SEN AND SENSIBILITY The onetime Bronx Dog has a predilection for the bygone sounds of New York City.

Obsessiveness can be a useful trait for artists. A fixation with dots didn’t hurt Seurat’s career, for instance, nor did a temporary mania for blue inflict much damage on Picasso’s rep. But a single-minded passion can have its downside as well—especially if it’s not entirely legal. Just ask Richard Sen, who’s one half of the production team Padded Cell. As a young man in London, Sen, now 40, was an avowed graffiti artist, covering the Tube’s Wembley line with his chosen tag of coma. But the bobbies, it seems, were having none of it, and Sen was busted for his art, not once but twice, in 1986 and 1988.

“It seemed like they really wanted to make me an example,” says Sen, who’s spinning with Citizen Kane and Metro Area’s Darshan Jesrani at their Adult Section party on Tuesday 9. “The first time got me six weeks in a detention center. It was like the army, where they make you do all this physical work and are really heavy into discipline, but I wasn’t really banged up in a cell. But the second time I got a six-month sentence, and that time I was banged up.”

A bit of jail time can give one a new perspective, and Sen turned his attention to the acid-house explosion that was then hitting the U.K. “Going to clubs and taking ecstasy quickly replaced graffiti,” he recalls. Nowadays, he and partner Neil Higgins make what Sen half-jokingly calls “devil’s disco,” a darkly funky, slow-creep music that’s eerily reminiscent of the art-disco that came out of downtown Gotham in the early ’80s. The pair has released a series of widely deejayed singles on the DC Recordings label, and a full album, Night Must Fall, came out earlier this year. But as his love for graffiti suggests, it was another NYC-associated, Reagan-era sound that first caught Sen’s attention.

“I first visited New York in ’85,” he recalls. “I went to the Fresh Festival with Run DMC, Whodini, LL Cool J and all the others, and I really fell in love with the kind of rap that was really exploding back then. And Kiss FM, of course.… The New York of 1985 blew me away, it had such a buzz about it.”

Though he began deejaying in 1989, it wasn’t till 1997 that Sen’s recording career kicked off, when he paired with Paul Eve (a onetime member of Wiseguys) in the breakbeat-oriented Bronx Dogs. “I was finding that I was more interested in the more disco end of breaks, and with the kind of music that the Idjut Boys were doing—just kind of slightly odd stuff,” Sen says. “I was kind of heading toward what I’d be doing with Padded Cell.” Eve left for Australia in 2002, Sen finished one last song as Bronx Dogs—a cover of the Bush Tetras’ 1981 Mudd Club classic “Can’t Be Funky,” tellingly—and in 2005, Padded Cell was born.

“Everything on 99 Records, like Liquid Liquid and ESG, is a huge influence,” Sen says. “But Bill Laswell’s group from back then, Material, is also huge. Of any of the music from that era, Material’s sound is the closest to what we try to do. Material has that funky bass, those .synths—it’s just a great sound.”

But Sen’s still got a bit of the B-boy in him. “I’ve played with Richard before,” Citizen Kane says, “and he played some really dark stuff, along with rare disco and house. But he also played some really great B-boy surprises, like that Wide Boy Awake track ‘Slang Teacher.’ It was interesting to see a U.K. DJ bring some old-school New York flavor to New Yorkers.”

Real B-boys tend to be a bit restless, however, and Sen is no different. “It really seems like there’s a lot of attention being paid lately to the kind of music Padded Cell has been doing,” he says. “But actually, I’m starting to get a little…well, not bored, exactly, but looking for something else. I think the next Padded Cell tracks might sound like something else entirely.”

Richard Sen plays at Adult Section Tue 9.