Veteran electronic music composer Jill Fraser’s new work takes stock of generations and lifetimes of memory, speculating on how the spirit of our songs might be interpreted after we’re gone. With her 1978 Serge Modular, Prism Modular and Ableton Push 3 in the circuit path, she recomposes a stack of American revival hymns, making new creations for the future. A fluent meditation upon mortality and rebirth amid numinous infinities of dimensional sound.
Jill Fraser is a composer and electronic music pioneer, active since the 1970s. Her credits are many and varied—yet her new album, Earthly Pleasures, takes a unique place among all her work: a luminous suite of electroacoustic music examining the bones of hymnal harmony, speculating on how the spirit of our songs might be interpreted after we’re gone.
Playing electronic music was what Jill’s seen for herself almost from the beginning. Switched on Bach was an early influence, blowing up her understanding of what she was learning on the piano. So was Silver Apples of the Moon, evolving recognizable aspects of classical music into a fantastic elsewhere.
She studied at CalArts, working with Morton Subotnick (her mentor) and taking master classes with John Cage and Lou Harrison, among others. Working at Serge Modular Music in the late 1970s, she built her own modular synth. She composed film scores with Jack Nitzsche (Cruising, Personal Best) and played her synthesizer at punk shows opening for Minutemen and Henry Rollins. She toured with Buffy Sainte-Marie.
Over the years, she’s won Clios for her original music for commercials, while continuing to write music for films. She’s released several albums of her own. When her daughter Sofia was playing with Wand, Jill contributed electronics to one of the songs on Laughing Matter. More recently, she’s composed music for an album release with The zZyzx Society, and she regularly performs live with the band re:VOLT, who were invited last year to make a version of Mort Subotnick’s “Sidewinder” for his 90th birthday celebration, which they subsequently performed live at the San Francisco Electronic Music Festival.
And 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.
For Earthly Pleasures’ composition, Jill began by researching revival hymns of the late 19th and early 20th centuries (with an instinctive bias towards those composed by women). Her workstation combines both the newest technology and some of the oldest analog electronic sound sources, a combo involving her original 1978 Serge Modular, a new Prism Modular and Ableton Push 3. As she writes in her liner notes:
“I’ve slowed these hymns down, dissected them, and fragmented them into tiny grains. Some are slow and meditative, some are dots of sound twinkling like stars in the sky. Some sound like computers trying to figure out tiny bits of data. Sometimes slow moving tones intersect to form clouds of sound. I wanted to make them unrecognizable yet still retain the inspiration and emotion.”
The sound world of Earthly Pleasures accesses a seeming infinity of dimensional sound in which the human hand is always keenly felt, no matter how deep the space. It’s a breathtakingly transcendent album that suggests inclusion within a diversity of genres:
Ambient, Electronic, New Age, Modern Classical, Gospel, Healing, Sacred . . . . It 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.
