bathing suit) and ‘Dolly’ (the sheep, not the singer), Reich and Korot ruminate on the ethics and considerations of our modern age, from nuclear testing and the environment to cloning and artificial intelligence. Using historic film footage and interviews with such figures in the scientific establishment as the late biologist Stephen Jay Gould and virtual reality pioneer Jaron Lanier, Reich and Korot make their case that technology has advanced much faster than society’s ability to deal with it.

In their comments printed in both the booklet notes and included on the DVD-Video extras, neither Reich nor Korot neglect the obvious point that the very technology that’s the subject of their critique has made their work possible. Technology has also now put the video as well as the music in the hands of home viewers, rather than limiting it to a public audience. Even a decade ago with The Cave, multiple images meant separate screens and the near-impossibility of replication at home. Today, even the out-takes of ‘Hindenburg’ have a place amid the DVD’s added features.

What Reich and Korot seem oblivious to, however, is how the Faustian pact with technology that they decry in society has also affected their own work. In both Different Trains and The Cave, Reich allowed his sources to make the opening statement. Before writing a single note, he had sifted through hours of personal interviews to find comments and statements with exactly the right resonance. ‘As they spoke, so I wrote,’ says Reich, which explains not only his respect for the sources but also the quirkiness of his melodies, tempi and key changes.

But just as technological advancements have allowed Korot to render multiple images on a single screen, Reich can now compose his music first and alter the text to fit it later. Rather than framing and responding to his subjects, Reich dictates the terms and spins a world of his own. This gives the visuals considerably more freedom as well. In a memorable moment, the hammering of German workers on the zeppelin is fitted to Reich’s take on the Nibelung motif from Das Rheingold; toward the end, the music’s spiraling modular repetitions are matched by the images of dividing cells.

Such firm control of the material breeds absolute power in shaping the forum itself. In a particularly egregious example, when Oxford University scientist Richard Dawkins compares man to machine, the text sample is looped in such rapid, mechanistic repetition that a key bit of explanation takes on a far more sinister context. Other faces may be appearing on the screen, but it is clearly Reich and Korot who are doing the talking.

In both its emotional evocations as well as its compositional process, Three Tales is highly manipulative. Given the artistic level of the creators and the seriousness of their subject, the results are often unbecoming. For artists so quick to criticise others for playing God, they prove vulnerable to the same temptation themselves.