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John Frusciante is offering a free download of “Walls and Doors,” a song he recorded in 2010 while he was experimenting with transitioning from rock guitar-centric music to electronic sounds. He states in today’s newsletter:

This song, recorded in September 2010, marks the point at which I began combining 60s and early 70s production styles with modern electronic production styles. This song was also the first time I successfully balanced pop music with abstract forms of music. This song showed me that the pop parts of myself and the more adventurous parts of myself could blend without one compromising the scope of the other. After this song I did not pick up the ball and run, but rather I continued to challenge myself, experiment and investigate, more from the abstract angle than the pop angle, until March 2011, at which point I’d figured out the things which made it possible for me to consistently make precisely the music I wanted to make, in which I was not restraining any part of my nature, allowing me to begin the recording of PBX. I might mention that Walls And Doors was also the first time my electronic instruments had begun to convey the visceral energy that one associates with people beating the fuck out of their instruments, in the context of a pop song.

Indeed, “Walls and Doors” sounds like the bridge between 2009’s The Empyrean and last month’s esoteric, experimental Letur-Lefr. For those less familiar with Frusciante’s 18-year, 12-album catalog as solo artist—14 albums if you count his Ataxia project with Josh Klinghoffer—it’s quite a trip inside the musical mind of an artist free from the almost-corporation that is the Red Hot Chili Peppers, with so many rules and limitations. I don’t feel like this track quite reaches that visceral energy Frusciante associates with a great rock song—that instinctive spontaneous cerebral response that is at once tellurian and extraplanetary—but on September 25, we’ll see if these early ambitions are fully realized on PBX Funicular Intaglio Zone.