Serena Jemmett, better known in the DJ world as sez. and radio sez, is perhaps best described as an unstoppable force. Far more than just a DJ (although that would be impressive enough on its own given her aptitude at mixing), she has delved into activism, events promotion, presenting, creative direction, modelling, styling, photography and videography to name but a few. Her spring-summer season this year has been busy, featuring highlights including solo sets at Ministry of Sound and Manchester’s Freight Island, as well as a takeover of her own at Planet Wax in southeast London. Nonetheless, she somehow found the time to discuss her background in student media, current activities, and hopes for the future.
At the start of June radio sez presents put on the third edition of their Face Off series at Stage & Radio. The event features a fresh Face-to-Face format, building on DJ battle traditions popular within the European techno scene which have evolved across the continent at events put on by the likes of FACE 2 FACE DIGITAL. Partly as a response to the limitations of standard back-to-back sets, this new set-up places two DJs opposite one another on the centre of the dance floor. With little planning and prior communication, the resulting sets are improvised and shaped by ear, allowing DJs to showcase both talent and skill.
Face-to-Face forces adaptation in the moment, and has the potential to revolutionise clubbing for both performers and audience members, collapsing the detachment between booth and dance-floor whilst providing a truly exciting and original experience. The radio sez presents version has been featured on the Instagram page Not The WHP, which aims to combat the commercialisation of dance music events, and sez. has thus received a stamp of recognition proving she’s doing something truly inventive and exciting.
When asked where she found the inspiration for her own spin on the format, sez. said she’d “seen various DJs, especially this bounce and techno DJ called FUMI, and Cloudy too” in similar set-ups via social media. “I just really liked the idea that it was kind of a 360 thing with them in the middle, it was a bit more visually appeasing”, she continued. “I think also for me, I’m very much against watching a DJ. Inherently, I don’t think we should stand like a cult and watch DJs press buttons, it’s actually so boring. You should be in your little huddles, dancing, chatting, sharing ciggies, you should have that community in the dance. You don’t need to look as if it’s a film, it’s not a visual thing. It’s an auditory thing”.
Initially, it may seem that a Face-to-Face format, where attendees are encouraged to immerse themselves in the visual experience of an original set-up, might not fit with these views. However, when sez. discusses her intentions for the Face Off events she puts on, it’s clear that the format functions as a way of adapting to an increasingly noticeable change in club culture. “There’s obviously been a shift where people are now facing the DJ”, she recognises, “so I was thinking if we tried this here, people are looking, but they also have something to look for and to look at. But also, it’s new and fun for DJs too, everyone who’s played Face-to-Face has always said how fun it’s been. It also tests DJs more, because obviously they can’t see their partner’s wavelengths, so they are actually having to like DJ in the sense of using their ears”.
The format also has a lot of history behind it: “when I then started researching it from European techno, I also found that it had pre-existed before that in turntable and vinyl culture. There were actually quite a few videos on YouTube, so I could figure out how they work with a sound tech. With vinyl DJs it’s even cooler, because they can’t really pick a BPM and stick to it, they have to beat match, it is a lot more difficult”.
Looking at where she’d want to take her events promotion beyond Face Off and her other past ventures, sez. mentioned “festival takeovers. I think creating and programming is definitely my shit, I’d love to tell a story through the day and the night, or through a whole festival”. sez. also has a few dream artists to book in mind, including “Sir Spyro, Ruff Sqwad, DJ Target, basically the producers that got me into grime. In Manchester, grime is kind of picking up again, which is really nice. And having been in London, it’s been really nice to properly immerse myself in the old school grime sounds that won’t be getting played out as much in Manchester. Every week in London, there’s multiple grime events you can go to, whereas that isn’t the case in Manchester. I’d like to bring a bit more of that up to the north and really expand it”.
One idea she believes is “never going to happen” is a Valentine’s Day Face-to-Face. “I wanted to do it with DJ couples, to see how the synergy within their relationships transpires in the sets. I did politics and international relations at university, so I’m really interested in relationships and the private sphere; in this culture nowadays, ‘relationship’ is seen as a scary word, but actually, you’ve got a relationship with your fucking postman. I still think a Face-to-Face with DJ couples would be really emotional though, I think you would feel so much joy and love”. Names she dreams of for that concept are electronic power couple Effy and Mall Grab, as well as Neffa-T and Jay Carder. “Another DJ couple that I love are my friends, Burna and Hally, they went back-to-back for radio sez presents at Planet Wax in October”, she says, and would be sure to tap them if a Valentine’s Day Face-to-Face ever did happen.
“A lot of people see the Face-to-Face concept as a clash, as competitive. And yes, you do market it a little bit that way just because it is a versus, but it’s actually way more collaborative than it is competitive. The DJs want to help each other out, because they won’t know who’s playing what, and if one person makes a mistake it looks shit on both of you. So even in a selfish way, they want to make it easy for their partner so it sounds good. But also, I think it’s important to remember as a DJ, you’re here to make the crowd dance and have fun, that is your purpose in the dance, not to get your ego praised. Your job is literally to make people have a good time, to provide the soundtrack for the night. Face-to-Face is very communication-based, but it has to be done through hand signals or eye contact. That’s another reason why I think a Valentine’s couples edition would be good because they would hopefully already have that synergy, they just would know”.
From her comments on the term ‘relationship’, sez. clearly recognises that realtionships can transcend the connection between two people. She herself has relationships that aren’t with another human, exemplified by her long history with Stage & Radio, the Northern Quarter venue which hosted the third edition of Face Off and is currently facing a threat of closure due to building proposals for 126 new flats just five metres away. “In three years, we’re potentially going to be bombarded with noise complaints and then we might face closure from that. Right now, we’re not facing closure, but there’s obviously the knowledge that the threat is going to come”.
“Stage & Radio has such a backing of support from the community because it really does harness culture for everyone. There are queer raves, there are grime raves, there are drum-and-bass raves, there’s house, it really holds refuge to everyone and it’s such a beautiful space in that sense. Without it, the community would be like really at a loss. It’s scary, because I think it could be a Night and Day type of thing”, involving a back-and-forth of noise abatement notices against the venue and subsequent appeals, “but also Night and Day prevailed. Now, it’s just a bit of a waiting game”. This isn’t the first time the venue has faced closure, either, having launched a crowd-funder in association with Music Venue Trust and Save Our Scene‘s #SaveOurVenues campaign last year.
Another formative venue for sez. is Ministry of Sound, the legendary nightclub near Elephant & Castle which offered the DJ her first clubbing experience. “I went there when I was fourteen, for an under-eighteens club night where you have to wear dresses and heels. Recently, I got to open up the main room, which was unbelievable, and really surreal”. Venues still waiting to be ticked off her bucket list are Fabric and PHONOX, both also in London, as well as The Warehouse Project’s concourse stage. A big aim for sez. at the moment is to also play more festivals: “I love being in the field and playing a set, because I think people are more open to the sounds that you bring, it’s a less judgy environment. Everyone’s more present, having gone off-grid for four days”.
One place sez. has already played that stands out is Freight Island. “I played there last year as DSDK with Ash Wozza, and this year I got to support Preditah there. He’s actually my next guest on my radio show, he asked me to go back-to-back. Because Preditah was quite grime heavy, I wasn’t straight after, but I could go down those grime routes. I quite like those kinds of sets because I can play fucking Kylie Minogue’s “Love at First Sight’, the Effy edit, and also play stuff like ‘Functions on the Low’ and it just does make sense. Who else is playing fucking pop princess edits and tripling three grime classics? I have to shout out Ghosts of Garage, I did a future garage set in Hidden’s basement in January which was also hosted by Chunky. I love having him host my sets”.
As part of DSDK, sez. is accustomed to sharing the decks. Nonetheless, “I’ve started getting more picky about who I go back-to-back with. At first I think it’s really important, it makes you better at thinking in the moment. I really enjoy having MCs with me now, because I think it keeps me more present and engaged. I think it’s really good for my ADHD because I’m like actually having to focus on one thing and I can’t stop. I really enjoy going back-to-back with people, but I don’t enjoy it when they hog the deck, or you’re doing a blend and their hands are suddenly on the mixer, which happens mostly with men. With Ash, we’d done a few back-to-backs and we were friends, so we were like, let’s fucking do it. It works like a relationship, because we just know how each other mixes, and what each other’s styles are. We complement each other quite well, I think the reason why we go so well when we go back-to-back is because it stems from friendship”.
As a politics and international relations student at the University of Manchester, sez. herself delved into student media, becoming the deputy editor of The Mancunion’s music section and Fuse FM’s station manager after running a talk show titled Sez Says. She cites the experience as shaping “everything” she does today. “I studied fucking politics, I was not in the music circles, like really at all. I was friends with music people, but then I started my radio show in my second year”.
“It was a talk show based on politics, but I found that the optimum listening time is seven minutes before people start to zone out. So I had the idea to talk for seven minutes, and then play a song. I would do really tedious, weird links. We’d talk about contraception, and I’d say, “okay, this next one’s ‘Plastic Bag’, don’t forget to wrap it up”. Because of that, it ended up getting more music focused. I started moving towards the new music stuff, and did a lot more with The Mancunion”.
“I think one of the first things I did was with The Snuts, and it was when they released ‘Zuckerpunch’ and their album Burn The Empire, and I was kind of the perfect person to speak to them about it because I had all of this political background, I knew the topics of the songs inside out. My conversation with them in the interview was very productive, because we could get really into the nitty gritty, it wasn’t just surface level questions like “are you excited for this gig?”. I think because of all my student media stuff, I then got this part-time job which was how I started promoting. From that, I met this girl called Daisy, who said I should learn to DJ, and then I moved in with a bunch of DJs who also had also been on Fuse FM. They said I couldn’t live with them unless I started DJing. So, without student media, I would 100% not be anywhere near where I am now”.
sez. hasn’t left her interviewing skills behind, either, continuing to put them to use across various content platforms: “I think interviewing is my favourite thing, because I really love getting to know people’s brains, and why they work like that. I also always want to make someone look good in an interview, so if I want to interview you, it’s because I think you’ve got something cool that I want to show off. But from a selfish side, I want to know more, I want to know why you’ve named the songs in a certain way. All artists think about the finer details, even fonts, and nobody really considers actually how much thought and work goes into a project as a whole”.
One example of her recent interview work was with Locked On Records at The Streets‘ recent homecoming show at O2 Academy Birmingham, which provided another full circle moment. “My first ever DJ set was at Aatma”, she says, “and it was an unofficial afterparty for The Streets. It was a collaboration between me and Master Peace, and his club night called HMMP Club. It was after he supported The Streets, so if he hadn’t have been supporting then I wouldn’t have had that DJ set. So it was pretty cool getting the label that launched Mike Skinner to ask me to do interviews later down the line”.
When asked if there’s any of the multitude of roles she’s taken on that she’d want to expand in future, sez. affirmed “I want to be doing more creative direction, but because I’m quite picky and particular, I don’t do it as much because it requires more effort and time. Also because I’m so ADHD, I just know I’d book a studio and then do it all the day before and be really disappointed in myself, so there’s physical and mental barriers with that. I would really like to do a zine or a magazine, and get into producing physical media. I’d also really like to have some merch, I actually have some lighters, I just haven’t sold them”. Make sure to look out for sez. branded lighters taking over the streets of Manchester and London sometime in the near future.
Merchandise would perhaps be proof of success, but sez. has already experienced that validation in a different form. On the same day as the third edition of Face Off, sez. ascended the stairs at Stage & Radio to perform a dubstep set for the live-streamed CROP Radio, within which she revealed her dubplate. In electronic music, and particularly sound system culture, a dubplate is an unreleased, personalised track in which an MC will incorporate the DJ’s name. sez.’s dubplate originates from “this MC who jumped on my set at Planet Wax called ryan, who messaged me like the next day saying he had something for me. It’s also the first dubplate he’s ever sent out. It’s really fun to play in grime and dubstep sets, but obviously I couldn’t really do it when performing with MCs. But someone literally made fucking bars about me, that’s crazy”.
If her current progression is anything to go by, this won’t be the last dubplate sez. receives. She’s a woman of many talents, and a master of all, leaving it impossible to not wonder whether she has more hours in the day than the average human. Having already achieved so much and made her mark on the music scene of Manchester and beyond, sez. is destined for great things. She can be found at an upcoming MODE RADIO LONDON residency, her Ones to Watch show on Manchester’s Steam Radio, and occasionally her Booth Bitch series where she interviews guest DJs while they mix.
