When Mouse On Mars were preparing to welcome Lee “Scratch” Perry to their Berlin studio in December of 2019, the occasion came with parameters.
“We were told like, ‘Three hours a day is the maximum Lee can do,’” says the duo’s Jan St. Werner, “and take care of his health, and no drugs or alcohol.”
The longstanding electronic act — St. Werner and Andi Toma — were prepared to abide by these outlines. Perry, then 83 years old, was not. “[The first day] he worked from 10 in the morning until two or three in the morning, and he was super happy about it,” says St. Werner. “Then he was like, ‘When do we start tomorrow,’ and we were like, ‘Whenever you want?’ and he said to pick him up at 10 a.m. He was just constantly going… The vibe after was like, ‘What did you do to Lee? He’s so happy,’ and we did exactly the opposite of what we were supposed to do.”
Mouse On Mars ultimately spent four long and happy days in the studio with the dub icon, who lived up to his reputation as a far-out musical genius. “I thought he was going to live for another 10 or 20 years, because he was very energetic, super concentrated and he didn’t seem to be old,” says St. Werner. But as it will for all of us, death caught up with Perry on August 29, 2021, when the artist died at the age of 85 in his native Jamaica.
The men of Mouse on Mars, who’ve released 12 studio albums since 1994, had a lot of unfinished Perry music on their hands, and — having thought they’d get together with him again to complete it — weren’t sure what to do. “We didn’t know if we wanted to finish without him,” says St. Werner. “When Lee passed away, we were like, ‘We’re so glad we got to meet him and share this beautiful time.’ That already was a huge gift, so we were kind of like, ‘Maybe that’s it.”
But it would not go down like that, with the duo ultimately finishing and releasing the music seven years after it was recorded as Spatial, No Problem. Heady, stylish and deep the eight-track collaborative album from Mouse On Mars and Lee “Scratch” Perry was released last week on Domino Records.
The most forceful cajoling to make it happen came from Mouse on Mars’ friend and frequent collaborator Louis Chude-Sokei, who over the years kept on them about finishing the project. “Louis was like, ‘Guys, you cannot sit on this material,’ recalls St. Werner. “He heard a few of the sketches and kept bothering us, like “You have to get your s–t together.”
While the duo reasonably had reservations about finishing the work without input from Perry, Chude-Sokei emphasized they had an obligation and responsibility to Lee, to his fans and to music history at large. “He was like ‘It’s not just about you or whoever thinks they have claims on this [music] or ideas about what this session was supposed to be,’” says St. Werner. “This just has to happen, because it’s precious.”
He was right. As Chude-Sokei’s liner notes to the album explains, after Perry’s passing, “a deluge of recordings appeared claiming to be the ‘last’ or ‘final’ project of the Jamaican icon. These came from musicians and producers from an incredible range of genres — trip hop, dub, ambient, rock, reggae. This range represented Perry’s hunger for new sounds and ideas. However, his last official album project took him to Berlin, Germany where he landed on the doorstop of electronic pioneers Mouse on Mars. He was looking for something that remained unclear. The only thing clear was that it should not be reggae.”
As such, Spatial, No Problem. is the final transmission of a career that began in the 1960s in Jamaica, where Lee first released music with The Upsetters, then under his own name, over the years working with and helping expand the sounds of artists including Bob Marley and King Tubby while pioneering the practice of sampling and creating the dub genre, innovations that would inform the sound and trajectory of electronic music. The way Mouse On Mars came to see it, their time with him represented a special chapter of Lee’s art, not only because it came so close to the end, but for how it functions as a confluence of styles, ideas and musical traditions.
“The material is great, and Lee loved the stuff he had recorded, but besides that, this is a particular chapter in his history and in what you could call Black Technopoetics or Afrofuturism,” says St. Werner. “It was a also moment where we were not just Mouse On Mars; we were also representing a maybe more Western or Central European idea of improvised or free music. At the same time, it was this whole history of electro-acoustic and electronic music and all this stuff coming together so casually.”
Lee’s legendary status preceded him before he arrived in Berlin, and when Mars On Mars friends and associates heard Lee would be around (arriving to town from Switzerland, where he then lived with his wife Mireille) people just started showing up. “It was like a community, because people were telling friends who were telling friends like, ‘Lee Scratch Perry is coming if you want to come by and maybe contribute something.’”
As such, the workspace got so cramped with singers, harpists, brass players, drummers and other hopeful contributors that at one point. St. Werner was in the recording booth looking out through the glass and wondering who everyone was. This freewheeling vibe suited the freewheeling Perry, who seemed to be enjoying this looseness and the possibilities therein.
“Lee was basically walking through rooms in a kind of dream state,” St. Werner continues, “sometimes sitting there listening, sometimes firing up the situation, sometimes just moving along, asking for a pen or writing something down, putting a sticker somewhere very intentionally.” Despite the untraditional nature of the sessions, the resulting recordings were rich, interesting, ready. Says St. Werner: “Everything was first take, as if the planets were working for us.”
Amalgamating dub, free jazz, electronic elements and a melting pot of other sounds, Spatial, No Problem. is, quite appropriately, a sort of retrospective of Lee’s life. Each song tells a story, with “Fire Dali” referencing the famous 1979 destruction of his Black Ark Studios in Kingston, Jamaica (with Lee often claiming that he burned down the space himself due to the negative energy that had settled there). The crackling of fire is heard of the end of the track, before it fades to nature sounds. In the eight-minute closer “State of Emergency,” Lee recounts stories of Bob Marley and other deceased reggae artists over the sounds of a New Orleans-style funeral jazz band.
“It was like he was talking about his past,” says Toma. “Then right in the end he also said, ‘This is the end, and he was laughing.”
Having performed their sacred obligation to finish the project, the pair now think of it as, St. Werner says, “a meeting of timelines, histories, genres, styles and technologies. It’s tape and digital, electronic acoustic instruments and recording techniques, and then AI.” To wit, when the duo asked Perry’s widow if it would be okay to use AI to render elements of his voice, she told them, St. Werner recalls, to “‘Go for it. Lee would have loved this, he was super into that kind of stuff.’”
As an explorer of music, art, philosophy and the nature of time itself, Perry’s work across mediums melded sounds and styles, bending things and transforming them into something different while infusing logic both scientific and spiritual. Spatial, No Problem. manages to capture that wizardry, presenting Perry’s work while functioning as a retrospective and celebration of his life.
“This record kind of predicts like, what could it be if all the knowledge you have at hand could just merge and fertilize and create something again?” says St. Werner. “It’s like you’re on a spaceship and all the nations of the world try to find other forms of life and engage in dialog, and it’s like a time capsule that travels backwards as much as it travels forward. I think that’s what that record is.”
