Drum & Bass

Coco Bryce may be a relatively new name to most in the UK, however he’s been plying his trade for around two decades. Hailing from Breda in the south of the Netherlands, it was back in the ‘90s when he first became enamoured with the sounds of breakbeat hardcore and gabber — the latter, he feels perhaps inevitable for a Dutch kid, despite it being at odds with the skater culture he was also a part of.“The raw energy just grabbed me,” he says. 

‘I make a bunch of different kinds of music’ reads the description on Doctor Jeep’s SoundCloud page, and that pretty much hits the nail on the head. Real name: Andre Lira, the New Yorker works within the bassier end of the club music spectrum, but is hard to pin down to a particular sound.

Everyone’s a junglist these days aren’t they? You’re a junglist. Your dear old dad’s a junglist. Even that nice little old lady next door and her dog claim to be junglists. Everyone’s a junglist, marching into a bleak future to the tune of a hundred foghorns, skanking towards the light at the end of the tunnel to a parade of amens, saying they were there in ’92 when they weren’t even born, and inflating the price of second-hand Reinforced 12”s in the process. Everyone’s a bloodclart junglist.

Patience is a virtue, possess it if you can. It’s a quality that’s seldom, if ever, found in a modern-day drum & bass fan. For proof of this contemporary proverb let us examine the case of Benny L. A man subject to some of the highest levels of dubplate impatience in years, he’s had to reinstall Instagram more times than Andy C’s won Best DJ trophies due to high levels of inbox pester pressure. Link me this. I beg you that. ID? ID? ID? Oi oi oi...

“I can’t go to my other studio ’cause I’ll get shanked,” says Mike, who proves to us that he can sing Afro-swing melodies as well as he raps drill flows, while we talk by Young Urban Arts Foundation’s multimedia bus. His friends giggle awkwardly, two of them wearing rolled-up balaclavas, but he’s not joking. “I appreciate this bus because it’s warm, let me not lie!

In the controlled YUAF space, under the patient guidance of producer and singer Mister Lees, the studio sessions functioned not only as a medium through which the teenagers could benefit from caring, meaningful interactions with our team of trained adult staff, and work towards a shared creative goal — they were also a constructive way they could spend time, away from the hostile norm of London’s increasingly unsafe roads, as youth violence continues to spiral out of control.

Harriet Jaxxon epitomises the dream of the self-made DJ. Born and raised in the small Kentish town of Whitstable, when she was just a child her jungle-loving father’s record collection led her to the sounds of DJ Ron’s ‘African Charm’ and Roni Size’s ‘Sound Advice’. “Those two tracks are the ones that for me stick out as two jungle tracks that I discovered before I knew what jungle was,” she tells DJ Mag.