Interview: Senser
I think it's really important to be here. I'm always really grateful that we seem to be making these choices at these times, because I wouldn't want to be doing anything else with Senser.
Senser have just returned with their latest album, the brilliant and much needed call to arms that is Sonic Dissidence and it sees the band on typically fiery form and sounding as vital as ever over the records eleven songs. Gavin Brown had the pleasure of talking to Senser vocalist Heitham Al-Sayed about Sonic Dissidence and its themes as well as discussing the history of Senser, hip hop and fighting the power in an inspiring and informative interview.
E&D: Your new album Sonic Dissidence has just come out, headed by the incendiary singles, ‘Full Body Rebellion’ and ‘Ryot Pump’. How does it feel to be back with this album and those songs leading it off?
Heitham: It feels really good. I always very grateful that we’re thriving and creative and all this so I’m very excited about it.
E&D: In a time of political unrest and upheaval, do you feel it’s like a perfect time for Senser to come back with this new album in particular?
Heitham: Yeah, I think everything is obviously transient. If you think about like the Troubles in Northern Ireland when we were younger, that just seemed like something that would just go on and on forever and then it stopped, so all these things that seem intransigent problems, these permanent problems, do eventually subside and do pass, but it needs participation from people. It needs action. In my lifetime, I don’t think we’ve seen such chaos. A move towards accepting fascism or accepting a kind of racism. But in the 90s, we were really fighting against the rise of things like the BNP, and then it went through all these different iterations. Now, in the UK, they’ve managed via social media and all this weird manipulation of algorithms and weird rumors and false information to create this groundswell of right wing chaos under the guise of these flags and stuff. Obviously, what’s happening in America is straight up fascism. They’re trying to put troops onto the streets. It’s the playbook of fascism that’s unraveling,certainly in the UK and in the US right now. So I think it’s really important to be here. I’m always really grateful that we seem to be making these choices at these times, because I wouldn’t want to be doing anything else with Senser, apart from speaking directly to these questions.
E&D: Do you see this a sonic call to action for the band and your music?
Heitham: Yeah, absolutely. Whatever you can do, You can be present on the street, you can show strength in numbers. Organising people. On the left side, people need to organise. There’s a huge amount of people that have the same thoughts about a socialist society that has a safety net for for the working classes, for people in need, immigrants, supporting women’s rights and LGBTQ+ rights and all these things, which are just common sense, basically, compassionate structures in society, which have been gradually dismantled. Remember a few years ago, when Jeremy Corbyn was coming up and he went on stage at Glastonbury, and the whole of the crowd, you could see the groundswell of people that were like, yes, this old guy that looks and sounds like a socialist geography teacher is what we want. He’s talking about the issues that affect society and he has simple, old fashioned socialist solutions to those things. The problem is that it’s been so fragmented since the Blair era, because a lot of people just feel completely betrayed. This idea of call to actions to me, to some degree, is just a call to the people, everyone on the left, everybody who shares the same, basic decency. Everyone can see all this stuff and think that all those right wing flag shagging obsessives are in still in the minority. The call to action is definitely, there in the music, for sure.
E&D: You played many benefit events for the likes of the Anti Nazi League with Rage Against The Machine and Billy Bragg back in the 90s. With this emboldenment of far right attitudes, how important is music in general for calling this sort of thing out and do you think there will be more events like the ones you used to do?
Heitham: I mean, the more the merrier. We’ve seen what happened with Kneecap, not that many people knew who Kneecap were, but the fact that they spoke out in a very clear way, they were heard around the world. I think events like that are important, but it’s just one card in the pack of what’s necessary. I think in the 90s, there was still a little layover from things like Rock Against Racism and even Live Aid. People thought that big shows could make changes, and to some degree it’s true. It maintains a kind of awareness. But the number of people that you can have in a show, even like Live Aid, it’s tiny compared with the amount of people you can have at a rally, or the number of people that you can have access to online, and you can make active and inspire to actually do things. So, yes, I think it would be great if there were more events like that, and I think there’s a place for it. Some people are doing that Brian Eno is organising an important event for Palestine, for example, there definitely needs to be more kind of Rick Against Racism type events or Anti Nazi events, for sure.
E&D: Do you feel just as energised today about your music and your message, as you did back in the 90s?
Heitham: Yeah, if I wasn’t, I wouldn’t do it, if I didn’t feel that, I wouldn’t do it. So I think you can tell from the live performances and the records. You can’t really fake it.
E&D: Have you received much negativity about your music and message, especially nowadays with how big social media is?
Heitham: Not really. I think a lot of people are gasping for this, you know, they love it, they need it. Obviously, there’s a certain amount of preaching to the converted, because our fans are on the same wavelength in general, and always have been. We’ve always attracted those sort of people. We used to get some Nazi skinheads showing up to our gigs in the 90s, but they were very quickly ushered out. They were removed from the from the premises by people who felt the same way that we did. I mean, there’s always going to be a couple of online trolls, but that’s nothing. It’s just a droplet in the ocean. For a start, most people don’t want to enter into those conversations with us because deep down, they know that the sort of thing that we’re saying are just universal truths. I don’t want to use the word righteous, because it sounds that we’ve decided morally what’s right and wrong. But I think collectively, people understand where we’re coming from. Even people that don’t agree with us, because they stand on a different side of this fence that they’ve created, they can’t actually deny it with any conviction.
E&D: Going back a bit, what are your memories of making the Stacked Up album, your debut record, and did it feel that you’d arrived with that album?
Heitham: My main memories? We had a lot of those songs because we’d been playing together for a while, so we went in and rehearsed them a lot and got them ready to record, and then we went in for a month in a studio, which was a common thing in those days, to make an album, you’d have to actually go in and spend a lot of time making it in the same place, living together, essentially eating together. We were in a studio that was above the Moles venue in Bath. We just booked it out for a month. We found a restaurant so that we could go and eat some decent food at least once a day. We went to the same restaurant every day for a month. We worked on it for a month in the very classic, traditional way. I remember sharing a little flat with Haggis, who was doing the engineering production, along with Jim Abiss, and watching a lot of late night TV after we after we finished recording.. What I do remember is that it’s very different from how people do things now. I mean, now, everybody’s basically recording on this album, awe did it all remotely, People would make their own demos and share them, and then people would start applying to that. So it took a lot longer, but it also meant that we didn’t have to all get together. In retrospect, I would have happily got together for a month and do it that way again? But that was a lot easier when everybody didn’t have families and secondary projects and jobs all this kind of stuff. Senser is like an art project that we continue to do. It’s a passion, and it has its own audience and it’s a little business concern of its own, but it’s completely independent, and everybody has their own parallel lives.
E&D: It must be cool to still be able to do it after all these years?
Heitham: Oh, yeah, It’s super exciting and really touching actually, that we can sell out rooms and play really cool, exciting shows. That part, we’ll obviously do it as long as we physically can. It’s our mission.
E&D: How you recent live shows gone and how’s the material from the new album gone down?
Heitham: It’s gone really well, considering they maybe know one of the new songs that was released as a single, and they don’t know the other songs. They’re very tolerant of us trying to play them live and they really like them. We’ve had nothing but really good feedback about them, and obviously we have only just started playing them, so at the beginning they’re a little shaky, but heavy audiences are very forgiving of bands, and they’re really willing to give them the benefit of the doubt. I’ve said this before, I’m not saying that that’s what we do, but bands have put out albums that aren’t that great, and then the fans don’t just drop them and move on. They’re like, Well, I’m sure they’ll pick it up again later. People have been super receptive to the new material.
E&D: Have you been told you’ve been a bit of a gateway from rock and metal music into hip hop and electronic music? I’d say that was the case for me when I was younger.
Heitham: Amazing, that’s great. Yeah, absolutely, and to some degree the other way around, a little bit less maybe, People who started off coming to it because they like the riffs and then exploring the rest, yeah, to this day, it’s turning young people on to different types of music, because it was that multi layered, slightly more eclectic aspect of Senser, where there’s electronics, and there’s hip hop, and there’s male and female vocalists. It gets quite heavy, quite thrashy. The scope is very wide. I think the other thing about that is, now it’s parents that are Senser fans now have kids that are old enough to come to the shows and introducing a different generation to music of that type, which there isn’t so much of these days, not like this. So, yeah, absolutely, I’m aware of that turning people on to different music’s aspect.
E&D: Do you love playing on mixed bills, where you can play with a metal band and a rap group or whatever?
Heitham: Yeah, absolutely. We can play on a very wide range of bills, because there’s a kind of psychedelic element in there. We can play very kind of mushroomy, psychedelic festivals, or we can play full on heavy metal festivals. I think we’re a little bit too heavy for straight up hip hop events,there’s too much guitars and stuff in there, but we do play sometimes with those type of bands. I think it’s we’re really lucky in that way. Sometimes we’ll go to a heavy thing, like a Hellfest or Download and in my mind, I’m like, Oh, God, we’re not going to be heavy enough for this crowd, and there’s going to be no one there. Then, every time, it’s just completely swamped with people. We’re really lucky in that way. But I think it’s because we followed our hearts and decided to do this eclectic thing, which was including all this music that we liked, instead of trying to just isolate one aspect, and it’s made it exciting for us.
E&D: Was the Biting Rhymes rap covers EP a cool thing to do, putting your own spin on hip hop classics and would you like to do something like that again?
Heitham: I loved it. I love all those tunes, those classics and it would be great to do more something like that again. I enjoyed doing it. I love the songs. We’ve always done weird hip hop covers in the band. We’ve also done some other covers too, we did a Butthole Surfers track. We’ve done a few things that weren’t hip hop, but yeah, the hip hop ones we’ve been doing since the very beginning. I can think of a few more that I’d like to do. So yeah, we might come back to that one day.
E&D: Was it a challenge to pay homage to someone like Rakim by doing ‘Follow The Leader’ for instance?
Heitham: I didn’t really mess with the lyrics too much. I pretty much just did it as a cover version. I’m not, I’m not going to mess with it. I did that very loyally too, because his flow was just so exciting and so unique to this day, you know you can hear him rapping, and you can change the beats, you can put him on all these different sounds but the way he flows still works. It still sounds really fresh, the way he goes over the bar. There’s so many different aspects to it, the poetry of it, the sheer imagery in the lyrics. He’s rapping with imagery, he’s making you see things when you’re seeing this journey into space! I love that. I love it when hip hop gets far out, like New Kimgdom and Kool Keith and Mike Ladd. Rakim was one of the first people to really do that. I guess maybe Rammellzee a little bit before that. But Rakim the way with the imagery, the way he rolls over the bar, the way he’ll go into the next bar and then build the rhyme with that. He never sounds rushed or breathless. It’s just the most exciting, mysterious ride. I love that track. I love that track.
E&D: I saw Rakim live a few years ago, and he ended with ‘Follow The Leader’, but it was just a cappella. It was just like poetry. It was amazing!
Heitham: Yeah, it’s like, Afro futurist, space poetry. He’s going out, and he’s describing, taking you to the galaxy, like in some movie, he’s just there, like the watcher, it’s like this floating head at the end of the galaxy.
E&D: Are people like Rakim and Chuck D still a big influences on you as a performer?
Heitham: I don’t listen to that music all the time, but of course, it’s just in your DNA. Chuck D, Rakim, Schooly D to some degree, Rammellzee, there’s a ton of them, really. I grew up with it. I got into hip hop when I was 12, when the first cassettes came over from America, before I’d heard Street Sounds, electro and all that, there was some cassettes that showed up. I’ve talked about this a few times in interviews, but this one cassette that was being passed around when I was about 12. On one side, Man Parrish, Jonzun Crew, Africa Bambaataa, all this type of stuff, what we used to call electro and on the other side is all this kind of breaks, stuff like Double Dee and Steinski, Apache, all those early breaks, a collage of crate digging on the whole side. Years later, I kind of deduced that it was probably a record. They were probably recordings from DJ sets at like the Mudd Club or Dancetetia or something. That’s been in my head since 1982 so yeah, of course, I’m still influenced by that music, even if I don’t I’m not listening to it every day, but it’s just there. It’s always there.
E&D: You’ve got shows booked already for next year including the Bearded Theory festival, do you still get the same thrill doing those big festivals like you did at the likes of Reading in the 90s?
Heitham: Yeah, of course. It’s really exciting. I enjoy playing any gigs really. The thing at festivals is, even though we’ve been around for a really long time, there’s always going to be people that don’t know what you’re doing, they don’t know who you are. So that’s always really exciting, and those people get swept up in it. There’s people coming up to us now at festivals going, I’ve been waiting all my life to see your band and so, yeah, it’s always exciting. There’s a natural adrenaline that comes with it. The adrenaline isn’t as crippling as it was at one point. I mean, at one point you go out in front of really big crowds, there’s something about the sheer numbers of people that increases the adrenaline. But as you get older, to some degree, you get used to it, but it never goes away. And I think that’s probably for the best.
E&D: You’re playing Bearded Theory with Skunk Anansie, who you played with all those years ago. How does it feel to still be playing today and having that longevity?
Heitham: I haven’t seen that band for ages. I haven’t seen any of them. I think the last time I saw Skin, I bumped into her on Ibiza and she’s like, what are you doing there? I was like, what are you doing here? That’s got to be at least 10 years ago! It’s exciting. I wish there was more people from that era. I wish we could see New Kingdom and Gunshot. I’d like to see Blade. I wish I could see all these people from back in the day, on these bills.
E&D: What have been some of the most memorable shows that you’ve played over the years, ones that still stick your memory to this day?
Heitham: Obviously there’s the very huge ones like Hellfest, like I mentioned earlier, where you don’t know if it’s going to work, that’s a very beautiful sensation when it does and I feel blessed and it’s real. I also really like the catastrophic ones. They make the best stories, things that just go hideously wrong. There was one festival a few years ago, a heavy metal festival somewhere in the north. Anvil and Saxon were playing and nobody knew that we were on, it was just weird because we’ve been playing these huge shows, and then we got to this one place, and we were on this separate tent miles away, and it was the biggest space, and there was, like, two people in there but we still went for it! I love that, wouldn’t want to do it all the time but it’s really humbling! Back in the day we did some really funny ones. It would be an outdoor festival and we’d get people onstage at the end of the gig and tell the security guards to just let people go, and there was one festival where everyone was onstage and the stage just started sinking into the mud and tilting, like a sinking ship! That’s one of the classics! We ruined it for everyone else!
E&D: Did you play at any free parties back in the day as well?
Heitham: We played free festivals, free events like squatted venues. I guess they were like raves with a stage, we did that kind of stuff. We did a lot of organised versions of that like Club Dog and Megadog. The more organisers and musically curated versions of those events.
Photo by Rebecca Cresta
