Don't Be Fooled by the Fake John Frusciante Album That's Circulating

The RHCP guitarist appears to have nothing to do with 'Instrumaniacal'

BY Alex HudsonPublished Apr 10, 2020

Red Hot Chili Peppers guitarist John Frusciante recently put out a new EP with his electronic project Trickfinger, with promises that a couple more releases are close behind. While that music comes from the real Frusciante, there's another release going around that most certainly does not.

The fake album is called Instrumaniacal. According to fans on Reddit, the album began circulating about a week ago after an imposter took over Frusciante's former SoundCloud username ("jfdirectlyfromjf"). Not only that, the imposter apparently got the album released through official distribution channels, including Spotify.

Thankfully, most of the fake accounts have quickly been scrubbed from the internet; as of press time, the user name "jfdirectlyfromj" is no longer active on SoundCloud or Bandcamp. The album still has its own Spotify page, but the music is no longer playable.

The original source of Instrumaniacal appears to be a SoundCloud account called John Frusciante - Tribute, which is found at the URL www.soundcloud.com/notfrusciante. That fan account uploaded the nine short guitar instrumentals two months ago, which the imposter evidently stole and repurposed as a fake Frusciante album. There's no denying that they sound quite a bit like '90s-era Frusciante. Hear it below.

All in all, this is arguably the biggest incident of mislabelled RHCP music since 2014's (genuinely spot-on) fake single "Abracadabralifornia."

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