Active since the 1970s, Jill Fraser is a composer and electronic music pioneer with a staggering list of credits across music, film, television and performance. Yet her new album, Earthly Pleasures (out September 27) sits uniquely against her groundbreaking body of work. Her Drag City debut is a modular resetting of American revival-style hymns that speculates on death, what comes after it, and how the spirit of our songs might be interpreted after we’re gone — taking Jill’s ever-evolving curiosity about music as both a science and a spiritual force to be reckoned with to otherworldly heights. The first single/video, “Amen 2”, is out now.
For Earthly Pleasures’ composition, Jill researched revival hymns from the late 19th-early 20th century composed by women. From there, hymns were slowed, dissected, and “fragmented into tiny grains,” as Jill puts it: “Some are slow and meditative, some are dots of sound twinkling like stars in the sky… I wanted to make them unrecognizable yet still retain the inspiration and emotion.” Some of these creations, like “Amen 2”, are short and sweet — like the backing to a dreamy pop song, albeit one with a church congregation sample glitching percussively. Other tracks, like the leave-taking “When We All Get To Heaven”, stretch past the ten-minute mark to elaborate on the final abandonment of consciousness. It’s a breathtakingly transcendent album that suggests inclusion within a diversity of genres: Ambient, Electronic, New Age, Modern Classical, Gospel, Healing, and more.
Jill Fraser’s path to Earthly Pleasures is nothing short of astonishing. In the 1970s, she was mentored by Morton Subotnick and studied with John Cage and Lou Harrison at CalArts, later working at Serge Modular Music and building her own modular synth. By the 1980s, she took her synths to Hollywood and collaborated with Oscar-winning composer Jack Nitzsche on the electronic scores for Hardcore, Cruising, and Personal Best. Jill was also part of a vibrant Los Angeles punk scene, opening for acts like The Minutemen and Henry Rollins while touring with Buffy Sainte Marie and performance artist Ivan E. Roth. She’s scored hundreds of TV commercials, won 3 Clios for her original music, and even contributed electronics on a track with her daughter Sofia on Wand’s 2019 album Laughing Matter — still, Earthly Pleasures stands out from all these things Jill’s done. Balancing composition, technology and introspection, it is a fluent expression that also considers mortality and loss; not simply our own lives and the lives of those we love, but the mortality of the very age we live in, the intelligence of our time. Jill’s forthcoming album is the work of a veteran composer and synth master at the peak of her powers, meditating upon the detritus of memory, the passage of all consciousness, and the rebirth of meaning in a new era.
Experience the Earthly Pleasures of Jill Fraser on September 27, 2024! To commemorate the album’s release, Jill will open for Caterina Barbieri at an Age of Reflections show in LA on September 28; Tickets are on sale now.
Jill Fraser 2024 Live Dates
Sept. 2 - Tuscon, AZ @ Hotel Congress (w/ Steve Roach) Sept. 28 - Los Angeles, CA @ First Congregational Church of LA (w/ Caterina Barbieri) | 
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