I’ve always been a big John Frusciante fan. His guitar work is really inspiring and full of feeling. He is one of my favorite musicians and guitar players ever. If you only know him from his work as the guitar player for the Red Hot Chili Peppers you’re missing out on a lot of great music, considering he has like 12 solo records and many EPs.
While many of those records are guitar based, other are mainly completely electronic affairs, composed using a diverse array of synthesizers, drum machines and even samples. The last one, “Maya”, (named in honor of Frusciante’s cat, who recently passed out,) falls into the fully electronic camp, like the rest of his most recent records.
Anyway, as I listened to Maya I began wondering how this record compares to his past works, and an idea suddenly hit me: his electronic albums are more related to his abstract work as a painter than to most of his guitar based records.
I think his guitar based records are way more traditionally structured, clearly showing he comes from a rock background. His electronic records, on the other hand sound like very abstract experiments. (Just listen to 2012’s PBX Funicular Intaglio Zone to see what I mean.)
I love electronic music, but listening to PBX FIZ, and its follow-up, 2014’s Enclosure, always left me wondering what was Frusicante’s point or goal on those albums. They’re not only abstract, but also very dark, dissonant, and even creepy. They made me feel as if John was in a really dark and chaotic mental place when he recorded them.
Anyway, Maya in general follows these last 2 record’s sonic blueprint, with the difference that this one is completely devoid of any singing, which is a good thing, as I think that made John more focused on the music. The tracks, while still abstract sound way more polished and less chaotic and experimental.
While I’m not much of a fan of the jungle beats under each track, I don’t hate them either. In a way I think they help make the record more cohesive, coherent and structured, and they definitely don’t distract me that much from the rest of the music that Maya has to offer.
Many tracks have beautiful melodies and sounds. All of them have detailed and intricate parts. Yeah, some of the tracks are kind of noisy too, but noise is part of the fun of synths, I suppose. And this is John Frusciante after all, so don’t expect all to be cute and not weird.
Instead of the heavily dark, dissonant, cold, and creepy stuff of his last few electronic adventures, Maya leans more on a cleaner and melancholic sound.
I’m not sure I’ll be listening very often to this record. It’s still weird, it’s still abstract, it’s still crazy, but also more readily accessible and enjoyable than John’s last few records. I might take it for a spin once in a while.
