Underloved Scratch

A few recommendations from the mammoth discography of trickster/prophet Lee "Scratch" Perry

Poring over his mammoth discography, you get the impression that Lee Scratch Perry – the Jamaican sonic visionary and trickster/prophet who died at age 85 on August 29 – made records constantly.

Perry could create all day in the lo-fi backyard studio he called the Black Ark. And for a long, incredibly fruitful time during the 1970s, he did. He dreamed up trippy, delay-drenched dub collages that influenced generations of electronic artists. Working with musicians who eventually became stars, he helped develop the loose, elemental pulse that traveled the world as reggae. He riffed proverbs and gibberish and Sunday-school homilies – “so don’t you fumble, just be humble” — and then situated those ideas within a throbbing, intoxicating gut-directed rhythm. He captured these on-the-fly creations quickly, on a hissy four-track tape machine whose particular noise characteristics became part of his sound.

As happens sometimes, Perry’s staggering output is something of a mixed blessing. Just sorting through the releases is a daunting task: You could build a multi-day playlist just devoted to Perry records with comic-book cartoon covers. Remembrances and appreciations of his work as both artist and producer have singled out most of the top-shelf essential documents, including Junior Murvin’s poignant Police And Thieves and the Upsetters’ s Blackboard Jungle Dub from 1973, a record that feels less like a template and more like a treasure map to still-unexplored realms each time it’s on the stereo.

Beyond those Scratch Perry classics are boatloads of other releases, including recurring collaborations with the Orb and other luminaries of electronic music. These vary greatly in terms of inspiration, but even the mezzo-mezzo ones can contain moments of astonishing brilliance. Here are a few titles I’ve encountered since Perry’s death that qualify as eye-openers at the very least:

Dubstrumentals (Trojan, 2005). Two discs of basic reggae backing tracks and hypnotic pulsations in dub, this compilation offers a look at Perry’s production approach during his early heyday. Before he bathed every instrument on every track in trippy echo.

Rainford (U-Sound, 2019). Perry delighted in his reputation as a madman; he once told Rolling Stone “When they think you are crazy, they don’t come around and take your energy.” That didn’t prevent him from sharing his energy by working with artists, some decades younger, who built their careers by borrowing heavily from his playbook. The UK dub producer Adrian Sherwood is one of them. On, this, Perry’s last great album, Sherwood created a crisp, surprisingly disciplined context that emphasizes songs with hooks (see “House of Angels” and “Run Evil Spirit”) over spacious dub vibes.

TechnoMajikal (RIOR, 1997). Of Perry’s many collaborative projects, this one, with the electronic artist Yello (Dieter Meier), ranks among the most riveting. Meier creates environments that are sleek and futuristic and worlds away from dub – “Maxi Merlin” floats on a Steve Reich-like matrix of mallet instruments – while pushing Perry to new levels of free-associative improvised wordplay.

Skanking With the Upsetter: Rare Dubs 1971-1974 and Lee Perry Presents: Dub Treasure From the Black Ark (Rare Dubs 1976-1978). What makes these archive compilation so interesting are the time-stamps: These are experiments Perry made, possibly for his own amusement, during his reputation-making early ‘70s days and then during the period when he was in high demand and feeling his power as a producer. That means some quirky tin whistles and percussion sounds, dive-bombing filter sweeps and strange essays in echo. Of course, running right alongside those are hypnotic. artfully  spacious examples of Perry’s slow-cooked everyday dub.

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