Fraser, Jill

***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 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. 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.