What Happened to his Post-Empyrean Solo Work?
As the new Trickfinger box set releases, I find myself relistening to the Renoise tracks for the first time in a year or two. Although records like PBX and Letur-Lefr have slowly been creeping up to become some of my personal favourite JF releases, I somehow haven’t been able to digest and celebrate the rest of the music from this time period yet.
It is truly staggering how little attention this period of his artistic career gets paid to. The pieces are unique past the point of categorisation, which gets enforced by how intangible and plainly wrong descriptions of the music made by its “opponents” sound. To put it bluntly, (mostly rock) fans that like a version of Frusciante’s music but can’t appreciate the full picture of his art because it’s out of the realm of their comfort zone have a hard time articulating what it is about the music they dislike that goes beyond just “it’s beep boop alien electronic music”. This actually reinforces Frusciante’s ambitions to create truly special music.
When you get down to analysing the pieces, it becomes clear that there’s a common thread among every iteration of his music. Melodically, it actually borrows a lot from Frusciante’s previous work. That, so to say, is a confirmation of his intuition - and of the perception that his music isn’t calculated, it strives to be pure and empirical. The uniqueness about this body of work comes down to the way his musical intuition is presented. Reading the text accompanying the Bandcamp page of “In A Box”, Frusciante’s way of describing the music comes across as very precise; An incomparable blend of Progressive Rock and Synth Pop, that isn’t only challenging to the listener, but also to the creator himself.
I’m not trying to put his Renoise era of music at odds with previous albums. I’m of the belief that opinions hold no power over the value of art at all, but it is merely the creators intent and the receivers feelings that are able to evaluate any kind of quality, if at all. This sentiment leads me to deeply appreciate the existence of Frusciante’s post-Empyrean output for it’s own reasons, and I wish there was more discourse covering it - Remote from any discussion of where his music lands in one’s tier list.