John Frusciante‘s recent return to Red Hot Chili Peppers isn’t curbing his desire to produce electronic music.
The fabled guitarist, who had said he “came back to the band because [he] knew that [he] could continue to play electronic music,” has announced a new electronic album called Maya, which is slated for a release on October 23rd via Timesig. Named after his beloved cat, who passed away after a battle with cancer last year, the record is inspired by jungle, breakbeat, and hardcore.
“I don’t have that interest in singing or writing lyrics like I used to,” Frusciante said. “The natural thing when I’m by myself now, is to just make music like the stuff being released this year. I really love the back and forth with machines and the computer.”
“For a full year before I started [Maya], I worked within self-imposed limitations and rules that made the music-making process as difficult as possible, programming for programming’s sake,” he continued, waxing poetic about the album’s origins. “After a full year of that, I decided to make things easier, to the degree that I could regularly finish tracks I enjoyed listening to, while continuing many of the practices I‘d developed. Throughout the recording of Maya, I would prepare to make each track very slowly, but would finish tracks very quickly. I’d spend weeks making breakbeats, souping up a drum machine, making DX7 patches, and so on. By the time an idea came up that seemed like the beginning of a tune, I had a lot of fresh elements ready to go.”
Along with the announcement came the release of a new single called “Amethblowl,” which you can listen to below.
After his 2010 departure from Red Hot Chili Peppers, Frusciante shifted his focus to dance music and produced acid house before releasing the first album under his new electronic moniker, Trickfinger.
Frusicante has been far from coy in sharing his love of EDM over the years. “I started being serious about following my dream to make electronic music, and to be my own engineer, five years ago,” he wrote in a 2015 blog post. “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 what I heard as best as I could.”
You can pre-order Maya via Bandcamp here.
