Former guitarist of the Red Hot Chili Peppers, John Frusciante, has finally crossed over and taken the dive into the electronic music world of producers. After being off and on with the Peppers for over 20 years, and even before his second departure from the group, John was becoming curious and learning how to program the hardware already associated with acid house.
While staying busy with other side projects that include projects with multiple members of the Mars Volta, involvement in the Speed Dealer Moms project, a collab with Aaron Funk (AKA Venetian Snares) released on Timesig in 2010 as well as his solo works, Frusciante, in April, will debut over a half a decade worth of work and experimenting with his new self-titled LP Trickfinger. It will be coming to light via the Absurd Recordings sublabel Acid Test.
An explanation of his journey to electronic music is included with the album:
“I started being serious about following my dream to make electronic music, and to be my own engineer, five years ago. For the 10 years prior to that, I had been playing guitar along with a wide range of different types of programmed synthesizer and sample based music, emulating as best as I could, what I heard. I found that the languages machines forced programmers to think in had caused them to discover a new musical vocabulary. The various forms of electronically generated music, particularly in the last 22 years, have introduced many new principles of rhythm, melody, and harmony. I would learn what someone had programmed but their thought process eluded me. Programmers, particularly ones fluent on machines from the early 80s and/or tracker programs from the 90s, clearly had a theoretical foundation in their employ but it was not the theory I knew from pop/rock, jazz or classical. The hands relationship to the instrument accounts for so much of why musicians do what they do, and I had come to feel that in pop/rock my mind was often being overpowered by my hand, which I had a strong desire to correct. I was obsessed with music where machine intelligence and human intelligence seemed to be bouncing off one another, each expanding with the incorporation of what it received from the other…”
Below is an offering from the eight track LP. It is the first tune off the album “After Below“, complete with a heavy helping of echos and drawn out melodies. Who knows. Hopefully this won’t be the last helping of acid house from the former RHCP, as he is in some elite company with Recondite and Tin Man being just a few to release successful works on Absurd and it’s subsidiaries.
1. “After Below”
2. “Before Above”
3. “Rainover”
4. “Sain”
5. “Exlam”
6. “85h”
7. “4:30″
8. “Phurip”