The Home Key #24
E-Spatially: An Interview with Louis Chude-Sokei
One of my very favorite recordings of the year is Spatial, No Problem, the recently released collaboration between German electronic band Mouse on Mars and the legend of Jamaican dub, producer/engineer/singer Lee “Scratch” Perry, which represents, it is said, the very last recordings that Perry made before his death in August 2021. You can find it here: https://mouseonmars.bandcamp.com/album/spatial-no-problem. If you (like I do) admire the Lee “Scatch” Perry dub albums from the high period of dub, you have probably noted a shoe-horning in of the man, recently, in pursuit of somewhat diminishing returns. Outside of reggae and dub, in some cases, he feels haphazardly applied in these his later guest appearances, even if it was his wish to work outside the constraints of reggae. Mouse on Mars, however, represents an especially relevant collaboration. They have never operated in one genre only. They are rangy, and, wherever they apply themselves, there is always this thoughtfulness and this joy. A joy that, in some cases, is not the first thing you think of with electronic music. Spatial, No Problem, with its incredibly inventive arrangements (so many horn charts!), stays well away from anything pre-formatted. It has Arabic melodies, it has soul music, it has West African rhythms, it has motorik. It has lots and lots of acoustic instrumentation. The bass parts are infectious. And, above all, it finds some way to cast Lee “Scratch” Perry at the top of his game, incantatory, prophetic, funny, free associative. It may be the best album, so far, of his later work. It is also a fresh, original, moving album in a time of many disposable things.
A secret weapon on this collaboration, for Mouse on Mars, is to be found in their friend Louis Chude-Sokei, a music critic and cultural thinker who teaches at Boston University. He has worked with Mouse on Mars on a great number of recent projects. In this case, he became a sort of a translator and consultant and continuity specialist for Spatial, No Problem, charged with making sure that the album honored its vocalist. I happened to meet Louis, recently, in Boston at a confabulation of thinkers about sound art, and I was really excited there to hear an excerpt from this album, as well as some of Louis’s own collaborations with Mouse on Mars (see more below). I should note, here, how much I also admire Chude-Sokei’s memoir, Floating in the Most Peculiar Way, which pushes against that genre’s containment, as he always does in his writing, perhaps because having grown up in Biafra, and then Jamaica, and then L.A., as well as having lived many other locales, he has an acute and international view of cultural specificities. We sat down to talk about his work and his role in Spatial, No Problem in June, in Jamaica Plain, MA. Louis is all enthusiasms and vitalities, always creative, always probing, which is self-evident below. I will note that he recommends hearing Spatial, No Problem on vinyl on an extremely large sound system.
A secret weapon on this collaboration, for Mouse on Mars, is to be found in their friend Louis Chude-Sokei, a music critic and cultural thinker who teaches at Boston University. He has worked with Mouse on Mars on a great number of recent projects. In this case, he became a sort of a translator and consultant and continuity specialist for Spatial, No Problem, charged with making sure that the album honored its vocalist. I happened to meet Louis, recently, in Boston at a confabulation of thinkers about sound art, and I was really excited there to hear an excerpt from this album, as well as some of Louis’s own collaborations with Mouse on Mars (see more below). I should note, here, how much I also admire Chude-Sokei’s memoir, Floating in the Most Peculiar Way, which pushes against that genre’s containment, as he always does in his writing, perhaps because having grown up in Biafra, and then Jamaica, and then L.A., as well as having lived many other locales, he has an acute and international view of cultural specificities. We sat down to talk about his work and his role in Spatial, No Problem in June, in Jamaica Plain, MA. Louis is all enthusiasms and vitalities, always creative, always probing, which is self-evident below. I will note that he recommends hearing Spatial, No Problem on vinyl on an extremely large sound system.
RM: When you first moved to Jamaica, as a child, was reggae the first example of what music was for you?
LC-S: Reggae was an example of a personal engagement with music, as opposed to just stuff you listen to. Because growing up, the stuff I listened to—ABBA, Boney M, right?—that stuff was all over the radio. Of course, growing up in the Caribbean, country and western is massive too.
RM: Right.
LC-S: Like Jim Reeves, Kenny Rogers. And because I grew up in a religious household, you couldn’t really officially listen to pop music—so there was country gospel. So I listened to a lot of that stuff. And so when I heard reggae—early Bob Marley, Bunny Wailer—it sounded like Grand Ole Opry. They’ve got pedal steel buried in the mix sometimes. All of that I would consider a first listening experience. Of course David Bowie too—my earliest memories of Bowie. But reggae was, I guess, the first non-abstract music. Meaning it was around me. It was a part of me. It felt like something I could be a part of.
RM: You were hearing it live around you, not always recordings.
LC-S: Because we weren’t allowed to listen to it in the religious house. But in Montego Bay, when I was growing up, the house we lived in was right next to a national stadium, and that stadium had reggae artists performing fairly regularly. The young girls in the house—the older girls, big sisters and cousins—they weren’t really into reggae, but they couldn’t listen to it in the house either. So they went up on the roof, and we’d go with them. I saw a lot of reggae acts just from the roof, looking over at the stadium. Also the Jamaican sound system culture—big speakers everywhere. You couldn’t believe it. Even if the family was saying you can’t listen to this kind of music, it’s so loud!
RM: The injunction against reggae—was that an objection to Rastafarianism, or just because it was the wrong kind of religious?
LC-S: Secular. But the Rasta connection made it even worse. Growing up in Jamaica at that time, for the elders—my aunt and uncle whose house I lived in, even my mom to a lesser extent—Rasta was taboo. The dreadlocks, the marijuana, associated with crime, but also devil worship. They thought it was devil worship. There’s a whole story—when we migrated to Jamaica, I was told, “ Rasta eats children.” The boogeyman of children’s stories.
RM: And how did your musical interests change when you arrived in the U.S.?
LC-S: When I arrived in the United States, growing up in Black communities on the West Coast—if it were New York it would’ve been a different thing—nobody listened to reggae. In fact, a lot of my friends in high school and junior high would hear reggae coming out of our house and say, “Oh, you’re listening to white people music.” And it wasn’t because they knew white hippies who liked reggae — no. Anything that wasn’t R&B or funk was considered white music. It was hard to explain to them that this wasn’t white music—that we’d play Fela, or Sunny Adé, some of that juju highlife stuff. Anything that didn’t fit what they knew was considered white music. So I didn’t listen to reggae then. Because also, as you’re getting older reggae is your parents’ music, and you want to listen to what everybody else is listening to. That would be Prince, Michael Jackson, Funkadelic, that stuff.
RM: So you would’ve been coming to musical awareness in the U.S. just as hip-hop was beginning to happen. Do you remember hip-hop from that time?
LC-S: I arrived before hip-hop hit, so I got to see how it crept in on the West Coast. For me, it crept in through what we’d now call electro. Early Black DJs, electronic things. Like in L.A. — Egyptian Lover, World Class Wreckin’ Cru, which I believe Dr. Dre was in briefly, back in the shiny-suit days, when everybody was trying to do that Black George Clinton, P-Funk- thing. There were a lot of synthesizers. So hip hop came in through that, but we didn’t think of it as hip-hop per se. Then eventually I met friends who’d have mixtapes coming from New York, and the first time I heard it I was like, what is this? Scratching. That stuff started getting smuggled in through people’s mixtapes. The fact that people were speaking in cadence didn’t yet make it a genre. Back in the ‘80s, everybody rapped a bit. Prince rapped. Rapping was a thing you did, not a thing you were.
RM: I’m sort of thinking about Lee Scratch Perry as a kind of electronic music artist, too. So in a way, Mouse on Mars makes perfect sense for a Perry project, and one you are involved in. Just as early rap is also electronic music, for relying on turntables. The musical form wherein you don’t need a band.
LC-S: Growing up, as I got older in America and hip-hop became more important —before that, as I became more politicized—that’s when I went back to reggae. Roots reggae — pan-Africanism, Black solidarity, all of that—which then connected to the kind of hip-hop I liked: more conscious hip-hop, KRS-One, Public Enemy, Native Tongues. For me, all of that made sense politically. But I got into dub, and dub is almost a religious thing for me. And dub was separate from reggae, for me. It came from reggae, but it was an approach to sound, an approach to technology, an approach to culture, mixing disparate elements. Lee “Scratch” Perry, Scientist, the early dub masters — it’s not just a studio as an instrument. It’s sound as both a weapon, which comes from the sound system, the sound clashes and battles, but also just sound as a way of engaging the world, up front. That’s what it was for me. Maybe dub is even more important to me than reggae. And Mouse on Mars, a lot of electronic music — especially after the late-'80s explosion, drum and bass and all that stuff — made sense to me, because when I heard it I thought, well, this is dub. Not only because of the way people are mixing, cutting and pasting, echoing, creating alternate spaces, but also because it comes from a culture rooted in turntables.
RM: Was there a point when you felt like Lee Scratch Perry, as a particular artist, began to make a difference for you?
LC-S: That’s a really good question. For a long time, growing up in L.A. and getting involved in the reggae scene there, Lee “Scratch” Perry emerged as a performer to me. I knew Lee Perry as this weird, shamanistic, crazy man on stage, surrounded — in California — by a bunch of drugged-out white hippies. All these white kids jumping around, and you’re thinking, who are you, why are you here? But they loved Lee Perry. So you started wondering: do they get Lee Perry, or do I get Lee Perry? Lee Perry was, like—I liked it, but it was a performance. It’s when I started listening more heavily to dub — Scientist, King Tubby — and then the folks in the UK, connecting it to electronic music, that you can’t help but discover the impact of Lee Perry as producer, as vocalist, as mixer, studio operator, sound person. Then you read the interviews, and they’re just mad — because they’re about technology, occultism, magic, history. Once I discovered the studio mixing, producing, early sampling, collage artist that is Lee “Scratch” Perry, he became a much more important figure to me. Lee Perry was all of that, but then he took it out to the front of the stage as this strange creation. That’s when you see the Lee Perry–Sun Ra–George Clinton connection.
RM: Sun Ra!
LC-S: Absolutely. The Black Ark studio, the Arkestra.
RM: And when you were a kid listening to a lot of music, were you already thinking about writing too?
LC-S: Always. There are stories in my family about me as a kid, before I knew how to write, sitting there with a pen and paper for hours, scribbling. And drawing cartoons—looking back now, it seems almost like a trajectory. Writing was always connected, because reading was always connected. Reading aloud. Dub, electronic music — I grew up obsessed with science fiction, and it all seemed to make sense, all connected. Technology, outer space, weird aliens, all of those things. To read as much as I did as a kid was to write. You read because you want to write, you wrote because you read. And, of course, all of that is connected to listening and sound and music. I was also learning to play instruments. But for me, it was all part of what happens when you engage with the sound. So yeah, writing was always part of it. I’m going to guess that you’re like me—we’re both of that generation that devoured the liner notes. All the bits of esoteric information. And then when magazines came out, zines or whatever, we devoured every word. So that was research. And that’s when you discovered some people wrote better about music than others.
RM: At a certain point I realized that the best musician I was ever going to be was as a prose stylist. I played many things—I still play many instruments—master of none. But the thing I realized is that the best music I could perform was my writing.
LC-S: Oh, we’re on the same page. I’ve got a studio, I’m involved in the music world, I do stuff, but I don’t pretend to be a genius. All of that is just enabling the writing. I’ve always been really ambitious about the writing. I’ve always thought, well, I’m a pretty good bass player, pretty good with the sound equipment. But writing is what it’s really about. Writing, and the research that feeds that writing — that’s my contribution.
RM: Part of what’s so fascinating to me about this album, Spatial, No Problem, is that it doesn’t really have a genre. I remember you saying Perry said, “We’re not making a reggae record.” And it really isn’t.
LC-S: It isn’t.
RM: To me it feels like it has tendrils running in many different directions. And my supposition is that this is true about your writing too—that you, nominally, appear to be a nonfiction writer, but it’s more about how thought works, according to a serpentine movement.
LC-S: Well, thank you for that. I’d say the work is dub. Dub not as a genre but dub as an approach to ideas and sound: things that meander but then come back, that echo and duplication, but then they snap into form. And dissipate again. That’s how I think about the word, the page, ideas. As a scholar, the challenge is to approach nonfiction with the tools and sensibilities of a fiction writer. To approach real-world research, history, information, with the techniques of fiction, but in ways that make it satisfying, even though it’s politically and culturally relevant—but also real. Meaning: I’m creative, but I try not to make things up.
RM: So how did you get mixed up with the Mouse on Mars people?
LC-S: I’ve been working with them since 2019. We did an album together before this one called Anarchic Artificial Intelligence, where I was really front and center. We made that during the COVID period, and we toured it for a long time. Four or five years after it came out, we were still doing shows. Up until 2019, I’d been going to Germany regularly for a number of reasons, starting with my work writing about reggae. I was brought over by some reggae magazines. I hadn’t realized reggae magazines and sound-system culture were such a big deal there. But my scholarly work had also gotten enough attention that I was asked to come do talks in Berlin. I was doing a kind of performance — spoken word, reading my essays with a sound artist. After one performance was over, this young German guy came up and wanted to talk. We just started talking, and he mentioned he was in a band called Mouse on Mars. He probably didn’t expect that I’d know them. But I had a compilation called Macro Dub Infection, and one of the tracks on it was by Mouse on Mars, a cool track. So initially I knew them from that. I thought, *Oh, you’re a real band — because when people come up to you in Berlin and say “I’m in a band” or “I’m a sound artist,” it’s a little like being in L.A. where everyone’s an actor. But we had a great conversation, and we met again the next day to talk more, and he said, you should come to the studio. I’m always happy to see studio gear! So I went to the studio and met a few other guys. This was Jan St. Werner. Then I met Andy — Andi Toma — at the studio. It was a wonderful connection, a great time hanging out. Then I went back to Seattle, where I was living. While I was there, Jan contacted me about an art residency in Berlin and said I should apply, since it’d give me a chance to come back and hang out some more. I applied, got it, and went back to Berlin to hang out with him and Andy in the studio. We talked a lot—about AI and technology, because that’s what I was writing about a lot at the time—and that helped inspire them to think about an album project. It spiraled into Anarchic Artificial Intelligence, which got a good amount of attention. We worked with a collective of sound designers and programmers who built a bespoke algorithm. We fed it my work, a lot of Caribbean poetry, poetics, and criticism, and the algorithm imitated my voice. The album is about the algorithm attaining consciousness and becoming the lead vocalist — it’s the algorithm and me having a back-and-forth conversation through the album. That triggered a bunch of other projects—me and Jan, me and Andy, me and Dodo, their drummer. We were working on projects fairly regularly, including Spatial, No Problem, which started while we were working on the AI album. Lee Perry came into the studio, and they pulled me into the conversation and into the project. I’d come back to America, where they’d send me these long vocal tracks. Because they’re Germans, they had no idea what the hell he was saying.
RM: Ha!
LC-S: So I’d translate it, and I’d also have to explain that a lot of it is untranslatable—he was clearly leaning into the sound of his voice as much as anything, and he was aging too. They’d send tracks, and I’d give them my thoughts. That went on until I went back to Berlin and was set up in the studio, back and forth. While that was going on, Jan and I worked on a bunch of sound projects together—they worked on some of mine, I worked on some of theirs. Andy worked on an album called Hejira with a Kurdish women’s-rights activist and pop star from Kurdistan, and I was involved in that too. So I became a regular collaborator with Mouse on Mars, collectively and separately, around this album. I also got involved with the Perry estate. I was able to gain his wife’s trust because I was co-curating the Carnegie Hall Festival of Afrofuturism in 2022, and I took some of the tracks from this album and created an installation that sold out two nights in a row. After Lee died, Mouse on Mars were gutted, and they weren’t sure they were going to finish it. But that Carnegie Hall project went so well, they were shocked at the response, and I think that helped them move forward. So I worked with the family, the estate, the Carnegie Hall project, went back and forth listening and translating, helped get them out of a contract with a really shady producer—reggae’s full of shady producers—and all of that brought me deeply into the album. And, years before I met Mouse on Mars, I was in Kingston working with the Institute of Reggae Studies at the University of the West Indies, and I got the chance to go to the ruins of the Black Ark studio. I went and spent time there and recorded the silences, the noise, the ambience of the ruins. I went back some years later and did it again. Once Jan found out I had this archive of Black Ark field recordings, they wanted to put it on the album. So our field recordings—the ambience of the Black Ark ruins—are on the album.
RM: That’s pretty heavy.
LC-S: Yes. It’s throughout the album, but there’s one moment — I think it’s the song “Ya Ya Ya Ya,” right before the last song, “State of Emergency.” As it fades out, you hear a voice say, “Black Ark.” That’s my voice, from my field recordings. Then it’s just the sound of the field recordings. For Jan and Andy, that was a big deal — for them, that’s really the core of it. I’m touched and happy that they used it. Field recording is a big part of my own practice. I’ve been carrying around these archives, the field recordings of the burnt Black Ark, not knowing what I’d ever do with them. But this is what they were for. Oh, and there’s a second album coming.
RM: More Perry?
LC-S: Of more Perry. You’re probably one of the only people—it’s not a secret, but not many people know.
RM: So great! Did you ever get to be in the studio when he was there?
LC-S: So, one day they called to say, “Lee Perry’s coming tomorrow.” Out of the blue, It was a bit of a rumor, but suddenly he was coming tomorrow. I said, “But I have to teach tomorrow.” I’d already been in Berlin so long, and I felt like I couldn’t justify missing class in America. So I said, “I’ll be back in a couple of months”—because at the time, I thought this was going to be an ongoing thing, and so did they. None of us realized there’d be this crazy COVID period. There was even talk of going to other studios to record and perform. So we all agreed, okay, I’d be back in a couple of months. And then, of course, COVID—and then he died. My great regret is that I went back to teach instead of being there when he arrived, because they really wanted me there — not just because of my connection to them, but my connection to Lee Perry and to dub. I think they were also nervous, because they’re two white German guys—they’ve collaborated with all kinds of people, but Lee Perry was a strange, singular figure. So they were hoping I could stay. I missed out.
RM: I’m sure there is some grief. I’d feel that way.
(A little silence.)
RM: The last thing I want to talk about is the lyrics. I have both of the Orb/Perry albums, and I like them (and I don’t like them) — there are good things and there is some … superficiality? This record doesn’t have the problems I associate with those records. Partly because the arrangements are so good—the horn parts and stuff.
LC-S: Oh my God, the horn parts are so good.
RM: Just so good. The strategy here is not slap a four-on-the-floor beat under him and let him talk, which is what I think the Orb did, and other people, more recently, with mixed results. But I also think there’s something astounding here too about what he says in this recording — I don’t know if it’s because he knew his time was coming, but there’s a transcendent quality running through all of it. The lyrics are deep.
LC-S: I think the “mad Lee Perry” legend is so overwhelming that that’s what people expect. And — this isn’t a secret — when I was editing, sometimes I’d say, you can’t put this in, because there was also Lee Perry the inappropriate, dirty-old-man side, which he’s known for. Some of that stuff just doesn’t fly anymore. So I suggested cutting some of that, partly because they didn’t always know what he was saying. But I heard a more reflective Lee Scratch Perry. I couldn’t help but think—this is a guy in his eighties. It helped that one of the things I had cut was him coughing—at first I thought that meant he was weak, but no, it was probably just from smoking, or whatever. But it sounded to me like someone who was winding down and reflecting, even though the dirty-old-man stuff was still this burst of life—"I still have this, I still have that.“ But there was also a lot of talk of death, of time passing, reminiscing, looking back. He’d done that on other records too, but here it’s matched with the horns and the textures. That’s why the song that ends the album, "State of Emergency,” is my absolute favorite. It doesn’t just end the album well—it feels like a fitting end to this incredible story that is Lee “Scratch” Perry, whose influence was far and wide.
RM: The lyrics have a surrealism to them, too, so it’s not like he’s staying on topic in a rigid way, but I feel a reverberation of current events woven through as well.
LC-S: He’s aware of a lot of things going on. They did a really wonderful job on the voices, because a lot of this was recorded at different times — it was just following Lee Perry around, and every time he’d start talking, they’d record it, because he was always on. Once people in Germany found out Lee Perry was there, the studio was always full of musicians who wanted to watch him, be near him, or contribute, so they’d just record him all the time. Lee never stopped. Andy would say, you wouldn’t believe this guy is 84 years old — he’d say, let’s start tomorrow at 10, or be there at 7, and he’d stay until 1 or 2 in the morning. The whole time, he just kept going. He was incredibly energetic, but also someone having a last burst of energy — we call it that now because we know he passed away. There’s a lot of material, that they took and put together in lots of different ways.
RM: He also sang a lot, so there’s a surprising amount of melody — for an old guy wandering around talking.
LC-S: He’s reminiscing, pulling from nursery rhymes, quasi-gospel, religious material, old reggae melodies. I don’t know if you know this, but a couple of years before he passed away, Lee Perry had his first art show, and it was at what used to be the Cabaret Voltaire.
RM: Oh, wow.
LC-S: True story. One of the things I got involved in was trying to track down his visual art, because Lee became a kind of collage artist—we know that he did that everywhere, in all the spaces, words, images, whatever—but he has actual pieces of art too. I was in Chicago a few weeks ago at a Dada Dance Revolution show—they took a lot of artists, made the work into installations—and they had some of Lee Perry’s framed works on display, including his laptop, which he’d turned into this weird sculpture. Lee was a real collage artist, and words were a big part of his collages. But the level of commitment to words, wordplay, language, and just the vocal sound, is remarkable.
LC-S: Reggae was an example of a personal engagement with music, as opposed to just stuff you listen to. Because growing up, the stuff I listened to—ABBA, Boney M, right?—that stuff was all over the radio. Of course, growing up in the Caribbean, country and western is massive too.
RM: Right.
LC-S: Like Jim Reeves, Kenny Rogers. And because I grew up in a religious household, you couldn’t really officially listen to pop music—so there was country gospel. So I listened to a lot of that stuff. And so when I heard reggae—early Bob Marley, Bunny Wailer—it sounded like Grand Ole Opry. They’ve got pedal steel buried in the mix sometimes. All of that I would consider a first listening experience. Of course David Bowie too—my earliest memories of Bowie. But reggae was, I guess, the first non-abstract music. Meaning it was around me. It was a part of me. It felt like something I could be a part of.
RM: You were hearing it live around you, not always recordings.
LC-S: Because we weren’t allowed to listen to it in the religious house. But in Montego Bay, when I was growing up, the house we lived in was right next to a national stadium, and that stadium had reggae artists performing fairly regularly. The young girls in the house—the older girls, big sisters and cousins—they weren’t really into reggae, but they couldn’t listen to it in the house either. So they went up on the roof, and we’d go with them. I saw a lot of reggae acts just from the roof, looking over at the stadium. Also the Jamaican sound system culture—big speakers everywhere. You couldn’t believe it. Even if the family was saying you can’t listen to this kind of music, it’s so loud!
RM: The injunction against reggae—was that an objection to Rastafarianism, or just because it was the wrong kind of religious?
LC-S: Secular. But the Rasta connection made it even worse. Growing up in Jamaica at that time, for the elders—my aunt and uncle whose house I lived in, even my mom to a lesser extent—Rasta was taboo. The dreadlocks, the marijuana, associated with crime, but also devil worship. They thought it was devil worship. There’s a whole story—when we migrated to Jamaica, I was told, “ Rasta eats children.” The boogeyman of children’s stories.
RM: And how did your musical interests change when you arrived in the U.S.?
LC-S: When I arrived in the United States, growing up in Black communities on the West Coast—if it were New York it would’ve been a different thing—nobody listened to reggae. In fact, a lot of my friends in high school and junior high would hear reggae coming out of our house and say, “Oh, you’re listening to white people music.” And it wasn’t because they knew white hippies who liked reggae — no. Anything that wasn’t R&B or funk was considered white music. It was hard to explain to them that this wasn’t white music—that we’d play Fela, or Sunny Adé, some of that juju highlife stuff. Anything that didn’t fit what they knew was considered white music. So I didn’t listen to reggae then. Because also, as you’re getting older reggae is your parents’ music, and you want to listen to what everybody else is listening to. That would be Prince, Michael Jackson, Funkadelic, that stuff.
RM: So you would’ve been coming to musical awareness in the U.S. just as hip-hop was beginning to happen. Do you remember hip-hop from that time?
LC-S: I arrived before hip-hop hit, so I got to see how it crept in on the West Coast. For me, it crept in through what we’d now call electro. Early Black DJs, electronic things. Like in L.A. — Egyptian Lover, World Class Wreckin’ Cru, which I believe Dr. Dre was in briefly, back in the shiny-suit days, when everybody was trying to do that Black George Clinton, P-Funk- thing. There were a lot of synthesizers. So hip hop came in through that, but we didn’t think of it as hip-hop per se. Then eventually I met friends who’d have mixtapes coming from New York, and the first time I heard it I was like, what is this? Scratching. That stuff started getting smuggled in through people’s mixtapes. The fact that people were speaking in cadence didn’t yet make it a genre. Back in the ‘80s, everybody rapped a bit. Prince rapped. Rapping was a thing you did, not a thing you were.
RM: I’m sort of thinking about Lee Scratch Perry as a kind of electronic music artist, too. So in a way, Mouse on Mars makes perfect sense for a Perry project, and one you are involved in. Just as early rap is also electronic music, for relying on turntables. The musical form wherein you don’t need a band.
LC-S: Growing up, as I got older in America and hip-hop became more important —before that, as I became more politicized—that’s when I went back to reggae. Roots reggae — pan-Africanism, Black solidarity, all of that—which then connected to the kind of hip-hop I liked: more conscious hip-hop, KRS-One, Public Enemy, Native Tongues. For me, all of that made sense politically. But I got into dub, and dub is almost a religious thing for me. And dub was separate from reggae, for me. It came from reggae, but it was an approach to sound, an approach to technology, an approach to culture, mixing disparate elements. Lee “Scratch” Perry, Scientist, the early dub masters — it’s not just a studio as an instrument. It’s sound as both a weapon, which comes from the sound system, the sound clashes and battles, but also just sound as a way of engaging the world, up front. That’s what it was for me. Maybe dub is even more important to me than reggae. And Mouse on Mars, a lot of electronic music — especially after the late-'80s explosion, drum and bass and all that stuff — made sense to me, because when I heard it I thought, well, this is dub. Not only because of the way people are mixing, cutting and pasting, echoing, creating alternate spaces, but also because it comes from a culture rooted in turntables.
RM: Was there a point when you felt like Lee Scratch Perry, as a particular artist, began to make a difference for you?
LC-S: That’s a really good question. For a long time, growing up in L.A. and getting involved in the reggae scene there, Lee “Scratch” Perry emerged as a performer to me. I knew Lee Perry as this weird, shamanistic, crazy man on stage, surrounded — in California — by a bunch of drugged-out white hippies. All these white kids jumping around, and you’re thinking, who are you, why are you here? But they loved Lee Perry. So you started wondering: do they get Lee Perry, or do I get Lee Perry? Lee Perry was, like—I liked it, but it was a performance. It’s when I started listening more heavily to dub — Scientist, King Tubby — and then the folks in the UK, connecting it to electronic music, that you can’t help but discover the impact of Lee Perry as producer, as vocalist, as mixer, studio operator, sound person. Then you read the interviews, and they’re just mad — because they’re about technology, occultism, magic, history. Once I discovered the studio mixing, producing, early sampling, collage artist that is Lee “Scratch” Perry, he became a much more important figure to me. Lee Perry was all of that, but then he took it out to the front of the stage as this strange creation. That’s when you see the Lee Perry–Sun Ra–George Clinton connection.
RM: Sun Ra!
LC-S: Absolutely. The Black Ark studio, the Arkestra.
RM: And when you were a kid listening to a lot of music, were you already thinking about writing too?
LC-S: Always. There are stories in my family about me as a kid, before I knew how to write, sitting there with a pen and paper for hours, scribbling. And drawing cartoons—looking back now, it seems almost like a trajectory. Writing was always connected, because reading was always connected. Reading aloud. Dub, electronic music — I grew up obsessed with science fiction, and it all seemed to make sense, all connected. Technology, outer space, weird aliens, all of those things. To read as much as I did as a kid was to write. You read because you want to write, you wrote because you read. And, of course, all of that is connected to listening and sound and music. I was also learning to play instruments. But for me, it was all part of what happens when you engage with the sound. So yeah, writing was always part of it. I’m going to guess that you’re like me—we’re both of that generation that devoured the liner notes. All the bits of esoteric information. And then when magazines came out, zines or whatever, we devoured every word. So that was research. And that’s when you discovered some people wrote better about music than others.
RM: At a certain point I realized that the best musician I was ever going to be was as a prose stylist. I played many things—I still play many instruments—master of none. But the thing I realized is that the best music I could perform was my writing.
LC-S: Oh, we’re on the same page. I’ve got a studio, I’m involved in the music world, I do stuff, but I don’t pretend to be a genius. All of that is just enabling the writing. I’ve always been really ambitious about the writing. I’ve always thought, well, I’m a pretty good bass player, pretty good with the sound equipment. But writing is what it’s really about. Writing, and the research that feeds that writing — that’s my contribution.
RM: Part of what’s so fascinating to me about this album, Spatial, No Problem, is that it doesn’t really have a genre. I remember you saying Perry said, “We’re not making a reggae record.” And it really isn’t.
LC-S: It isn’t.
RM: To me it feels like it has tendrils running in many different directions. And my supposition is that this is true about your writing too—that you, nominally, appear to be a nonfiction writer, but it’s more about how thought works, according to a serpentine movement.
LC-S: Well, thank you for that. I’d say the work is dub. Dub not as a genre but dub as an approach to ideas and sound: things that meander but then come back, that echo and duplication, but then they snap into form. And dissipate again. That’s how I think about the word, the page, ideas. As a scholar, the challenge is to approach nonfiction with the tools and sensibilities of a fiction writer. To approach real-world research, history, information, with the techniques of fiction, but in ways that make it satisfying, even though it’s politically and culturally relevant—but also real. Meaning: I’m creative, but I try not to make things up.
RM: So how did you get mixed up with the Mouse on Mars people?
LC-S: I’ve been working with them since 2019. We did an album together before this one called Anarchic Artificial Intelligence, where I was really front and center. We made that during the COVID period, and we toured it for a long time. Four or five years after it came out, we were still doing shows. Up until 2019, I’d been going to Germany regularly for a number of reasons, starting with my work writing about reggae. I was brought over by some reggae magazines. I hadn’t realized reggae magazines and sound-system culture were such a big deal there. But my scholarly work had also gotten enough attention that I was asked to come do talks in Berlin. I was doing a kind of performance — spoken word, reading my essays with a sound artist. After one performance was over, this young German guy came up and wanted to talk. We just started talking, and he mentioned he was in a band called Mouse on Mars. He probably didn’t expect that I’d know them. But I had a compilation called Macro Dub Infection, and one of the tracks on it was by Mouse on Mars, a cool track. So initially I knew them from that. I thought, *Oh, you’re a real band — because when people come up to you in Berlin and say “I’m in a band” or “I’m a sound artist,” it’s a little like being in L.A. where everyone’s an actor. But we had a great conversation, and we met again the next day to talk more, and he said, you should come to the studio. I’m always happy to see studio gear! So I went to the studio and met a few other guys. This was Jan St. Werner. Then I met Andy — Andi Toma — at the studio. It was a wonderful connection, a great time hanging out. Then I went back to Seattle, where I was living. While I was there, Jan contacted me about an art residency in Berlin and said I should apply, since it’d give me a chance to come back and hang out some more. I applied, got it, and went back to Berlin to hang out with him and Andy in the studio. We talked a lot—about AI and technology, because that’s what I was writing about a lot at the time—and that helped inspire them to think about an album project. It spiraled into Anarchic Artificial Intelligence, which got a good amount of attention. We worked with a collective of sound designers and programmers who built a bespoke algorithm. We fed it my work, a lot of Caribbean poetry, poetics, and criticism, and the algorithm imitated my voice. The album is about the algorithm attaining consciousness and becoming the lead vocalist — it’s the algorithm and me having a back-and-forth conversation through the album. That triggered a bunch of other projects—me and Jan, me and Andy, me and Dodo, their drummer. We were working on projects fairly regularly, including Spatial, No Problem, which started while we were working on the AI album. Lee Perry came into the studio, and they pulled me into the conversation and into the project. I’d come back to America, where they’d send me these long vocal tracks. Because they’re Germans, they had no idea what the hell he was saying.
RM: Ha!
LC-S: So I’d translate it, and I’d also have to explain that a lot of it is untranslatable—he was clearly leaning into the sound of his voice as much as anything, and he was aging too. They’d send tracks, and I’d give them my thoughts. That went on until I went back to Berlin and was set up in the studio, back and forth. While that was going on, Jan and I worked on a bunch of sound projects together—they worked on some of mine, I worked on some of theirs. Andy worked on an album called Hejira with a Kurdish women’s-rights activist and pop star from Kurdistan, and I was involved in that too. So I became a regular collaborator with Mouse on Mars, collectively and separately, around this album. I also got involved with the Perry estate. I was able to gain his wife’s trust because I was co-curating the Carnegie Hall Festival of Afrofuturism in 2022, and I took some of the tracks from this album and created an installation that sold out two nights in a row. After Lee died, Mouse on Mars were gutted, and they weren’t sure they were going to finish it. But that Carnegie Hall project went so well, they were shocked at the response, and I think that helped them move forward. So I worked with the family, the estate, the Carnegie Hall project, went back and forth listening and translating, helped get them out of a contract with a really shady producer—reggae’s full of shady producers—and all of that brought me deeply into the album. And, years before I met Mouse on Mars, I was in Kingston working with the Institute of Reggae Studies at the University of the West Indies, and I got the chance to go to the ruins of the Black Ark studio. I went and spent time there and recorded the silences, the noise, the ambience of the ruins. I went back some years later and did it again. Once Jan found out I had this archive of Black Ark field recordings, they wanted to put it on the album. So our field recordings—the ambience of the Black Ark ruins—are on the album.
RM: That’s pretty heavy.
LC-S: Yes. It’s throughout the album, but there’s one moment — I think it’s the song “Ya Ya Ya Ya,” right before the last song, “State of Emergency.” As it fades out, you hear a voice say, “Black Ark.” That’s my voice, from my field recordings. Then it’s just the sound of the field recordings. For Jan and Andy, that was a big deal — for them, that’s really the core of it. I’m touched and happy that they used it. Field recording is a big part of my own practice. I’ve been carrying around these archives, the field recordings of the burnt Black Ark, not knowing what I’d ever do with them. But this is what they were for. Oh, and there’s a second album coming.
RM: More Perry?
LC-S: Of more Perry. You’re probably one of the only people—it’s not a secret, but not many people know.
RM: So great! Did you ever get to be in the studio when he was there?
LC-S: So, one day they called to say, “Lee Perry’s coming tomorrow.” Out of the blue, It was a bit of a rumor, but suddenly he was coming tomorrow. I said, “But I have to teach tomorrow.” I’d already been in Berlin so long, and I felt like I couldn’t justify missing class in America. So I said, “I’ll be back in a couple of months”—because at the time, I thought this was going to be an ongoing thing, and so did they. None of us realized there’d be this crazy COVID period. There was even talk of going to other studios to record and perform. So we all agreed, okay, I’d be back in a couple of months. And then, of course, COVID—and then he died. My great regret is that I went back to teach instead of being there when he arrived, because they really wanted me there — not just because of my connection to them, but my connection to Lee Perry and to dub. I think they were also nervous, because they’re two white German guys—they’ve collaborated with all kinds of people, but Lee Perry was a strange, singular figure. So they were hoping I could stay. I missed out.
RM: I’m sure there is some grief. I’d feel that way.
(A little silence.)
RM: The last thing I want to talk about is the lyrics. I have both of the Orb/Perry albums, and I like them (and I don’t like them) — there are good things and there is some … superficiality? This record doesn’t have the problems I associate with those records. Partly because the arrangements are so good—the horn parts and stuff.
LC-S: Oh my God, the horn parts are so good.
RM: Just so good. The strategy here is not slap a four-on-the-floor beat under him and let him talk, which is what I think the Orb did, and other people, more recently, with mixed results. But I also think there’s something astounding here too about what he says in this recording — I don’t know if it’s because he knew his time was coming, but there’s a transcendent quality running through all of it. The lyrics are deep.
LC-S: I think the “mad Lee Perry” legend is so overwhelming that that’s what people expect. And — this isn’t a secret — when I was editing, sometimes I’d say, you can’t put this in, because there was also Lee Perry the inappropriate, dirty-old-man side, which he’s known for. Some of that stuff just doesn’t fly anymore. So I suggested cutting some of that, partly because they didn’t always know what he was saying. But I heard a more reflective Lee Scratch Perry. I couldn’t help but think—this is a guy in his eighties. It helped that one of the things I had cut was him coughing—at first I thought that meant he was weak, but no, it was probably just from smoking, or whatever. But it sounded to me like someone who was winding down and reflecting, even though the dirty-old-man stuff was still this burst of life—"I still have this, I still have that.“ But there was also a lot of talk of death, of time passing, reminiscing, looking back. He’d done that on other records too, but here it’s matched with the horns and the textures. That’s why the song that ends the album, "State of Emergency,” is my absolute favorite. It doesn’t just end the album well—it feels like a fitting end to this incredible story that is Lee “Scratch” Perry, whose influence was far and wide.
RM: The lyrics have a surrealism to them, too, so it’s not like he’s staying on topic in a rigid way, but I feel a reverberation of current events woven through as well.
LC-S: He’s aware of a lot of things going on. They did a really wonderful job on the voices, because a lot of this was recorded at different times — it was just following Lee Perry around, and every time he’d start talking, they’d record it, because he was always on. Once people in Germany found out Lee Perry was there, the studio was always full of musicians who wanted to watch him, be near him, or contribute, so they’d just record him all the time. Lee never stopped. Andy would say, you wouldn’t believe this guy is 84 years old — he’d say, let’s start tomorrow at 10, or be there at 7, and he’d stay until 1 or 2 in the morning. The whole time, he just kept going. He was incredibly energetic, but also someone having a last burst of energy — we call it that now because we know he passed away. There’s a lot of material, that they took and put together in lots of different ways.
RM: He also sang a lot, so there’s a surprising amount of melody — for an old guy wandering around talking.
LC-S: He’s reminiscing, pulling from nursery rhymes, quasi-gospel, religious material, old reggae melodies. I don’t know if you know this, but a couple of years before he passed away, Lee Perry had his first art show, and it was at what used to be the Cabaret Voltaire.
RM: Oh, wow.
LC-S: True story. One of the things I got involved in was trying to track down his visual art, because Lee became a kind of collage artist—we know that he did that everywhere, in all the spaces, words, images, whatever—but he has actual pieces of art too. I was in Chicago a few weeks ago at a Dada Dance Revolution show—they took a lot of artists, made the work into installations—and they had some of Lee Perry’s framed works on display, including his laptop, which he’d turned into this weird sculpture. Lee was a real collage artist, and words were a big part of his collages. But the level of commitment to words, wordplay, language, and just the vocal sound, is remarkable.
Spatial, No Problem is out now on Bandcamp and all the streaming services! For a good list of Louis Chude-Sokei’s books, see here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Louis_Chude-Sokei and here: https://www.bu.edu/afam/profile/louis-chude-sokei/.
