John Frusciante.

John Frusciante, born in 1970, is best known as the guitarist of Red Hot Chili Peppers — but his solo catalog is a parallel life entirely his own. It opened in 1994 with Niandra LaDes and Usually Just a T‑Shirt, a raw, largely home-recorded double album that had almost nothing to do with the funk-rock day job.

In 2004 he went on one of the great creative benders in modern rock: across roughly a year on the Record Collection label he released a run of solo records — Shadows Collide With People, The Will to Death, Inside of Emptiness, A Sphere in the Heart of Silence and Curtains among them — several tracked fast and deliberately unpolished. Shadows Collide With People became his first solo album to chart.

The Empyrean (2009) pulled the other direction: a single continuous song-cycle, orchestrated and dense, with Chili Peppers bandmates and guests woven through it. Then Frusciante largely stepped away from the guitar-hero frame altogether.

Since the 2010s his solo work has turned electronic — programming breakbeats and acid-house lines on hardware, releasing club records under the alias Trickfinger and, under his own name, the sampler-built Maya (2020). One instrument to the next, the through-line is a musician following his ear wherever it goes.