Red Hot Chili Peppers electric guitar player John Frusciante has announced that he will release a new solo electronic album next year.
Making the announcement on Bandcamp, Frusciante cited a need to "clear my head" after releasing not one, but two, 70+ minute albums – Unlimited Love and Return of the Dream Canteen – with the Chili Peppers in 2022.
There will, Frusciante says, be two versions of the new album, . I : and : I I . ("one" and "two.") . I : is shorter, and contains a vinyl-only track, while : I I . is a longer, CD version of the record, containing "sounds that cannot be pressed on vinyl."
Produced by Frusciante himself, the album will be released – in both forms – on February 3. It follows Frusciante's most recent solo effort, 2020's Maya.
"After a year and a half writing and recording rock music, I needed to clear my head," Frusciante writes.
"I listened to and made music where things generally happen gradually rather than suddenly. I would set up patches on a Monomachine or Analog Four and listen to them, hearing one sound morph into others, making changes to a patch only after having listened for quite a while, gradually adding elements, and finally manipulating the sounds on the fly. All tracks were recorded live to CD burner, with no overdubs, and executed on one or two machines."
In the statement, which can be found on Bandcamp, Frusciante also cites the role recording, writing and touring with the Red Hot Chili Peppers played in his desire to create the album.
"I cannot overstate the role that being in my band played," he says. "I had previously spent 12 years programming and engineering my own music, and then spent a year and a half making music where my role was basically to write songs and play guitar. When the band's recording phase was completed, I needed to go back to my adopted language.
"I had done enough with chords, rhythms, notes, defined sections, sharp transitions, etc.. What I needed was to create music from the ground up with nothing but sound, and have that music reflect 'being' rather than 'doing'. It was a therapeutic way of re-balancing myself, before and during my band’s mixing process."
Frusciante – whose highly experimental, genre-fusing solo work often stands in stark contrast to the music of the Red Hot Chili Peppers – has been candid in past interviews about occasionally becoming fatigued with writing in a more conventional rock vein, particularly in the late 2000s, when he departed the Chili Peppers a second time.
“It was like, ‘I just really don’t want to do all this living in this world of fame and publicity; I just want to concentrate on making electronic music and making music just to make music, and not to make people happy, not to be successful,’" he told Guitar World earlier this year, in reference to his leaving the band in 2009. "And that was just what I needed at the time."
However, the alt-rock guitar hero also took care to mention in the same interview that he's found a healthy balance between his rock and experimental outlets during this, his third tenure with the Chili Peppers.
“There’s an appreciation of the chemistry that I can’t say I really had towards the end of being in the band last time,” he explained. “An appreciation of what we’re capable of – when you get so used to something, you sometimes tend to take things for granted.
“I’d had lots of time making music where I do whatever I want. And that was great. And I continue to do that. But it seemed like a really good step for me as a human being to try to play in a band again. Most of all, I just have a lot of fun playing with those guys.”
. I : and : I I . can each be pre-ordered now via Acid Test Records' Bandcamp page.
