In what’s being called his “final, intentional artistic statement,” Lee “Scratch” Perry‘s collaborative album with Mouse on Mars will be released some five years after the legend’s passing. Entitled Spatial, No Problem, the eight-track LP will arrive June 5th via Domino.
So, how did a Jamaican dub icon hook up with a pioneering German electronic music duo? According to a press release, “reasons were vague then and remain so now,” with references to a possible “record label connection.” Regardless of the backstory, Perry made himself right at home during a December 2019 visit to the pair’s Paraverse Studio in Berlin, including filling the space with “knickknacks, icons, images, stickers, talismans” and writing “further slogans and ideas on walls and surfaces.”
As such, the resulting album is described as a “story of spaces mixing, and cultures morphing towards a different kind of future.” Or, simply as “what Perry left behind in Berlin.” Either way, it was a decidedly odd but massively magical experience that we’ll all get to experience long after the fact.
“We hardly spoke about what we were doing. We met and got going,” said MoM’s Jan St. Werner in a statement. “He was laughing a lot and we laughed along. We also cooked and ate fish soup and papayas.”
Our first taste of Spatial comes with the album opener, “Rockcurry.” It’s said to be the most indicative of Perry’s “work” while in Berlin, with the legend quickly taking to “the group’s blend of motorik rhythmic elements with free improvisation, digital glitches, dada poetry, and the dubby ‘voodoo’ he always insisted haunted our machines.” Watch the corresponding music video below, directed by Studio Sparks, which utilizes various drawings and found objects taken from Perry’s visit.
Pre-orders for Spatial are now ongoing.
The album will also be featured as part of Barbican’s Project A Black Planet exhibition, transforming a London space called The Pit into “a specially commissioned immersive environment.” The installation will “present the album in spatial audio on a specially installed D&B Soundscape sound system alongside in-person events which foreground how the music became a resonant medium for Black consciousness, cultural resistance, and the expression of a shared African heritage across the diaspora.” The exhibition runs from June 5th through 13th.
As you might’ve already guessed, this is not the first record deemed to be Perry’s final posthumous release. Back in 2024, False Idols released King Perry, which Perry wrote and recorded in the months before his death in 2021. The Spatial press release even recognizes that LP, referencing a “deluge of recordings…claiming to be the ‘last’ or ‘final’ project,” before calling this offering his “last official album project.”
Spatial, No Problem Artwork:
Spatial, No Problem Tracklist:
01. Rockcurry
02. Hallo Shiva
03. Economic Train
04. Spatialee
05. Fire Dali
06. Yayaya
07. To The Rescue
08. State Of Emergency
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