Exactly 20 years ago in 2022, Sena Dagadu wandered into a hip-hop club in Buda and, at the urging of a friend, grabbed the free microphone. This proved to be a significant moment in the history of Hungarian popular music, as since then, the Ghanaian-Hungarian singer has still been holding onto the microphone and become an inescapable figure in Hungarian pop culture.
Sena’s debut album, ‘First One’, released in 2003, became an emblematic musical piece of the first half of the 2000s and soon made the singer nationally well-known. Although since then Sena has made 3 other solo albums (2012 Lots Of Trees, 2017 Feathers, 2019 Wings), she mostly made her name as a team player. After performing with bands like Kamu and Barabás Lőrinc Eklektric, she has been working as the lead singer of Irie Maffia for the past two decades. Beyond several counties in Hungary, they toured over 15 other countries and cities from New York to Paris, from London to Accra.
In addition to all this, Sena has also been able to build an international career; she has been through dozens of European tours with several collaborators, such as the French label Irie Ites, or DJ Vadim, having many of her collaborations being released all over the world. Perhaps, the most popular collaboration of hers is the one with Belgian drum and bass DJ Murdock, that has become the most listened Hungarian-related song on Spotify. Sena is a true musical chameleon, fitting into any environment without any difficulty, be it reggae or rock, disco or hip-hop, and she has no problem singing gospel at a Papal mass or duetting with Gábor Presser. Sena, despite all of her successful musical experiences, is not the showing-off type, and always tries to keep her music in tune with her own inner unity while conveying the messages that are crucial to her.
Although she can easily wrap her audience around her finger with light-hearted hits, the real challenge for her is to perform deeper, more meditative, attention-demanding pieces. Sena Dub presents the meditative, spiritual face of the singer. Jamaican dub, jazz flute and Sena’s smoky voice create a truly unique atmosphere. The music does not hurry anywhere, it is once varied but repetitive; it shows that sometimes, it is worth slowing down to look around in this endlessly accelerated world. It attempts to break away from the pattern of three-minute songs and release music, which nowadays we tend to keep locked in a golden cage. This is demonstrated in the trio’s 11 part video series, Ghana Live Sessions, recorded on the streets of Ghana.
