r/John_Frusciante

Saw john dropped a new song then looked at who it was with and saw this, realized “trick finger” is John under an alias! Has some super sick techno music haha this is awesome.

any tips?

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.

https://acidtestrecords.bandcamp.com/album/in-a-box

When I recorded the first 2 Trickfinger records, I had recently discovered that you could make electronic music in a room with a bunch of synced machines going at the same time, record it on a CD burner and have a finished track. I've heard this process described as “overdubbing into the air”. It was as exciting to me as my first 4 track was when I was 14. I wasn't trying to be good, or original. I was just excited that music could be made that way; it felt like I was a whole group of musicians playing together… or like I was jamming with ghosts of myself. This has actually been a very common way of making electronic music since the 80s, particularly in the main pioneering genres like Chicago Acid and Detroit Techno, but anyways I didn't figure it out until 2006. In 2007, I started doing it myself, which resulted in what was eventually released as Trickfinger, and Trickfinger II. I was just home from tour and was still in the middle of recording The Empyrean.

A couple of years later I started making music by overdubbing onto a computer, but using the same machines. I tried to make music that didn't sound like anything else. I saw a way of combining Progressive Rock and Synth Pop which nobody had done. And I was combining my songwriting and guitar playing with these old machines in a way which I was sure was unique. I had reached a point where it was more important to do something original than to do something good, whatever “good” means.

Some of this music did not get a proper release, and is compiled here as the vinyl record High Low. I don't think I have ever tried so hard at making music as I did during that period. This in contrast to those two Trickfinger records, where I wasn't trying at all. There’s something to be said for both mental states. When you're in one, the other seems impossible. I was really pushing myself on High Low. Looking back, it was as if I had an audience inside myself, driving me to go beyond my abilities, while at the same time I had a total disregard for any concept of an actual audience. It was one of those periods in life where things come together in a certain way that feels natural at the time, but seems foreign in retrospect. It felt like I was going to die if I didn't do something musically different.

The fourth record in this box is me breaking in a new mixing console, making live-to-stereo music. The record is called Rotation, and it is all new music. These tracks are more in the “not trying” category, since we're on that subject. I had just come home from tour, and was just really glad to be in the studio with my machines.

Acid Test thought it would be nice to do a box set commemorating the 10th anniversary of the release of Trickfinger, and so we put together this box set, with homemade cover art.

John Frusciante 2026

Man he just has the most beautiful voice, its hard to do it justice.