On August 29, 2021, Lee Perry, a Jamaican composer who will have left his mark above all as a director, died. Pushing the limits, technological and creative, of what it was possible to accomplish with a mixing console, Perry created for each song small supernatural universes irrigated by abundant bass. the label British Trojan devotes a compilation to it — another! — aimed more at neophytes and the curious than at collectors, who will find only a handful of unreleased mixes among the 109 songs selected in the “deluxe” version of King Scratch. The essentials are there, the immortals of Max Romeo, Junior Murvin, The Heptones, even if we would have chosen better titles from the Congos. The selection of the most obscure songs is remarkable, particularly these two pearls sung by the unknown Susan Cadogan. The work of the singular musician is abundant, better explored in the box Arkology (Island, 1997), but King Scratch fulfills its mission to remind us of his genius.
Click here for an excerpt.
To see in video