“West Coast/East Coast Synthesis...” - Jill Fraser Debuts New Album “Earthly Pleasures” On Drag City :: 09/27
The readied metaphysics of hysteria, repetitive rhythm and chronic calculations can send one into a critiqued tailspin, where multidimensional figures pluck from the vibrating vertebra of the sleeping. Through stormy trees and their whimsical fractals, it results in this fractured prayer method posing in front of the mighty winds of colossal change. If there’s such a thing as the softness of colliding with the marital magic of connection and honor, then there must be a distinctive ringing like that of a memory explosive going off someplace quiet and grounded in acrylics and rationed readings. Across a once flourishing landscape, whose jaw-dropping features reflect once ancient harvests and community connections, breaths into the digitized lungs of perfection and the soured songs of man in a deteriorating display of recollection. Where ground meets sky in this complete and utter blackout transaction between time and space, lurks the ultimate question for the ears of the universe, “for what and what for”?
Born and raised in Cincinnati, OH and eventually relocating to Chapel Hill, NC as a child, composer and pioneer in electronic music, Jill Fraser first came onto the scene when moving to the West Coast at the cosmic request of the great Morton Subotnick, whom she helped to create voltage control tracks for the composer's original Nonesuch Records release of "A Sky of Cloudless Sulfur" in the early 70s. Having already graduated from ECU with a BM (Bachelor of Music Degree), while studying with Otto Henry, Fraser continued her education in the music matrix at CalArts in Santa Clarita, where she attended classes taught by the esteemed giant, John Cage. Continuing her industrious and incredibly historical exploration into various moods and modes of synths and modular systems throughout the 70s, Fraser began building her very own instruments in the infinite genre, while working in Hollywood as an employee at Serge Modular Music, where she built her very first MSS. A dawn cascading with heavenly tools of free form expression that even the 60s dare try to articulate with enlightened literature and renegade power music, Fraser helped regulate its monumental arrival for a whole new generation of eager musicians to take its collective narrative across the landscape of the 1980s in a way that brought the future right to your front door.
Having worked in film, commercials, both solo and collaborative efforts in music as well as her participation in the great LA punk scene opening for the likes of The Minutemen and Black Flag, Fraser returns, but this time to Drag City for her debut album entitled “Earthly Pleasures”. A splendid body of work filled with metallic textures and worn-down paintings that starkly resemble the great Monet’s long-lost fever dream, Fraser effortlessly captures the pure essence of the anatomical atmosphere and full body voyage of sound experience. With tracks like “Monarch of the Sky”, the album’s first single “Amen 2” and the title track all exposing the radical truths of a Dionysian dance across embryonic embers, “Earthly Pleasures” completely eradicates this lingering idea in all of us that the world is worse off than ever before, or that’s bottle necking towards this devastating reality, but the fact of matter is, It's simply not the case if people are able to conjure this sort of magnificent magic to help heal the world and its listeners ethereal ears. Fraser’s practice in composition is indeed cosmic and after all the years of seeing the modular landscape change from hibernating hydras into smooth, radiating scores of geometric gestures, one can simply imagine where it could go from here.
