LEAPING TIGER
Leaping Tiger, born Jacob Park, uses this artist title as a means to describe a project of being a music producer from New Zealand who describes himself as “just a guy.” However, there’s no doubt that he is more than just an ordinary person. In addition to being a producer, Jacob is a songwriter and multi-instrumentalist who has now started to dabble in singing. Much like his position in the music industry, his music is also a wonderful nexus of a variety of genres, including electronic, hip hop, alternative, and RnB.
Jacob created the project Leaping Tiger to be a means of experimentation without limiting his creative ability based on what is and isn’t acceptable. The result of that commitment to a rather bold approach has allowed him to create unique tracks that feel both original and familiar to a slight degree, allowing the listeners to feel some level of comfort with the genres that they’ve been listening to for years.
His ability to create experiments that actually work comes from being able to play a wide array of musical instruments. He was only three years old when he began playing the piano, but he eventually expanded to different instruments over the years and found his favorite, the bass guitar, at the age of twelve. Learning about music and how to create melodies and rhythm at that young age enabled him to release his very first track when he was barely into his teenage years (fourteen years). That was when Leaping Tiger came into existence.
Since then, Jacob has continued to create and release new music. His consistent effort to create new tunes helped grow his fanbase on different platforms. On Spotify alone, he has garnered over 4.7k monthly listeners at the time this article was published. While that number may not be indicative of how unique and original his work really is, it’s good to see that this work is getting the recognition it deserves—even if it has been slow and gradual so far. In fact, one song has over 140k plays, and some of them have crossed 20k plays overall.
Two of these songs belong to his latest album, Soulsleep, which was the debut album for his vocal work. However, he still brought his experimentation-focused style to the vocal arrangements in his songs as well. A good comparison is between the songs Gooey and Anti. In the former, he sings at a low octave, allowing him to sing the melodies. On the other hand, in Anti, he uses samples of his vocals, turns up the frequencies, and uses them as rhythmic elements in the song.
Leaping Tiger, the brainchild of a New Zealander of Zambian and Italian descent, has given listeners in different parts of the world a breath of fresh air with some truly unique compositions and a consistent commitment to experimentation. It’s easy for experiments to go wrong, but Jacob makes sure to use the right elements of various genres to create a marriage of sounds that would otherwise not have been thought of as being together.
