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Jill Fraser — Earthly Pleasures
(Drag City DC919, 2024, 2LP / DL)

by Peter Thelen, Published 2024-12-18

Earthly Pleasures Cover art

Jill Fraser is a composer and electronic musician with a background in television, films, and commercials using Moog, Buchla and Serge modular synthesizers, along with standard analog and digital synthesizers. She studied with Morton Subotnick, Mel Powell, John Cage, and Lou Harrison at Cal Arts. Interestingly, after decades of film and commercial work, she arrived at her solo recording career only recently (relatively speaking), with 2015’s Smart Shack and a 2018 collaboration with Peter Grenader titled The zZyzx Society preceding this latest album Earthly Pleasures, a two-LP set featuring eight compositions of various lengths based on dissected and deconstructed hymns from the late 19th and early 20th centuries, broken down to a granular level and reassembled, often ambient, often experimental, often exotic, beautiful and melodic — this is probably like nothing you’ve heard before. Here, Fraser uses the Serge modular, Prism Modular and Ableton Push 3, as well as choral voices (presumably samples), with a less obvious use of strings (viola, cello, string bass, also possibly sampled), and a whirlwind of creativity. The idea is to present something that could be interpreted by some intelligence far into the future, long after our civilizations and religions have disappeared. Some of the pieces are slow and meditative, others are embellished with sounds that scintillate brightly from far distances, like starlight; when slow moving chords and tones intersect they often greet the listener with mystery and illusion, sparking curiosity and wonderment. The side one opener, “When We All Get to Heaven,” has all of these qualities in abundance, as well as a strong melodic flair amid curious sonic abstractions. The title track that opens side two begins like a sparkling drift on solar winds before its origins become faintly recognizable, bolstered by choral samples as the piece proceeds, while “Beautiful Summer” lifts off with brisk melodic percussive tones that later blend with floating ambience to take the listener on a quirky journey, closing with a vague reference to a Christmas hymn. “Amen 2” may be one of the shortest cuts at a little over two minutes, but it’s definitely one of the most interesting, both rhythmically and texturally, while “Monarch of the Sky” offers several minutes of pure floating ambient bliss before choirs join in to make it a heavenly majestic experience. In all, Earthly Pleasures is a most unusual and captivating juxtaposition of sonic elements.

Filed under: New releases, 2024 releases

Related artist(s): Jill Fraser

More info
http://jillfraser.bandcamp.com/album/earthly-pleasures

 

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