Lee Scratch Perry at his Black Ark Studio
Posted by jelka | September 25, 2009In ‘More Brilliant than the Sun’ Kodwo Eshun calls Dub the ‘MythScience of the Mixing Desk’ and recalls Perry describing the Black Ark Studio as a space craft: ‘The drum controls the heartbeat and the bass holds the space. I dub from inner to outer space. The sound that I get out of the Black Ark Studio, I don’t really get it out of no other studio. It was like a space craft. You could hear space in the tracks.’
Lee Perry can be called a Trickster, always on the edge of madness, turning every interview with a flurry of rhymes, riffs, and puns into a cosmological description of the world. He burned down his famous Black Ark Studio in Kingston’s Washington Gardens in 1979, but you still can imagine what kind of place it was when wandering around with Perry in this video. Black Ark was a machine lifeform, the mixing desk a mental machine, a mind machine interface. Perry described the process of making music as follows: ‘I put my mind into the machine and the machine performs reality. Invisible thoughtwaves, you put them into the machine by sending them through the controls and the knobs or you jack it into the jackpanel.’
via Afflicted Yard
You should also take a look at Afflicted Yard, whose mastermind, Jamaican photographer Peter Dean Rickards, did some cool shots of Perry in the Black Ark Studio recently. And always bear in mind what Perry used to say: ‘Every time the music reach a stop, instead of killing the music, we take the music back to the lab and perform a medical operation and bring the music back in a new generation.’
[...] Lee Perry talking to the British TV host & Musician Jools Holland at his Black Ark Studio. via KimObrist & VKMP3 [...]