American producer Jake Back has been in my inbox a couple of times this month, with deep electronic music that ploughs into progressive territory. Lemme Tell You stood out based on the combination of driving electronics combined with joyous samples.
Splitting his time between Los Angeles and New York City, Jake Back began creating music from a young age. Beginning to develop his musical understanding through a combination of DJing and piano playing, Back went on to start crafting his own compositions whilst studying Physics at the University of Rochester.
Starting with a thundering bass line and clanking percussion, Lemme Tell You jumps in at the deep end, a dark cacophony that surrounds you. The song gradually builds towards a sample drop, and as a disco-soul vocal arrives it strips away the percussion, creating space for a new scattershot drum pattern. When Lemme Tell You’s bass returns, it is with a newfound warmth. The combination creates a sense of humanity, contrasting to the dark psychedelic aesthetic established in the song’s introduction… The result is less disco, than the idea of disco, utterly consumed by and lost within tech house.
The interplay established between electronics and the sample on Lemme Tell You has a brightness to it, intellectual and yet vibrant and soulful. It reminds me of the Jamie xx’s ability to find something transcendental in a similar interplay on his post-pandemic anthem, Let’s Do It Again, and similarly Fred again.. on Marea (We’ve Lost Dancing). In the darkness, these songs all point to the value of human connection, and the reason we find ourselves in these dark rooms together in the first place. Every so often we have to lose ourselves in the sound in order to find each other.