Five years after his death, the inventor of dub, Lee »Scratch« Perry, still manages to surprise one last time. His final musical project led the then over-80-year-old onto paths untypical of reggae: into the Berlin studio of electronic duo Mouse on Mars. Quite spontaneously, and without much of a concept, the three got going: Perry improvised his lyrics somewhere between guru and eccentric great-grandfather; on the side, he redecorated the studio into a kind of art installation. To murmuring, scat singing or insistent incantation, Jan St. Werner and Andi Toma assembled wildly colourful sound collages from sources and genres as different as possible.
On the eight experimental tracks of Spatial, No Problem., a great deal is attempted. Which sonic contrasts are especially interesting? Are there points of connection with the Jamaican musical universe? Alongside the dub-typical reverb effects, jazz-tinged horn arrangements surface on »Economic Train«, for instance; the krautrock beat and post-rock bassline of »Fire Dali« feel just as hypnotic and spaced-out as Perry’s reduced drum’n’bass tracks from the echo chamber, which he created half a century earlier in his legendary Black Ark Studio. On the closing track »State of Emergency«, synth loops, interference noises and the funeral-march atmosphere ultimately make way for perhaps the most primordial musical expression one can celebrate together: drums and rattles as alpha and omega.
