Concentric Circles by Jonny Fallout

The New Jonny Fallout record is here and ready to be loved! Endless dance-ability and fun abound! No second of this record feels non-essential, it's wall-to-wall goodness by a producer who time and again proves he can deliver some of the most fully-realized and authentically dope tunes in the game.

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INTERVIEW
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George Ernst (Triplicate Records): Did you go into this record trying to make a career-defining series of absolute bangers? Because that's what you've ended up doing.

Jonathan Follett (Jonny Fallout): I'm glad the songs for "Concentric Circles" came together! It's never clear to me when I'm writing a track, where exactly it will go, or if it's going to work. With this album in particular, there were some songs that felt like they almost wrote themselves, and others that evolved over many iterations. A few songs I revised over the course of a year or so.

GE: Tell us a little about the significance of the album's title?

JF: "Concentric Circles" is based on the concept that we all contain inside ourselves the people that we were before. If you examine a tree stump you can see the rings, the different layers of that tree as it grew over time. Similarly, a person contains the child, the teenager, the young adult, that they were previously. As we grow, we add our experiences in each layer, but we're still those people we were in the past. I know that, at least in part, I'm still the creative kid that I was in the '80s. The album was my way of examining this idea and reflecting on all those different aspects of myself that I contain, especially the excitement and joy that I've always had for creating music as a child and a young person.

GE: What's your favourite animal and how many of it would it take to beat you in a fight?

JF: I particularly like the fox. We have at least one fox who lives in the woods near my home. Every now and then I see him trotting across the lawn in the snow, in the very early morning.
I like the literary representations of the fox, too: the idea that the fox is a clever animal surviving by his wits. It would probably only take one fox to beat me in a fight, I imagine.

GE: What came first? The 'Nothing Short of a Miracle' snippet or what's built around it? Wait, I guess I kind of answered my own question there.... Ok how about... What's the sample from?

JF: The sample is from a 1958 RCA Victor promotional film called "Living Stereo", which is now in the public domain. This was the era when audio recordings went from mono to stereo sound. The snippet comes from the beginning of the film, when an RCA spokesperson talks about their new innovative technology, Living Stereo, for high fidelity audio.

GE: Tell us something cool you've dreamt about?

JF: I think I've had my fair share of post-apocalyptic and dystopian dreams. At least for me, these always involve hiding out in a building with a group of people defending themselves against weird and dreadful monsters.
Of course, in the dreams, it's never the monsters that are the focus, but rather the complete chaos of trying to organize a group of people to work together. Don't know what that means, exactly, but I suspect that the control freak, detail obsessed, perfectionist side of me is grappling with something.

GE: What's next for Jonny Fallout? Do you plan these projects out well in advance or do they just sort of come together?

JF: What's nice about finishing an album, at least for me, is that during the next few months, I feel free to explore lots of musical ideas, without necessarily aiming for a finished track. Sometimes I'll have 10 or 20 different short elements that I know eventually can become songs, whether that's drum beats, or bass lines, or chord progressions or just interesting audio elements and samples. So, I do have a plan for the next project, but it's extremely malleable. I do a lot of improvisation when I'm writing music, and see where things go.

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REVIEW
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The new Jonny Fallout LP 'Concentric Circles' reintroduces his lush and vibrant dance sound to the scene, and we're all just very happy about that right now.

Retaining the impeccable and relentless dance-ability of Last summer's 'Unknown Unknowns', the new record sounds energized and complex, dripping with delicious electronica juice. The purpose hasn't changed, the uncanny marrying of vibes-most-chill and need to get up and flail one's limbs remains, the formula, as it were, perfected and refined.
This formula is embodied proudly on the magnificent opener 'There's Hope for us Yet', and what a good pick for an opener it is: bold and in motion right out the gate, no messing around. A badass start to a badass record.

The title track, 'Concentric Circles' feels like it would play during a motorcycle chase in a PS2 game. High-octane head-bobbing and a mental laser-show often accompany the playing of this song; it's inevitable. It feels as though you've gone back in time to when dance music didn't largely suck.
We're finally treated to the album version of 'Ice Cream Sandwich', and it sounds fresh as ever. Colourful and psychedelic mystery wooshes swirl over crisp and purposeful beats, the results are sweet like candy. The following 'Flow' feels like a part two almost. Maybe this is the flow of that hot melting sandwich sliding down your leg. Maybe not. Probably not, because this is an absolute banger. It feels as though all the sweetness and crunch of 'Sandwich' just exploded in righteous neon bliss. Electric guitars soar through the jubilant night like weird angels at a birthday cake airshow, that is to say... it's good.

'I'll See You When the Rains Come' opens with grand swells of synthetic strings. It's sci-fi time! When things get going, it's a steadier affair than the Ice Cream Flow suite and the energetic title track. This time it's freer and easier. The percussion is light and techno-inspired. The track alternates between a holistic lushness and insect-electronica sparseness. It's an intriguing dichotomy that gives character to the overall listening experience of the LP.

What you're going to hear about now is 'Nothing Short of a Miracle'. Literally that's what its called. It's good. Old School as hell, complete with the disembodied voices of dancers in the throws of rhythmic transcendence. It's infectious and pretty, like a dapper bug. 'Point of Origin' on the other hand is a detour. The prettiness is retained of course but the mission has been switched up some. This one involves racing again, a-la the title track. A supreme bounce to the twitchy, ever-morphing beat is attained with the pairing of delicate key-work and hollow bells. It's lovely. One of the best on the record. This is going to end up on your playlist.

Penultimately, we get our faithful serving of funk, in the form of the airy and mystical 'Impulse', complete with ambiguous musings over things that come to us in dreams. I'd be perfectly happy to have this fun little tune soundtrack my dream.

We close with 'Fade from You'. Good title for a final song but wait, there's more! The music itself slaps! It's a slick and subtle banger than builds and builds. Ducking through the inky back streets at 2AM, approaching the centre of town tentatively, where the action (and presumably the beat) resides. Woozy warbling melodic patterns duck and weave through labyrinthine bends of fun beats and shimmering street light synths. A cool and collected closer for an album of colossal character. No second of this record feels non-essential, it's wall-to-wall goodness by a producer who time and again proves he can deliver some of the most fully-realised and authentically dope tunes in the game.

Jonny Fallout is an electronic artist / producer of synthwave, retrowave and synthpop with cyberpunk flavor. When he's not abusing the upper limits of his machine's RAM, he's obsessively sampling cool noises, constructing new sounds, or remixing tracks.

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