UK-based new genre-hopping guitar trio SEN3 have emerged from London’s melting pot. The band create a compelling wide-screen soundworld that’s rich in melody and emotive harmonies, contemporary beat-culture and heavy riffs.
The SEN3 adventure started in 2012, when guitarist Max, drummer Saleem, and bass player Dan met at a live music night in Shoreditch and felt almost instant chemistry. They quickly started a jam band who navigated between Hip-Hop, Jazz Fusion, Funk and 70’s rock, organically developing their sound solely through playing together.
What are some of your earliest memories of music?
Being 8 years old having guitar lessons at school and hating it ha!
Listening to Nat King Cole in the car with my mum
Take us through your songwriting process. Are there any particular steps you take when putting music together?
We meet up improvise either freely or around some kind of template. Most of the material is put together and tested live on gigs. We don’t really come to the table with finished songs we each bring a different element and mesh it together to create a unified sound. We find the best stuff happens when we are playing freely and ultimately having fun. This tends to happen when we take a risk and try out some new unrehearsed ideas in front of an audience. We used to have a few residencies around London that we’d use as writing sessions eventually fully finished tunes came out from these performances. For us we come up with the best stuff this way – you can always tell if something is working in a live show more than in a rehearsal room. Sometimes things don’t work as well as we thought and then we go back to the drawing board. With enough trial and error we ended up piecing together the songs in a way we think works the best for an audience.
Studio work and music creation or performing and interacting with a live audience, which do you prefer?
We love making new music and getting in the studio but we are definitely a live band at heart – we love playing live and taking an audience with us on a journey. We always dig in more live. There’s an energy you get on a gig that you don’t get in the studio.
What is the most memorable response you have had to your music?
Hard to pin that down to one thing. We are genuinely blown away that people come out to these shows and show us support. We started this band to have some fun and play out some ideas without any real preconceived plan. It means a lot to us that people keep coming back for more !. We recently played a sold-out show at Pizza express soho it just shows how far the band has come since we started this to have a laugh playing some ideas in a pub. We are really proud of this.
If you could put together a radio show, what kind of music would you play?
A mixture Psychedelic 70’s jazz-rock, Indie and minimalist electronic music
Name five artists and their albums who would appear on your radio show
Four Tet – There is love in you
Pink Floyd – The Dark Side of the Moon
Mahavishnu Orchestra – Inner Mountain flame
Madvillain – Madvillainy
Joy Division – Unknown pleasures
What would you like to achieve with your music? What does success look like to you?
We want to travel the world with our music and meet new people in places. We’d love to play in Japan!
One last thought to leave your fans with?
We are always working on new material and taking our sound to new unknown territories – album III is coming soon!
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