By JOSIAH J. MADIGAN

CONTRIBUTING WRITER

Question: Name the six guitarists who have played with the Red Hot Chili Peppers. Answer: Hillel Slovak, John Frusciante, Arik Marshall, Jesse Tobias, Dave Navarro, and John Frusciante. Ok, I'm cheating, but it's still a fact that Frusciante has been the Chili Peppers' guitarist on two separate occasions; following founding member Slovak's death from 1988 to 1992, and once again from 1998 up to the present. Oft considered the finest of the Peppers' guitar players (or at least the best suited to the band's style), Frusciante brought an oblique, jazzy angle to funk in the same way Andy Summers reinterpreted reggae for The Police.

Frusciante's solo explorations are in no way reminiscent of Summer's own new age prog-fusion instrumentals, however, and a better reference point might be Blur's Graham Coxon. The quintessential Britpop guitarist surprised a lot of people with his lovely and overlooked (if somewhat slight) The Sky Is Too High in 1998. Similarly, Frusciante's brand new album, To Record Only Water for Ten Days, will confound anyone expecting a funk workout reminiscent of his day job. Like Coxon, Frusciante prefers to wind down on his own time, and in this case the results are 15 short, pretty and mostly laid-back pop songs.

To Record is not Frusciante's first solo work. 1995's Niandra Lades and Usually Just a T-Shirt and 1997's Smile From the Streets You Hold were of a mold similar to his current album, but were plagued by inconsistent writing, and a singing and playing style that could be described as unhinged. The two releases seemed to be confirmation both of his enormous talent and reported descent into severe heroin addiction.

Now reportedly clean, Frusciante has left his old problems off his new record. Smiling in his liner notes, he plays everything himself, including the role of producer. Backed only by his guitars, drum machines, and occasional bleeps, keyboards, strings and marimbas, each track is nevertheless a rich melange of melodic and timbral ideas. There will inevitably be those put off by the simple boom-chick of the drum machine and the absence of bass lines, and it would be a nice contrast to hear these songs performed by a sympathetic backing band, but the overall intimate ambiance is key to the project's feel. While his voice is often distorted, the sound of the instruments is clear, and guitars ring and chime nicely.