As Mouse On Mars prepared to welcome Lee “Scratch” Perry to their Berlin studio in December 2019, a lot of things fell into place for the opportunity.
“We were told, ‘Lee can only do three hours a day,'” says Jan St. Werner of the duo.
With many years of electronic activity, St. Werner and Andi Toma were ready to adhere to these briefs. Perry, who was 83 at the time, was not. “[The first day] “He worked from 10 a.m. until 2 or 3 a.m., and he was very happy with that. Then he said, ‘When can we start tomorrow?’ And we said, ‘Any time?'” St. Werner says. And he said he’d pick me up at 10 a.m., which he always did…The atmosphere after that was like, “What have you done to Lee?” He’s very happy.” But we ended up doing the exact opposite of what we were supposed to do. ”
Mouse on Mars ended up spending four long, happy days in the studio with the dub icon, who lived up to his reputation as an extraordinary musical genius. “I thought he would live another 10 or 20 years, because he was very energetic, very focused and didn’t seem like he was getting old,” St. Werner says. But on August 29, 2021, as it is for all of us, Perry passed away in his native Jamaica at the age of 85.
The members of Mouse on Mars, who have released 12 studio albums since 1994, had a large amount of unfinished Perry music on hand, and they wanted to work with Perry again to complete it, but they didn’t know what to do. “I didn’t know if I wanted to end without him,” St. Werner says. “When Lee passed away, we thought, ‘We’re so happy to have met him and shared this wonderful time with him.’ It was already a huge gift, so we were like, ‘Maybe this is it.’
However, things didn’t quite work out that way, and the duo ultimately completed and released the music seven years after it was recorded as Spatial, No Problems. Mouse On Mars and Lee “Scratch” Perry’s eight-song collaboration album was released last week on Domino Records.
The person most powerful in convincing them to make it happen was Mouse on Mars’ friend and frequent collaborator Louis Tude Socay, who had been nagging them for years about ending the project. “Louis was like, ‘Guys, you can’t sit on this material,'” St. Verner recalls. “He listened to some sketches and kept bugging us, like, ‘We’ve got to keep each other on our toes.’
Although the duo was understandably reluctant to complete the work without input from Perry, Choude Sokei emphasized that they had a duty and responsibility to Lee, his fans, and music history as a whole. “He said, ‘It’s not just about you and people who think they have a right to this.’ [music] “Or any idea of what this session was supposed to be,” St. Werner said, adding, “This has to happen because it’s valuable.”
He was right. As explained in the liner notes to Chude-Sokei’s album, after Perry’s death, “a flood of recordings emerged claiming to be the Jamaican icon’s ‘final’ or ‘last’ project. These included an incredibly wide range of genres, including trip-hop, dub, ambient, rock, and reggae. This range represented Perry’s thirst for new sounds and ideas. However, his last official album project took him to Berlin, Germany, where he landed “Doorstopper” by electronic pioneers Mouths on Mars. What he was looking for was something that was not yet clear. It just wasn’t supposed to be reggae. ”
Therefore, there is no problem spatially. It is the final transmission of a career that began in Jamaica in the 1960s, with Lee first releasing music as The Upsetters and then under his own name, pioneering the sampling and creation practices of the dub genre (an innovation that influenced the sound and trajectory of electronic music), while working with and helping to expand the sound of artists such as Bob Marley and King Tubby over the years. Mouse on Mars came to see it and the time he spent with him represented a special chapter in Lee’s art. Not only because it was near the end, but also because of how it functions as a confluence of styles, ideas, and musical traditions.
“The material is great and Lee loved what he recorded, but on top of that, this is a special chapter in his history and what you might call black technopoetics or Afrofuturism,” St. Werner says. “It was also a moment where we weren’t just Mouse on Mars, but were expressing perhaps a more Western or Central European idea of improvisational music and free music. At the same time, it was the whole history of electroacoustic and electronic music, all of this coming together in a very casual way.”
Lee’s legendary status existed even before he arrived in Berlin, but when friends and associates of Mars on Mars heard that Lee was nearby (he had arrived in the city from Switzerland, where he had since lived with his wife Mireille), people started flocking to see him. “It was like a community, because people were telling their friends, ‘Lee Scratch Perry is coming, if you want to stop by and contribute something.’
As a result, the workspace became so crowded with singers, harpists, brass players, drummers, and other potential contributors that at one point St. Werner was looking out through the glass in the recording booth, wondering who everyone was. This free-spirited atmosphere suited the free-spirited Perry, who seemed to enjoy the looseness and the possibilities it offered.
“Lee was basically walking around the room in some sort of dream-like state,” St. Verner continued. “Sometimes I would sit there and listen, sometimes I would inflame the situation, and sometimes I would just go ahead and ask for a pen, write something, or very deliberately put a sticker somewhere.”Despite the nontraditional nature of the sessions, the resulting recordings were rich, interesting, and ready to use. St. Verner says: “Everything was thought of in the beginning, as if the planet were working for us.”
A melting pot of dub, free jazz, electronic elements and other sounds, spatial and untroubled. This is truly a retrospective of Lee’s life. Each song tells a story, with “Fire Dali” referencing the famous destruction of his Black Arc Studios in Kingston, Jamaica in 1979 (Lee often claims he burned down the space himself due to the negative energy that had built up there). At the end of the track you can hear the crackling of a fire before fading into the sounds of nature. In the final eight minutes, “State of Emergency,” Lee tells the story of Bob Marley and other deceased reggae artists to the sounds of a New Orleans-style funeral jazz band.
“He seemed to be talking about his past,” Thoma says. “And at the very end, he too said, ‘This is it.’ And he was laughing.”
Having fulfilled their sacred duty to complete the project, the pair now see it as a “meeting of timelines, history, genres, styles and technologies: tape and digital, electro-acoustic instruments and recording technology, and AI,” says St. Werner. So when they asked Perry’s widow if it was okay to use AI to render elements of his voice, she said, “‘That’s fine. Lee would have loved this, and he was really interested in that kind of thing,'” St. Warner recalls.
As an explorer of music, art, philosophy, and the nature of time itself, Perry’s work blends sounds and styles across a variety of mediums, bending and transforming things while injecting scientific and spiritual logic. There is no problem in terms of space. manages to capture that magic by showcasing Perry’s work while serving as a retrospective and celebration of his life.
“This record is a kind of prediction of what would happen if all the knowledge you have at your fingertips could be combined, fertilized, and made into something again,” St. Werner said. “It’s like being on a spaceship, with countries all over the world trying to find and interact with other life forms, and it’s like a time capsule that goes backwards as much as it goes forward. I think that’s what that record is.”
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