Mouse on Mars Releases 'Spatial, No Problem' Perry LP
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- Mouse on Mars are releasing "Spatial, No Problem," a posthumous album with Lee "Scratch" Perry recorded in 2019 during a four-day, near-nonstop session at the duo's former Berlin studio with friends and collaborators dropping in and out.
- Lee "Scratch" Perry, who died in 2021 at age 85, gave the album its title when asked about spatial audio — responding with a grin, "Spatial? No problem." The sessions are said to include some of his final recordings.
- The duo will launch the record with an immersive spatial audio installation at The Pit in the Barbican Centre in London on June 5 and 6, an event the Barbican calls "the only way to experience the album as fully intended."
- Percussionist Dodo NKishi (an unofficial third member) and Nigerian-Jamaican-American scholar Louis Chude-Sokei join the core duo for the live performances, with Chude-Sokei contributing field recordings from the site of Perry's Black Ark Studios in Jamaica.
- Founders Andi Toma and Jan St Werner (now a professor at Folkwang University of the Arts) have been making experimental electronic music since 1994's Vulvaland, with prior collaborators including Mark E Smith, Bon Iver, the National and Beirut.
Why it matters: Coming after a five-year release silence and a years-long delay caused in part by COVID and ownership disputes, this posthumous Perry record stakes out a defiantly un-algorithmic corner of the industry: a 30-year German experimental act releasing a Lee "Scratch" Perry LP through a one-of-a-kind spatial-audio installation rather than the streaming-optimized playbook.
