A Sphere In The Heart Of Silence is a record of electronic music made by Josh Klinghoffer and myself. After a few months making raw and/or stripped down music we decided to go back to making more layered, richly textured electronic music. It was still recorded as if it were 1970, but with modern electronic instruments that didn’t exist back then.
The first song “Sphere” was originally made to be performed live at Performance One, the first in a series of ten individually conceptualized shows consisting largely of experimental music. It has been shortened to a cozy 10 minutes for the purpose of fitting into a record. The original version, as it was performed at Performance One, was thirty minutes long.
The second song “The Afterglow” dates from the time of the songs on Shadows Collide With People. Half of these songs were originally intended to be part of Shadows but we decided to let Shadows center around my more songwriter-type songs and save our more experimental collaborative stuff for this album. On “The Afterglow” Josh wrote and played all the music and I wrote a vocal over his original 8-track recording. It’s fun singing over such tripped out layered music. Two basses and two guitars.
The basis of “Walls” was programmed in about 15 minutes the morning of Performance Five when we opened for Blonde Redhead in Pomona. I danced and did abstract vocal effects that night, but when we recorded it I wrote a proper vocal (literally written while the drum machine was going to tape). This song journeys from the past to the future and back.
“Communique” was originally performed at Performance Two at the Knitting Factory in Hollywood. This is one of those recordings so rare in today’s world that took as long to record as it takes to listen to. Josh sang and played piano while I made noise on my modular synthesizer and there were no edits.
“At Your Enemies” and “Surrogate People” were both from the time of Shadows. They are both written by Josh with the exception of my vocals on “Surrogate People”. We were discovering so much about making electronic music back then and albums like Amnesiac, Vespertine and Confield were all coming out at that time which were opening our minds to the infinite possibilities of that realm.
The last song is called “My Life”. It was originally performed at Performance Four. Like “Communique”, “My Life” was recorded in real time. The footsteps at the end are me going back to the control room.
My friendship with Josh is something I’m very blessed to have. To have experienced so much closeness through hearing music together as well as playing music together is one of the main things that has given meaning to my life.
Thank you for listening.
- John Frusciante
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