Photo: Dubblestandart and Lee “Scratch” Perry at Popfest 2015; Karlsplatz in Vienna, Austria. Photo by Manfred Werner – Tsui. Courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.
The Black Ark. The name alone evokes memories of yesterday, of the spirit of the 1970s when originality and innovation was at the heart of music and culture. In 1973, reggae and dub producer Lee “Scratch: Perry built the Black Ark behind his family’s home in the Washington Gardens section of Kingston, Jamaica.
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As with the D.I.Y. spirit of the times, the Black Ark made due with what was available—providing the genius is in the mind and not in the equipment. Perry understood the nature of recorded music existed in harmony between man and machine. In order to create “the living African heartbeat,” he once buried microphones at the base of a palm tree, then thumped on the grounds to create a mystical bass drum effect.
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It was not the rudimentary set up or the dated equipment that gave the Black Ark its sound, but the wisdom of Perry to incorporate life into the creation of his art. He would later songs with subtle effects that spoke to his truth, the sounds of broken glass, crying babies, falling rain, and cow noises simulated by Watty Burnett.
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“I see the studio must be like a living thing, a life itself. The machine must be live and intelligent. Then I put my mind into the machine and the machine perform reality. Invisible thought waves – you put them into the machine by sending them through the controls and the knobs or you jack it into the jack panel. The jack panel is the brain itself, so you got to patch up the brain and make the brain a living man, that the brain can take what you sending into it and live,” Perry told Roy Ascott for the book Art, Technology, Consciousness: Mind @ Large (Intellect, 2000).
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Recapturing Memories of the Black Ark. Installation view, Prospect 3, New Orleans, 2014.
