Question: About your new video, Vincent Gallo is directing that is he?
John Frusciante: Yeah.
Question: Are you friends with him? What kind of video is it?
John Frusciante: It’s like an experimental film starring me and directed by him. It’s the best video I could have asked for, it’s so cool.
Question: What’s your relationship with Vincent?
John Frusciante:Well, he’s my friend you know, he’s been my friend ever since we were writing the record “Californication” and Vincent had the movie “Buffalo 66” out. I saw that movie and it reminded me of my music. The feelings of his movie reminded me of the feelings of my songs. He got my phone-number from a friend of ours, I found out that he was a big fan of my solo-record, both of my solo-records. So, he asked me if I would do the music…
Question: Can I take some pictures while we’re talking?
John Frusciante: Yeah yeah, sure. So he asked me if I could do the music for his next movie and I said yeah. I wrote a lot of songs sort of with his next movie in mind, and I made a CD out of them, and I would say that a lot of that CD will be the soundtrack. They’re not on this CD, they’re on a CD that I just gave to my friends.
Question: But that is coming out eventually?
John Frusciante: Well, eventually. He hasn’t figured out yet who he wants to be in the movie. He needs a few female parts that he’s having a hard time casting. But, when he does it will be a wonderful movie and I’m gonna do the music to it. He’s the only filmmaker that I feel any sense of camaraderie with, he’s the only person who … I haven’t seen any other films or videos that have reminded me of my music in the last few years. I see films from the 50’s by Kenneth Anger that remind me of my music and I see films by Andy Warhol in the 60’s that remind me of my music but I don’t… Vincent is the onlyperson making movies now that… things of that same kind of… sort of avant garde kind of radical approach to filmmaking. So yes, I’m very proud of what we’ve done together and I know we’ll do other great things together.
I started being serious about following my dream to make electronic music, and to be my own engineer, five years ago. For the 10 years prior to that, I had been playing guitar along with a wide range of different types of programmed synthesizer and sample based music, emulating as best as I could, what I heard. I found that the languages machines forced programmers to think in had caused them to discover a new musical vocabulary. The various forms of electronically generated music, particularly in the last 22 years, have introduced many new principles of rhythm, melody, and harmony. I would learn what someone had programmed but their thought process eluded me. Programmers, particularly ones fluent on machines from the early 80s and/or tracker programs from the 90s, clearly had a theoretical foundation in their employ but it was not the theory I knew from pop/rock, jazz or classical. The hands relationship to the instrument accounts for so much of why musicians do what they do, and I had come to feel that in pop/rock my mind was often being overpowered by my hand, which I had a strong desire to correct. I was obsessed with music where machine intelligence and human intelligence seemed to be bouncing off one another, each expanding with the incorporation of what it received from the other. Read More
“When I was 26 years and had no place to live, sitting in stationary car of my friend Toni, and smoking marijuana coming from their livelihoods, I was not allowed to smoke in her car, wondering if my life was ending or if it was a start, hearing REM and Radiohead, I felt that radio was my company (along with my K-7’s Bob Marley and the Butthole Surfers).”
“I was 18 when I joined the band. I was totally off balance. When I quit I was 22 and I just thought everything’s over. I needed time to do absolutely nothing - time to have no responsibilities other than to experience life. The resentment I built up against Anthony is real personal stuff. Honestly, I think in his soul he really wanted me to be exactly what I am, but he has certain needs from people that even he has no explanations for.” - John Frusciante
