Release Date: 28 November 2025
Song Count: 10
Duration: 33 minutes, 36 seconds
Rating: 7.2/10
Description:
(Note: Oh hey, 100th post!)
An absolute music producing machine in the scene, Yoël Yaïr, known by his stage name of Coco Bryce, has had an affinity for making music and sharing his crafts practically his entire life, starting his DJing ventures over 30 years ago and still going strong after all of this time. The Dutchman has gone through many different stages of evolving his music, alternating between genres over time until he ended up focusing primarily on drum & bass and jungle music in around 2015, and he has reportedly released 170 vinyls over the course of his music scene presence - an unbelievable feat and a true sign of his dedication to producing music. This newest release, Noches Sephardies, follows along on these firmly formed steps whilst simultaneously putting a fresh twist on them with the choices in sounds and samples utilised, treading on a fine balance between familiarity and sonical experimentation.
The composition of the set of tracks within the record appear at first to be quite minimalistic, limiting itself to only a few sounds at a time and not adding anything more than what is required. What truly makes them worthwhile of being talked about, however, is the fact that influences behind these small pieces of noise and music come from all sorts of traditions and cultures around the world, from the Caucasus and Africa to Southeast Asia and the Balkans, and are blended together with electronic drum & bass beats and chopping almost seamlessly - and this without feeling the need to much else to the mix to glue things together. It's a creative and expertly done sequence of putting these beats together so that they complement each other far more than they clash and topping it with just enough additional samples, including at times vocal samples, all to create some seemingly timeless-sounding tracks.
If the expectation is that Noches Sephardies is a bunch of super slick, modern, poppy and widely appealing drum & bass music that uses the same drum samples that have proven to make a lot of other works in that corner of music work, that presumption could not be further from what one actually gets here. In a way, this feels far more old-school and perhaps even nostalgic of the beginnings of such music, and it's indicative of the mastery of someone who clearly knows the ins and outs of drum & bass and jungle that is at play - only someone with as much experience making such music as Coco Bryce could pull a work like this off well, especially in modern years where the trend has shifted very far away from the sound of the album. A quite decent listen, and would most definitely go much further in the rankings if it only were longer than just cracking half an hour in total runtime.