[rating=6.00]
John Frusciante comes full circle with Enclosure, completing what he calls a “musical statement” that began four years and several experimental recordings ago.
Now half a decade removed from Red Hot Chili Peppers, the band he quit in 2008, Frusciante has exorcised the abstract-electronica monster he struggled to free upon his own liberation. He shut himself away at home, spending those first years studying and building his own challenging and unsettling brand of synthpop, far from producers and managers and anyone else with a conceivable say in his career. Part of Frusciante’s discipline involved making music he would never release, then churning out more. Enclosure, his third record in seven months, caps the most fitful chapter of his 20-year solo work.
Frusciante’s relationship with the guitar was never the same; it was, after all, the vehicle for the notoriety he came to resent and eventually detest. It has since taken on a programming role, feeding Frusciante’s ideas into a computer, itself an instrument, and morphing into other electronic means. His manipulation and mixing with sampled beats and grooves became the base for everything that followed. Letur-Lefr, an EP he recorded in 2010, was his toe-in approach to this free-form production. It compiled electronica and hip-hop fragments and formed a rough blueprint rather than a firm concept.
Frusciante claims that his musical statement technically began when he embarked on the album PBX Funicular Intaglio Zone in March 2011. This time his tracks appeared in the order he made them. From there, the statement unfolded, growing heavier and all the more unsettling. Outsides, another EP, followed last August. It was a different excursion, an ambient labyrinth studded with breathing room and fewer sudden tangents. Its calming brevity made for a welcome break.
Enclosure is the benediction to this macabre love affair with electronica. Here Frusciante reclaims his voice, a guttural tone always at odds with his choppy, heart-racing background, and just as abruptly obscures it again. He has moved on from snippet-style production to thoughtful assembly; “Fanfare” even has a melody, and demands repeated listens.
Frusciante made Enclosure while also producing an album for the rappers Black Knights. In a press release he remarked that both recordings “represent one investigative creative thought process.” Does this suggest a deliberate turn from synthpop to hip-hop? For now, a question mark punctuates Frusciante’s Musical Statement.
