John Frusciante of Red Hot Chili Peppers adopts acid house, readies to release his first electronic album as Trickfinger
The newest candidate to join the realm of electronic music is John Frusciante of Red Hot Chili Peppers fame. The guitarist, who left RHCP indefinitely in 2009, has remained busy in his own right: since departing from the band, he has released several solo and collaborative albums and dedicated himself to his dream to create electronic music. In 2012, Frusciante explained the backstory of his seemingly unpredictable switch in genre, which surprisingly, was not as random as most may think:
“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 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. In 2007 I started to learn how to program all the instruments we associate with Acid House music and some other hardware. For about 7 months I didn’t record anything. Then I started recording, playing 10 or so synced machines through a small mixer into a CD burner. This was all experimental Acid House, my skills at making rock music playing no part in it whatsoever. I had lost interest in traditional songwriting and I was excited about finding new methods for creating music. I’d surround myself with machines, program one and then another and enjoy what was a fascinating process from beginning to end. I was so excited by the method of using numbers much in the same way I’d used my muscles all my life. Skills that had previously been applied by my subconscious were gradually becoming conscious, by virtue of having numerical theoretical means of thinking about rhythm, melody and sound.”
Finally, it seems, Frusciante has mastered his take on acid house as he readies to release his first LP on April 7th. Under the new guise Trickfinger, his new self-titled album arrives on Acid Test with eight original tracks. As a teaser, Frusciante has shared the album’s opening track “After Below,” thick with dark undertones and an intricately layered hypnotizing beat. Surely, there’s more acid house exploration to come from Trickfinger and John Frusciante’s new alter ego.
Track list:
1. “After Below”
2. “Before Above”
3. “Rainover”
4. “Sain”
5. “Exlam”
6. “85h”
7. “4:30”
8. “Phurip”