The music is hypnotic, coupling the musical subgenre’s skittering rhythms with a variety of Middle Eastern sounds.
Based in the Netherlands, Bryce has had a remarkable run since 2019’s breakthrough Night on Earth, releasing three albums in 2023, Point of No Return, Phoenix, and Computer Love; another in 2024, City Pop; and Noches Sephardies at the end of 2025; along with numerous singles.
His talent for imbuing even the most minimal tracks with compelling granular details prevents them from sounding like exercises in nostalgia.
Bodies familiar with the music of jungle’s mid-1990s heyday should feel at home in this work, easily finding a comfortable groove. But their minds are a different matter.
From track to track, album to album, Bryce changes the interior décor just enough to prevent listeners from responding to his music reflexively. The keyboard arpeggios that open Night on Earth’s penultimate track “Breach the Peace”; the fragmented funk details of “Euphony” from Point of No Return; the unctuous synth tones underlying City Pop’s “I M 4 U”: all suggest a bottomless bag of tricks.
With Noches Sephardies, however, Bryce has taken innovation to a different level. Instead of confining novelty to the margins, as was mostly the case on his previous records, he places it front and centre. That’s because he incorporates it into the beats themselves.
Tracks like “Hazina” and “Azimio” feature traditional drum sounds which, even though they are repurposed to produce classic jungle rhythms, still retain an aura of the pre-modern Orient. Together with snippets of vocals that also evoke that world, they turn Noches Sephardies into a worldbeat record without losing touch with the core of Bryce’s musical identity.
In a sense, Noches Sephardies is a celebration of cultural miscegenation.
When Bryce began his Tov Kru project, he explained that it represented an attempt to connect with his Jewish roots. Yoël Bego, in real life, was stunned to see his great-grandparents on a transport list to Auschwitz. Reflecting on the Antisemitism he had personally experienced in the Netherlands, he decided to honour his heritage musically.
Predictably, in the hopelessly polarised political landscape of today, this move inspired a backlash from people who interpreted it as a tacit endorsement of Israel’s conduct in Gaza and its historical mistreatment of Palestinians.
As a consequence, Bryce made a video statement clarifying his views, making it clear that he firmly supports a two-state solution and is revolted by the imperialist ambitions of the current Israeli regime.
Instead of retreating into his musical comfort zone after that unfortunate experience, Bryce decided to make a jungle record that nods to the rich multicultural aesthetic of Sephardic Jews.
This isn’t the cultural appropriation of conservative Israelis who love great falafel but despise the people who make it best, but a reminder that Semitic heritage does not map neatly onto religious or political divisions.
Maybe that’s why, the more I listened to Noches Sephardies, I was reminded of the mysterious collective SAULT, which has released a series of superb albums incorporating traditional African rhythms and soul vocals into songs that are structurally grounded in EDM.
Like those SAULT records, Noches Sephardies hearkens back to the stunning hybrid music of the 1990s, when R&B, hip-hop, worldbeat, and sometimes even rock made it possible for the dance tracks played at raves to double as headphone fare.
Perhaps the most intriguing song on Noches Sephardies is “I Know This Place,” barely over a minute long, in which a woman’s voice calmly repeats that phrase as a crackling groundswell of noise builds in the background. It communicates a sense of the uncanny, the recognition that a location is familiar even though it feels strange.
Are we meant to take “place” as a reference to a literal locale or a figurative one that stands in for a place in musical culture?
As a musical subgenre like jungle ages, it’s common for devotees to pare it down to an essence. Although this can lead to some remarkable work – see some of the great minimal dub records made in Germany – the impulse to capture an essence can turn into an invitation to police boundaries.
What makes Noches Sephardies special is that it vigorously repudiates this mentality, yet manages to remind us of jungle’s power despite “diluting” it with extrinsic reference points.
Placed in the context of Coco Bryce’s musical development since 2019, his new album suggests that he is more keen on reviving the recombinant spirit of the mid-1990s, when the prospect of rule-breaking hybrids was thrilling, than in a sorting operation designed to purify jungle.
From this perspective, “I Know This Place” could be construed as a statement about returning to jungle now, when the excitement of the post-Cold War Era feels very far away indeed. While the 1990s didn’t feel like a Golden Age for the people who were living through them, it’s hard not to compare the period favourably with what came after.
By reminding us that jungle wasn’t a walled-off musical subgenre for purists, but a fertile ground for musical experimentation, Coco Bryce’s Noches Sephardies makes a powerful case for miscegenation as both a cultural and political principle.
Photograph courtesy of Bas Bogers. Published under a Creative Commons license.
