Lee “Scratch” Perry may be one of the most quietly influential producers in history. Upon his death in 2021 at the age of 85, numerous publications rushed to elucidate his indelible contributions to music. His vast catalog includes works with everyone from Bob Marley to The Clash and Beastie Boys. Then he was one of the first to experiment with recording a toaster speaking over a beat, which was the precursor to an artform known as rapping.

Perry’s final album, Spatial, No Problem (2026), came to life in the Berlin studio of the electronic experts, Mouse on Mars. Given how ostensibly different Perry’s production on Bob Marley’s Soul Rebels (1970) sounds from Mouse on Mars’ Iaora Tahiti (1995), it doesn’t seem to make sense that these cross-continental musicians worked together.

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Well, it still doesn’t make sense to Mouse on Mars either.

“I don’t know if he had ever heard of Mouse on Mars,” says Jan Werner, half of the duo. He mentions a friend of theirs who “constantly connects people” and who knew Perry, but he’s not sure if that was what brought them together. “I don’t know why Lee came, to be honest.”

Regardless, Perry did make the trip to Germany, and he was ready to work right when Andi Toma, the other half of Mouse on Mars, picked him up upon arrival from the US to Berlin. Other than being shocked at the stamina of this octogenarian, Perry was forcing them to violate their agreed-upon condition of his presence.

“We had one assignment. We could work with him for three hours per day. [Perry’s wife Mireille told us] ‘Please take care. ‘He’s an old guy. I want him back complete.’ Unfortunately, it was not possible to stick to this,” Werner says. They worked until the early hours of the morning, and Perry assured them he would be ready again by 10 am. the next day.

The experience was already surpassing all their expectations. “He was basically more durable than us. We were more 80 years old than Lee,” Werner admits. Then Perry flouted another when he started making music outside the reggae spectrum.

“We perceived him much more as a conceptual artist than a representational figure of a specific genre or even music in general,” Werner says. “The guy was just a catalyst for everything that human beings can produce that isn’t shitty.”

Spatial, No Problem isn’t a reggae album or an electronic album. The only constant is Perry’s voice, whether it’s delivering clear messages or floating around the edges. Song structure is not a concern. There are no verses, choruses, or much of any repetition. Some of the tracks even sound like jams.

“Everything is a first take,” Werner says. “It wasn’t like, ‘1, 2, 3, 4, let’s jam.’ It was listening to what we had already recorded, and a new idea would come.”

Horn choirs subtly raise the temperature of Fire Dali as Perry beckons them: “More fire! More fire!” Spatialee leans into Mouse on Mars’ electronic palette with synth drips and drops, gradually expanding into ambient metallics. Economic Train cacophonizes both of these qualities over loose, flailing drums.

Perry was the leader of this relaxed, yet explorative approach. He rarely gave specific directions, instead encouraging everyone to listen instead of play.

“It was much more about stepping back and trying to understand what happened. Contributing something whenever it seemed appropriate,” Werner says.

Usually, Werner and Toma fall into the endless pit of manipulating the knobs to find a sound they deem worthy of Mouse on Mars. Perry alleviated this pressure by reminding them to trust themselves.

“Control versus trust,” is how Werner describes it, then linking trust to another essential concept for creative success: self-confidence. “You cannot trust when you’re unsure, unstable, or in panic mode. If you’re really rooted in yourself, you can let things happen. You’re open to the unexpected, and that is what Lee brought.”

There were moments when trust played out more literally. When the studio was truly packed with people, sometimes Werner and Toma were handed cables without knowing the source of the sound. If they wanted to trace it back, they would be disrupting the creativity happening in the moment.

“We had to listen to a lot of those recordings, figuring out what is actually on those tracks,” Werner says. One time, he actually followed a cable, which led to what looked like a cigar box with rubber bands. “It was like a bass type of instrument. I don’t know.”

With this philosophy of letting go, Werner and Toma used a lot of room mics to capture everything happening in the studio. While everyone was listening and recording, Perry was floating through the space. They needed to capture him wherever he went.

“Let’s have as many microphones as possible, because you don’t know if Lee will move around, or what’s going to happen. Let’s just see that we can record as much as possible,” Werner explains. When he talks about Perry “moving,” he doesn’t just mean within one room. Perry went to different rooms with different mics set up. Some had six. Others had one. “The album is totally crafted as a stereo production, but it really transcends the idea that when you try to control sound, it always goes wrong.”

The only option to relinquish as much control as possible was to present the album in spatial audio. Yet ironically, a lot of spatial productions do incur a significant element of control. Mics are often placed in specific parts of the room to have an individual channel for the complete 9.1.4 configuration (which is a very common setup for Dolby Atmos spatial recordings).

However, in the case of this album, the title says it all: Spatial, No Problem. Perry said those exact words to Werner and Toma during the session, and the spirit of his workflow allowed them immense freedom when they were processing the album into immersive audio.

“The room is basically the mixer. We don’t have to mix to stereo. We can just assign sounds to different locations,” Werner says.

If Lee was moving around the room, they could have his audio encircling the space. If he was lying down, they could accommodate that, too. Not to mention all the unknown sounds they dug up in the recordings. They had no idea what the source was, so they had no idea where it originated in the room. Where it fit in the 3D spatial rendering was completely at their behest. Sometimes they even lost track of the downbeat.

“You just have to jump into this vagueness, somehow. It’s all variables. None of that shit is really controllable,” Werner says. “If you do object-based mixing, you can try to comprehend all these aspects of sound, and do the narration, spatially.”

Lee “Scratch” Perry was the narrator of this album, one last time. But then again, maybe not.

“Sometimes, we wanted to get a clearer voice of Lee, so we sent him through some AI tools,” Werner says. “We asked Mireille if it was okay to do this. Because if you feed an AI the voice of whoever, it’s in the machine. And she was like, ‘Lee would have loved this. He wanted to be a machine.’”

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