The Latin Jazz Sample on Jasiah's 'Break Shit'

“For ‘Break Shit,’ my mission was to find high-energy samples with an almost cartoonish quality for Jasiah. Something that feels like a high-speed chase,” tells LA-based producer Tobias Wincorn. He previously worked with artists such as Panic! At The Disco, Lizzo, Phantogram, and GoldLink, and now co-produced “Break Shit” together with Jasiah. “Jasiah is a killer producer who's great with drums. That means I focus on finding, chopping, and looping the sample so its tee'd up for him to quickly throw drums on and start writing. I flip a dozen things that fail to get down to one I think could work.”

That digging spree brought him across the pond: to The Republic, an Afro-Caribbean Latin jazz band out of London, UK. The fast-paced rhythm and brass section on “My Spies” combined with the off-kilter opera delivery of lead singer Sarah Jane Morris, was exactly the type of oddity Tobias was after. “It was a no-brainer for Jasiah. Immediate excitement. The intro would have been strong on its own, but the horn break in the middle gave us a dynamic lift. Like the Inuit, I try to use every part of the kill.”

And as if that hunt wasn’t enough, Jasiah added killer drums to the beat and laid down demolishing vocals. In typical punk fashion, he and Tobias broke down the Latin Jazz and reconstructed it into something new. “From vintage kitsch to cutting-edge rap. That's the magic of sampling to me: a recording can be totally flipped on its head from its original context,” adds Tobias.

The band they sampled, The Republic, had a short-lived life. Despite a magazine cover story for NME and a documentary for the UK's biggest independent television franchise, they didn’t get much radio play as the band was considered to be too political. They only released a 12” in 1983 and a 7” a year later, after which they called it a quit.

On the bright side: both of their releases are available for sampling. That was all Tobias & Jasiah needed to break sh*t down from there. Tobias: “I love sampling so much on a creative level, but everyone hates the hostage negotiation when you have to clear samples of unknown origin. Tracklib is now the first place I go when crate-digging for any project. The pre-determined and reasonable clearance rates are hugely appealing. Major love—Tracklib is doing the lord's work.”