John Frusciante
Maya

I know nothing about jungle, I really have no idea about Aphex Twin and I wonder why certain house is called acidic. Rave, not even by accident, I lived through the 90s as a child.

Yet I like this stuff, and not a little. Although there are all the prerequisites for the opposite: one of the guitarists who made me fall in love with rock as a young man, an interesting and varied solo career, abruptly abandoned to pursue acid house. Are you kidding me? The last album of his that I listened to closely was the 2012 one, Pbx Funicular Intaglio Zone, which I liked quite a bit maybe because my ear was inexperienced with drum n' bass and the like. But it was purely an intellectual pleasure, without feeling. And indeed, I never wanted to listen to that album again.

The subsequent works I only skimmed, but the idea of calling himself Trickfinger and making party music I just couldn't understand. A self-destructiveness and disregard for the tastes of his audience that aroused in me a mix of admiration and contempt, like envy for that crystalline madness of his.

At least a half-decade like that, of cold war and regret. Then it takes just one song to change your world and this time he's come up with two or three, intriguing ones. I bought the record out of a fit of nostalgia, to see his name printed on the cover again. And playing it in the car I am falling in love with it, like you fall in love with a beautiful stranger, precisely because it's all mystery and exotic scents. Eyes you don't know how to interpret.

Moreover, in my inability to precisely define these synthetic sounds, I understood one thing. That it matters little if the beat is from a drum skin or produced by a drum machine or who knows what else, a program on the PC. Sounds are just a medium for passing those abstract visions that are the music, the so-called songs. On the difficult journey that leads to opening horizons toward different musical forms, this electronic dimension of good Frusciante seems particularly effective to me in translating his creative obsession into sound.

I can't explain it well, fractured and very fast rhythms that distort harmonies and stain the synth washes. Abstract drummer John appeals to me for his inexhaustible virulence, and the ability to create soundscapes that combine his classic melodic insights with frayed, limping fabrics, chewed and unresolved sounds. It's as if he has given up the formalities of the classic song to devote himself entirely to the pure alchemy between rhythm and harmonies, which if one listens closely to his beginnings (Niandra LaDes) or other particularly successful albums (To Record Only Water...) one realizes that the obsession was all there already, but compensated by vocal melodies and the narrative of pussy, heroin, death, and rebirth. Here it's beyond narration, only the formal obsession remains. (The only thematic cue is the dedication to his dead cat, who gives the album its name)

In the end, two ideas remain. That this music may be for raves but it seems decidedly more ambitious in form and more experimental than much of the rock of the last twenty-thirty years. It's a cerebral challenge that can be won, a rhythmic eruption that appears chaotic but has its regularities, it just takes more time to master them. I feel an affinity with the best metal, uncompromising music.

And a thought to those musicians who change worlds, who dive in like kids with a bucket and spade on the beach of possible sounds. They open up horizons for us, which we may have previously ignored out of laziness to always resort to the usual reassuring names and genres. In short, artists like Fruscio (in this specific case) are as necessary as bread, leading us beyond the boundaries imposed by your spoiled ear. They take away the comfort zone and in some cases manage to take you with them to new moons, which you didn't see before or didn't want to see. Let's see if I can plant my flag there.