The Black Ark - The Innovative Sound of Lee Scratch Perry
An innovative, eccentric and influential music producer from Kingston, Jamaica, Scratch is regarded as a legend in early reggae and along with his music studio, The Black Ark, was considered “formative in creating the highly innovative reggae subgenre called dub” - Paul Douglas, drummer of Toots and the Maytals.
The Black Ark was built in 1973 in Perry’s backyard, and in comparison to studios standards of the time was considered a rudimentary and dated setup.
In the studio was a Teac-4 Track recorder and Alice mixing desk, along with spring reverbs and tape delays which were crucial to the dub sound.
Although utilizing what was regarded as low end gear, Perry’s skill and creativity led to a vast number of successful hits for himself, and other artists who we worked with.
Some of the techniques Perry used to achieve his sound certainly stretched into the bizarre, however they were a key personal element to him and the creation of his music, along with his mixing mastery some of the sound design choices made include :
Layering in ambient noises such as broken glass, falling rain, crying babies or grazing cows.
Burying microphones under trees, hitting the ground above to generate bass and kicks.
Wrapping drums in chicken wire to create rattles.
As well as this, Perry went steps further in some cases including burying unprotected tapes to add noise, burning incense and candles repeatedly around his recording equipment to coat it in ash and dust intentionally for similar character, and finally conducting voodoo, magic practices which saw the completed track tape exposed to numerous fluids, as he believed this would further enhance the records.
Besides his peculiar flare, with the mythos of his technique and style many fascinated musicians from around the world came to Perry’s studio to get in on his sound and work with him, some of the names include :
Bob Marley and the Wailers
Paul McCartney
The Congos
The Clash
Max Romeo
The Heptones
In total over his 5-decade career Scratch produced around 95 albums in 438 releases in total, with credits to songs for working on either the production / writing / arrangement reaching beyond 2’000.
Perry has described his relationship to the studio as :
The studio must be like a living thing, a life itself. The machine must be live and intelligent. Then I put my mind into the machine and the machine perform reality. Invisible thought waves — you put them into the machine by sending them through the controls and the knobs or you jack it into the jack panel. The jack panel is the brain itself, so you got to patch up the brain and make the brain a living man, that the brain can take what you sending into it and live.
Some favourites to check out : Heavy Voodoo / Disco Devil / People Funny Boy / Having a Party / Chase The Devil / Scratch Is Alive /
